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According to Article 1422 of the TCC; "If the occurrence of the risk is impossible without the acts and effects of the policyholder, the insured and, in life insurance, the beneficiary, before the insurer's liability commences, the insurer shall not be entitled to the premium." As it is known, the risk is an event that triggers the insurer's payment obligation, which is likely to occur in the future, but whether it will occur or not is unknown in advance. Just as the interest existing at the time of the conclusion of the contract disappears during the term of the contract, the contract becomes invalid at that moment, a similar result arises in terms of the risk. Indeed, as a rule, if the liability of the insurer starts with the payment of the premium, the premium obligation is being removed if the realisation of the risk has become impossible due to a reason that cannot be attributed to the insurer, the insured or the beneficiary in life insurance. At this point, it is vital to interpret the provision together with the regulations regarding the debts and obligations of the insurer, and to resolve the issues of whether the premium will be paid or not, and if so, at what rate it should be paid. Because, it is seen that the result reached based on the contrary meaning of the provision is in contradiction with the regulations regarding the premium and the absence of insurance interest. In addition, whether the provision in question can be applied in terms of retroactive insurances is also a problem that needs to be resolved. In order to solve all these problems, the provision should be interpreted in a different way in accordance with the purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The now well-known impossibility results of algorithmic fairness demonstrate that an error-prone predictive model cannot simultaneously satisfy two plausible conditions for group fairness apart from exceptional circumstances where groups exhibit equal base rates. The results sparked, and continue to shape, lively debates surrounding algorithmic fairness conditions and the very possibility of building fair predictive models. This article, first, highlights three underlying points of disagreement in these debates, which have led to diverging assessments of the feasibility of fairness in prediction-based decision-making. Second, the article explores whether and in what sense fairness as defined by the conjunction of the implicated fairness conditions is (un)attainable. Drawing on philosophical literature on the concept of feasibility and the role of feasibility in normative theory, I outline a cautiously optimistic argument for the diachronic feasibility of fairness. In line with recent works on the topic, I argue that fairness can be made possible through collective efforts to eliminate inequalities that feed into local decision-making procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the celebrated work of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC 1989), a number of black-box impossibility results have been established. However, these works only ruled out classical black-box reductions among cryptographic primitives. Therefore, it may be possible to overcome these impossibility results by using quantum reductions. To exclude such a possibility, we have to extend these impossibility results to the quantum setting. In this paper, we study black-box impossibility in the quantum setting. We first formalize a quantum counterpart of fully black-box reduction following the formalization by Reingold, Trevisan and Vadhan (TCC 2004). Then we prove that there is no quantum fully black-box reduction from collision-resistant hash functions to one-way permutations (or even trapdoor permutations). We take both of classical and quantum implementations of primitives into account. This is an extension to the quantum setting of the work of Simon (Eurocrypt 1998) who showed a similar result in the classical setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper mobilises the idea of impossible worlds to conceptualise and explore inconsistent and illogical visions and ways of living sustainably. Specifically, the paper focuses on an understanding of sustainability based on classic Kantian universalistic ethics (suppose everyone did the same) and relative feelings of responsibility and guilt for the environment. By mobilising three vignettes, the paper argues that impossibility is present in current environmental thinking, and narratives of impossibility have an emotional and political role in shaping popular discourses concerning environmentalism and responsibility. It suggests that exploring glitches, impossibilities, contradictions and inconsistencies may contribute to understanding the role of personal guilt in sustainability narratives, and potentially trigger change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I list various kinds of 'plurality' in philosophical investigations. By plurality, I mean a plurality of methodological criteria which we apply to philosophical phenomena and which are very often incompatible with each other. Any philosophical phenomenon can be approached from different methodological viewpoints and result in utterly different ontological and ideological commitments. In other words, I assume that one philosophical problem can have different solutions which depend on different methodological and theoretical presuppositions. Instead of considering this feature of philosophical theories as a problem, I take this plurality as a natural meta-philosophical result. As an example, I consider impossible phenomena and ways of treating them systematically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature tends to view the firm either as a person or as a thing. Due to this dichotomy, it struggles with the proposition that the corporate form brings about efficiency gains that cannot be accomplished by other types of profit-seeking firms. This study supplies game-theoretic proof for this proposition. It identifies a capital-intensive business that requires external financing and is vulnerable to a holdup by a supplier. It shows that only the corporate form can organise the business while other types of firms fail. This advantage of the corporate form over other types of firms is due to its Janus-faced nature as both person , that is endowed with legal capacity, and thing , such as a transferable bundle of assets. A long-held tradition of strictly separating persons and things fails to account for this advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main concerns about fairness in machine learning (ML) is that, in order to achieve it, one may have to trade off some accuracy. To overcome this issue, Hardt et al. (Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 29, 2016) proposed the notion of equality of opportunity (EO), which is compatible with maximal accuracy when the target label is deterministic with respect to the input features. In the probabilistic case, however, the issue is more complicated: It has been shown that under differential privacy constraints, there are data sources for which EO can only be achieved at the total detriment of accuracy, in the sense that a classifier that satisfies EO cannot be more accurate than a trivial (i.e., constant) classifier. In this paper, we strengthen this result by removing the privacy constraint. Namely, we show that for certain data sources, the most accurate classifier that satisfies EO is a trivial classifier. Furthermore, we study the admissible trade-offs between accuracy and EO loss (opportunity difference) and characterize the conditions on the data source under which EO and non-trivial accuracy are compatible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fragmentalism allows incompatible facts to constitute reality in an absolute manner, provided that they fail to obtain together. In recent years, the view has been extensively discussed, with a focus on its formalisation in model-theoretic terms. This paper focuses on three formalisations: Lipman's approach, the subvaluationist interpretation, and a novel view that has been so far overlooked. The aim of the paper is to explore the application of these formalisations to the alethic modal case. This logical exploration will allow us to study (i) cases of metaphysical incompatibility between modal facts and (ii) cases of modal dialetheias. In turn, this will enrich our understanding of the role of impossibility in the fragmentalist framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circumstantialists already have a logical semantics for impossibilities. They expand their logical space of possible worlds by adding impossible worlds. These are impossible circumstances serving as indices of evaluation, at which impossibilities are true. A variant of circumstantialism, namely modal Meinongianism (noneism), adds impossible objects as well. These are so-called incomplete objects that are necessarily non-existent. The opposite of circumstantialism, namely structuralism, has some catching-up to do. What might a structuralist logical semantics for impossibilities without impossibilia look like? This paper makes a structuralist counterproposal. We present a semantics based on a procedural interpretation of the typed λ-calculus. The fundamental idea is that talk about impossibilities should be construed in terms of procedures: some yield as their product a condition that could not possibly have a satisfier, while the rest fail to yield a product altogether. Dispensing with a ‘bottom’ of impossibilia requires instead a ‘top’ consisting of structured hyperintensions, intensions, intensions defining other intensions, a typed universe, and dual (de dicto and de re) predication. We explain how the theory works by going through several examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afḍal al-Dīn al-Ḫūnaǧī (d. 1248) is one of the most influential Arabic logicians who departed from and argued against Avicenna in various places in his logical works. This paper is about al-Ḫūnaǧī’s account of inferences from the impossible. In this paper, we will overview his formulation of inferences about three main occurrences of impossibility in logic and language: propositions with impossible subjects, syllogism about impossible situations, and implications from a contradictory pair. All these are based on a distinction between two ways of reading the subject term of a proposition which al-Ḫūnaǧī borrowed from Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, namely the essentialist and the externalist. Later Arabic logicians raised a crucial objection to al-Ḫūnaǧī’s account of the essentialist reading. They argued that all universal propositions are false in this reading. If that is true, many of al-Ḫūnaǧī’s proofs will be trivially valid and redundant. I will argue that the falsity of these propositions does not preclude their truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education about catastrophes often begins with, and at times even focuses on, passing down catastrophe memories. For this education, catastrophe memories that are unique to the survivors must be translated carefully to ensure that they can be understood by successors who may not have experienced a catastrophe themselves. This study elaborates on the structure of the translation of these memories between the survivors and successors. It also focuses on the educational significance of the practical application of such translations. Section 1 describes the purpose of this study while Section 2 examines the reasons for the emphasis on passing down survivors' memories in catastrophe education. Section 3 focuses on telling-listening exchanges while passing down these memories and examines the structure and characteristics of such exchanges. It was identified that it is imperative that these exchanges should communicate the experience that cannot be translated in words or is incommensurable. If both, the survivors and successors, are truthful to the incommensurability, and if they both dare to experience it, they will be able to find the potential and possibilities to transform human lives and societies while weaving together the narratives of catastrophe memories that would be transformed and generated endlessly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education about catastrophes often begins with, and at times even focuses on, passing down catastrophe memories. For this education, catastrophe memories that are unique to the survivors must be translated carefully to ensure that they can be understood by successors who may not have experienced a catastrophe themselves. This study elaborates on the structure of the translation of these memories between the survivors and successors. It also focuses on the educational significance of the practical application of such translations. Section 1 describes the purpose of this study while Section 2 examines the reasons for the emphasis on passing down survivors' memories in catastrophe education. Section 3 focuses on telling-listening exchanges while passing down these memories and examines the structure and characteristics of such exchanges. It was identified that it is imperative that these exchanges should communicate the experience that cannot be translated in words or is incommensurable. If both, the survivors and successors, are truthful to the incommensurability, and if they both dare to experience it, they will be able to find the potential and possibilities to transform human lives and societies while weaving together the narratives of catastrophe memories that would be transformed and generated endlessly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People can think about hypothetical impossibilities and a curious observation is that some impossible conditionals seem true and others do not. Four experiments test the proposal that people think about impossibilities just as they do possibilities, by attempting to construct a consistent simulation of the impossible conjecture with its suggested outcome, informed by their knowledge of the real world. The results show that participants judge some impossible conditionals true with one outcome, for example, "if people were made of steel, they would not bruise easily" and false with the opposite outcome, "if people were made of steel they would bruise easily", and others false with either outcome, for example, "if houses were made of spaghetti, their engines would (not) be noisy". However, they can sometimes judge impossible conditionals true with either outcome, for example, "if Plato were identical to Socrates, he would (not) have a small nose", or "if sheep and wolves were alike, they would (not) eat grass". The results were observed for judgments about what could be true (Experiments 1 and 4), judgments of degrees of truth (Experiment 2), and judgments of what is true (Experiment 3). The results rule out the idea that people evaluate the truth of a hypothetical impossibility by relying on cognitive processes that compare the probability of each conditional to its counterpart with the opposite outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Erciyes Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Erciyes University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

When some unusual natural movements, which may be considered ordinary for the globe we live in, come together with the human element and cause material or moral damages, they are referred to as natural disasters. In the period we are currently living in, the fact that natural events in which people experience such losses are on the agenda and cases in which such losses are not observed are not widely covered in the media supports what we have said. As a matter of fact, it will be observed that this is the case when we look at our sources of history and fiqh. Natural disasters, which have human beings at their centre, have also been the subject of our fiqh sources. For instance, even though the offer and acceptance have been made, issues such as who should bear the losses incurred in the event that the incomplete contracts are partially or completely affected by natural disasters, especially because they have not been accepted, occupy an important place in the Islamic law of obligations. This situation may pose a problem for a normal worship of sacrifice, but it also affects contracts such as sale, rent, trust and pledge. Although natural disasters can affect such contracts in the form of partial and total losses, in this study, after briefly explaining the types of natural disasters in our fiqh sources, we will endeavour to explain the responsibilities of the parties in contracts in case of performance impossibilities arising as a result of total losses in a concise manner by avoiding going into details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text aims to trace, through Darin Tenev's thesis on the relationship between possibility and negativity, how Heidegger's thinking proposes death as a self-possibility and how not-being-able-to-be in superposition against the horizon of the world ultimately can be interpreted as "sublated" in death as "Dasein's ownmost possibility". Blanchot, who follows Heidegger in many respects, takes a radically different position towards death, speaking of death as an impossibility, which in the process of dying is less and less owned death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of allocating a social endowment of private goods among a group of n agents with linear preferences. We search for rules that satisfy three standard requirements. First is (Pareto-)efficiency. Second is the fairness requirement of "equal treatment of equals" (in welfare terms). Third is the incentive requirement of "strategy-proofness": no agent should ever benefit from misrepresenting their preferences. We show that no such rule exists. A variety of domains have been explored and similar negative results have been proved but one would have hoped that the domain of linear preferences is sufficiently narrow to allow for some positive results. Our result dashes such hopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Private Law is the property of University of Tehran and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Most analyses of can and abilities accept what is known as the poss-ability principle (i.e. that an agent S is able to Φ only if it is possible for S to Φ). In this paper, I devise a new route to rejecting the poss-ability principle. I argue that the poss-ability principle is incompatible with some kind of agent, such as God; that the poss-ability principle has normatively unacceptable consequences (granted the existence of a certain kind of evil agent); and that analyses of abilities or ‘can’ based on the poss-ability principle are conceptually flawed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to what Hume termed an ‘establish’d maxim’, nothing absolutely impossible is imaginable. It has recently been claimed against this that given the ubiquity of stipulative imagination, where one imagines a proposition simply by adding it as a stipulation about the imagined situation, it seems that we can imagine any impossibility whatsoever, even plain contradictions: all we need to do is add them as stipulations. The aim of this article is both to defend Hume’s maxim against this objection and – hopefully interestingly – to do so while granting the assumption that adding something as a stipulation is a valid way of imagining something. To this end, appeal is made to a particular development of a second Humeanism, according to which necessary truths are analytic in the sense that their truth follows from their meaning. Their analyticity, it is then argued, secures that they are true in all imagined situations. Therefore, even if it is right that a valid way of imagining something is to add it as a stipulation, attempting to stipulate that, say, some imaginary bachelor is also married is bound to fail: you can’t stipulate it to be the case because it really isn’t the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an extended analysis of the English translation of Beatrice Alemagna's picture book What is a Child? By extended analysis, I am referring to sustained engagement with the constitutive textual framing and narrative perspective of the picture book. Through this approach, my aim is to draw out the specific antagonisms necessary to its concept of 'child'. The child, for What is a Child?, is never quite a self-evident and isolated identity. Rather, it is (to take just three examples): constituted by a perspective on it, and other to it; other to itself, because of the various contradictions in its pictorial and textual constructions; split between name and being. The understanding of the child that emerges runs counter to Marah Gubar's subtle critique of the child as a contradictory identity, knowable, but only in a piece-meal fashion. My understanding of what Jacqueline Rose calls the 'impossibility' of the child is rooted, instead, in an understanding of it as self-cancelling, unavailable as an in-itself identity shorn of its constitutive others, an identity, I argue, that can be addressed only through an approach that is non-essentialist and narration-focused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note disambiguates the predicate ‘is an unknowable event’ and shows how Transparent Intensional Logic interprets the sentences “Agent a is calculating the final decimal of π” and “Agent a has calculated the final decimal of π”. The knowability paradox is used to set the stage.

The law of impossibility contained in Section 56 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 is a slight oddity in the common law world as it does not make any mention of the parties' intention. While Indian courts have subordinated it to the intent of the parties, they have also insisted that it is a "positive law" that is unconcerned with the terms of the contract, which have been relegated, at least superficially, to Section 32 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 that only imperfectly deals with the vast terrain of impossibility. It is argued that the contradictory stance is, in part, the result of an unwarranted importance being attached to theEnglish debates surrounding the juristic bases of the law of frustration. It is also argued that the jurisprudence would benefit from delinking the terms of the contract, specifically the terms that do not constitute conditions precedent, from Section 32. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incompressibility is a popular security notion for white-box cryptography and captures that a large encryption program cannot be compressed without losing functionality. Fouque, Karpman, Kirchner and Minaud (FKKM) defined strong incompressibility, where a compressed program should not even help to distinguish encryptions of two messages of equal length. Equivalently, the notion can be phrased as indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attacks and key-leakage (LK-IND-CPA), where the leakage rate is high. In this paper, we show that LK-IND-CPA security with superlogarithmic-length leakage, and thus strong incompressibility, cannot be proven under standard (i.e. single-stage) assumptions, if the encryption scheme is key-fixing, i.e. a polynomial number of message-ciphertext pairs uniquely determine the key with high probability. Our impossibility result refutes a claim by FKKM that their big-key generation mechanism achieves strong incompressibility when combined with any PRG or any conventional encryption scheme, since the claim is not true for encryption schemes which are key-fixing (or for PRGs which are injective). In particular, we prove that the cipher block chaining (CBC) block cipher mode is key-fixing when modelling the cipher as a truly random permutation for each key. Subsequent to and inspired by our work, FKKM prove that their original big-key generation mechanism can be combined with a random oracle into an LK-IND-CPA-secure encryption scheme, circumventing the impossibility result by the use of an idealised model. Along the way, our work also helps clarifying the relations between incompressible white-box cryptography, big-key symmetric encryption, and general leakage resilient cryptography, and their limitations.

In this paper, I explore the ways in which the construction of enclaves became central to utopian attempts of social engineering and how their legacies shape contemporary society despite the failures of these projects. By focusing on the role of enclaving, in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, I demonstrate how it derives its power as a walled remnant of the resuscitation of past utopian goals and simultaneously, by being presented as a solution to current festering urban problems, often themselves the result of previous attempts of enclaving. Rather than solely acting as an outgrowth of the most exclusionary aspects of contemporary capitalism, I argue that enclaving is a highly malleable strategy of enacting power despite its enduring failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance art of magic allows us to experience the impossible, and this study used a balancing magic trick to investigate the relationship between participants' enjoyment and perceived impossibility. Participants watched a live performance of a magic trick in which the magician balanced objects in progressively more impossible configurations. At seven different time points observers rated their enjoyment, and the extent to which they believed what they saw was impossible. Regression analysis revealed that participants' enjoyment of the magical effect relates to their perceived impossibility of the magic trick, and this relationship was independent of how much they enjoyed magic in general. Moreover, a one-way within-subjects analysis of variance showed that participants enjoyed the performance More as the trick became more impossible. However, once the magical effect was anticipated, enjoyment began to plateau while perceived impossibility continued to increase. These results are discussed in the context of people's aesthetic appreciation of magic and current arts appreciation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bajo Palabra: Journal of Philosophy is the property of Bajo Palabra: Journal of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Escritura e Imagen is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Bonney takes the romantic and surrealist traditions (Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Césaire) to a point where they meet their impossibility, not by subjective diminishment but through encounter with the political as it currently exists. The inner life of the poetic subject is unprotected; this multiplies difficulties. The singular energy of Bonney's Letters finds itself at this conjuncture. Speed and compression of the work grapples with those same qualities as they exist inside political oppression. Poetry, for Bonney 'a specific method of thought', carries out the work of creating form as definition by means of thought thinking, dialectically, against itself. This article seeks, overall, to consider the means by which the Letters sustain their energy within current political conditions.

The central thesis of this paper is that slavery is phenomenologically describable as a reduction of the effort to a physical force through the imposition of impossibility as a fountain of self-recognition of the ego in the defeat. The slave is constituted from the defeat of its egoic, personal, and concrete possibilities. I develop this thesis in three moments. First, I explore the effort concept on the phenomenological basis of Husserlian analyses of the constitution into Ideas II. In the second part, I describe how effort--as a concretion of an egoic-embodied will-is reduced to physical force--productive-- in the slavery, though the alienation of the possibilities for de 'I-can'. The correlate of this way of constitution of the own body, in the alienation, is a horizon of possibilities are present for the ego in the canceled, or impossibility way in which the ego recognizes itself as defeated, issue of the third and last part. The description of the defeat manifests the condition of the embodied will as a resistant limit against slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English Abstract: Fiction might not be formally the same genre as ethnography, but fiction remains a legitimate companion to anthropological reflection. Placing Kafka alongside the authors of this special section of SA/AS allows me to read them just a touch beyond their central positions: especially for what they can teach us about untranslatability, 'impass-ability' and impossibility, as a vital part of ethnography and of relating more generally. Aft er discussing the texts of this section, I address questions posed to our panel at EASA2020. I then discuss what I call Brazil's most untranslatable novel, which sheds unique light on contemporary anthropological worries about untranslatability, or impossible-to-fully-bridge difference. French Abstract: La fiction n'est peut-être pas formellement le même genre que l'ethnographie. En tant que produit d'une « observation sérieuse » quotidienne (Wood 2014[2020]) par contre, la fiction reste un compagnon légitime à la réflexion anthropologique. En plaçant Kafka aux côtés des auteurs de cette section spéciale de SA/AS, je peux les lire un peu au-delà de leurs positions centrales, en particulier pour ce qu'ils peuvent nous apprendre sur l'intraduisibilité, l'«impasse-abilité» et l'impossibilité, parties essentielles pour l'ethnographie et des relations/rapports plus généralement. Après avoir discuté les textes de cette section, je réponds aux questions posées à notre panel lors de l'EASA2020. Je discute ensuite de ce que j'appelle le roman le plus intraduisible du Brésil, qui jette une lumière unique sur les préoccupations anthropologiques contemporaines concernant l'intraduisibilité, ou la différence qui est impossible à combler entièrement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the forms and pragmatic functions of "impossibility" slangy expressions in Yoruba informal interactions, within the framework of Mey's pragmatic acts (2001). Data comprised ten informal interactions randomly sampled from thirty interactions observed among the Yoruba in different contexts. Findings revealed "impossibility" slangy expressions in Yoruba trifurcate into function-oriented, structure-function-oriented, and danger-oriented types. They are deployed to express rejection, rejection with warning, caution, discountenance and disapproval, rebuke with dare, challenge and threat in Yoruba informal interactions. Participants in Yoruba informal interactions make recourse to facial expression (physical act), and contextual elements: shared cultural knowledge (SCK), shared experiential knowledge (SEK), voice (VCE), inference (INF) and relevance (REF) to deconstruct the pragmatic imports of impossibility expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight (1962), for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present an exemplary Humean modal epistemology. My version takes inspiration from but incurs no commitment to both Hume's historical position and Lewis's Humeanism. Modal epistemology should meet two challenges: the Integration challenge of integrating metaphysics and epistemology and the Reliability challenge of giving an account of how our epistemic capacities can be reliable in detecting modal truth. According to Lewis, modal reasoning starts from certain Humean principles: there is only the vast mosaic of spatiotemporally distributed local matters of fact. The facts can be arbitarily recombined. These principles cannot be taken for granted. I suggest a bottom-up approach instead: Humean principles of recombining the mosaic of facts can be retrieved from the evolutionarily instilled and empirically informed use of imagination in exploring everyday circumstantial possibilities. This use of imagination conforms to a primitive conception of matter as freely recombinable. The modal beliefs that can be obtained from generalizing the more elementary exercise of imagination have to be corrected. Recombination is limited by sortal criteria of identity. Moreover, the overall picture of a recombinable spatiotemporal mosaic must be weighed against the results of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problematic integration theory (Babrow, 1992. Communication and problematic integration: Understanding diverging probability and value, ambiguity, ambivalence, and impossibility. Communication Theory, 2(2), 95–130, 2001. Uncertainty, value, communication, and problematic integration. Journal of Communication, 51(3), 553–573) was developed to illuminate communication in relation to distinct but interrelated forms of troublesome meaning (e.g. uncertainty, ambivalence). Since its initial articulation, researchers have applied the theory to investigate communication in a wide range of contexts, including primarily health but also areas such as environmental risk, personal relationships, and organizational communication. This study systematically analyzes 54 applications of the theory, including the contexts to which PI theory has been applied, the key research questions, and methods used in these research applications. Findings of the systematic review are summarized in relation to the theoretical forms of PI and their dynamic relationship with communication. Theoretical implications and suggested directions for future PI research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the blurred distinction between performative and constative utterances in an effort to develop a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer as perjurious testimony. Focusing on a passage in the recently published Le parjure et le pardon seminars, I argue that a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer is one whose function interminably oscillates between constative and performative, rendering the distinction between these two uses of language indiscernible. This oscillation plays not to prayer's detriment, but instead serves as the animating force behind prayer and the impossible ethical desire prayer expresses. The impossibility of a prayer whose desire is rendered perjurious by the state of affairs from which it emerges opens onto a number of political, ethical, and theological concerns that the second half of the paper addresses. By reading Simone Weil's reflections on the 'Our Father' in light of Derrida's considerations above, I argue that prayer's impossibility is a condition of possibility for its ability to produce real effects in the world it betrays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]