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This chapter discusses the use of animals to explore issues relating to human cognition, emotion, volition, and their pathologies. Researchers who use animal models in their work point to similarities in the genomes of the two species, in the structure of mouse and human brain, in patterns of brain activation, in neural mechanisms at the cellular and molecular level, in responses to drugs and so forth, perhaps with reference to evolution and the principle of conservation across species when it comes to the most basic aspects of living organisms, including their brains. The chapter then examines four interconnected themes: the question of the artificiality of the laboratory situation within which animal experiments are conducted; the idea of a model in behavioral and psychiatric research; the specificity of the human and the elision of history and human sociality; and the problem of translation.

Arendt was wholly ambivalent about the liberal discourse of human rights and by extension, it is argued, wars justified in their name. She can be read as far less sanguine about the apparent progressiveness of human rights ideologies than other of her readers have suggested. This argument is made through an analysis of her writing on violence and hypocrisy. Arendt's work is filled with examples of violent rage against hypocrisy, but also how hypocrisy can enable cruelty. Above all, Arendt was a defender of the created, public world where it is only possible to judge words and actions, not motives. And yet Arendt does not leave us without grounds to act against genocide. These grounds are not based on the large numbers of dead, on levels of cruelty as such. Wars of annihilation cannot be tolerated because they attack the fundamental basis of all politics which is human plurality.

Specifically moral desires, just as the partial desires of which they are impartial variants, are person-implicating: their contents make essential reference to the actions and qualities of human persons. More narrowly, they are mind-implicating: their contents make essential reference to the mind-displaying actions and qualities — the conative characteristics, the traits, the intellectual talents and abilities — of such individuals. Some moral desires are desire-implicating desires. Within the framework of David Hume's expanded moral conativism, it follows that some propositional moral affections are likewise desire-implicating ones. In his Artificiality Argument, Hume contends that desire-implicating moral desires implicate natural — that is to say, non-moral — desires. He also distinguishes two types of desire-implicating moral desires. Moral desires of one of these types implicate natural non-moral desires, desires that do not require conventions. Moral desires of the other of these types implicate artificial non-moral desires, desires that require the presence of conventions.

When restrained by dependence on suitable conventions, it is the combination of ‘selfishness and confin'd generosity’ — that is, a concern for one's own interests and those of one's friends and relations — that meets the conditions that C1 and C2 impose on moral sentiments pertaining to matters of justice. It is convention-dependent narrow interest that provides the virtuous non-moral desires that a moral sense of justice requires. This is the contention of the Artificiality Argument. To secure this conclusion in more than a formal way, however, David Hume must show that narrowly interested non-moral desires, thus constrained, can in fact meet C1's and C2's conditions. Crucially, he must show that the claims of narrow interest, when narrow interest functions within an appropriate framework of convention, correspond to the claims that ‘the rules of justice’ make on an agent's conduct. Hume's reflections on the interplay of morality and convention contribute substantially to his characterization of reasons for action, including specifically moral ones.

The chapter seeks to define virtual reality. It looks into seven elements that constitute the term. Simulation refers to the modern computer graphics and sound effects that can create such a high degree of realism. Interaction refers to electronic representations that people perceive as virtual reality by their interacts with with them. Artificiality refers to a world that is largely of human construct. Immersion refers to the computer-generated sensations to which a man can immerse his sensory perceptions to simulate reality. Telepresence refers to the capacity of computer technology to replace human presence by robotic presence. Full-body immersion refers to the latest technology that allows human body to interact with graphics on a computer screen. Networked communications refers to communication that can go beyond verbal or body language to take on magical, alchemical properties. A virtual-world maker might conjure up hitherto unheard-of mixtures of sight, sound, and motion.

This chapter discusses questions about the possibility of textual stability. It shows that Belacqua, the protagonist of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, is a character and his own critique. It takes note of his artificiality and the process of his fabrication that are constantly foregrounded. This chapter shows that instead of explaining the quirks of Belacqua Shuah, Dante's Belacqua adds to his literariness while taking away from his realism.

The chapter examines the distinct aesthetic effects conveyed by the filmmaker’s stylistic and narrative choices in The Spanish Prisoner. Specifically, it argues that Mamet’s unusual aesthetic view relies on a use of film style that sits uneasily with the notion of classicism in American cinema. This is because, although narrative construction follows, for the most part, the basic principles of classical narrative (causal coherence, continuity and character motivation), it often departs from those principles and follows a logic of its own. These departures are mainly manifest in several clear breaks from the rules of social and/or cultural verisimilitude which immediately provide the story with a high degree of implausibility compared to a classical narrative. Equally, the film style employed to support such a narrative generally adheres to the rules of continuity and transparency, though, on several occasions, it also breaks those rules and consequently evokes a strong sense of constructedness and/or artificiality. In this respect, although film style is at the service of the narrative, it also comments on the narrative and breaks the spectator’s engagement with the story in ways that a classical style would never do.

Certain kinds of artificiality or unnaturalness are sometimes also the most natural or spontaneous, in the very sense in which they are artificial and unnatural. As becomes clear in this chapter, the “sometimes” qualification is as important a part of this idea as the relation between nature and artificiality. At first glance, this idea might not seem to have any bearing on Plato at all. However, his works, for a start, in dealing with the truth and nature of things, teem with fictions and the artifices of wit and of provocative details of construction. Whatever Plato's conclusions about reality might then be, what he does in coming to those conclusion in the first place—in approaching those conclusions—must exhibit a “sometimes” thinking of the kind. This chapter also discusses the inconstancy or “sometimes always” character of truth.

Theater was one of the main inspirations of late modern cinema, and it served as a characteristic stylistic background in many modern films. Historically, the close interaction between modern theater and cinema is also explained by the parallel activities of many modernist directors, from Andrzej Wajda and Ingmar Bergman to Peter Brook, Tony Richardson, Jean-Marie Straub, Marguerite Duras, and Armand Gatti as well as Jacques Rivette Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard. There are two general characteristics of theatrical style in modern cinema. One is the excessively unnatural, exaggerated, abstract way of acting that emphasized artificiality rather than psychological realism. The other is the artificial look of the sets as well as artificial, expressive lighting.

This chapter considers how the fictionality of the small, but significant, genre of Greek novels, deriving from the late Hellenistic era and the Roman empire, was understood in antiquity. Although the genre was ignored by ancient literary critics, and the concept of fiction is not defined as such, it is suggested that there are a number of notions and distinctions formulated in ancient discussions which point towards an appreciation of fiction. However, it is maintained that it is more helpful to take account of the understanding of fictionality expressed in the Greek novels themselves. The novels simultaneously encourage belief in the world created and signal, in sophisticated ways, the artifice and artificiality of this same world. We are thus invited to ‘make believe’, rather than just to ‘believe’, and to accept, against our better judgement, that real life could be like that fictional world. This strategy is not fundamentally different from that of modern fiction, although it employs different conventions.

This chapter challenges the narrative that conflict in Iraq was sectarian in nature. Conflict was the product of local and regional sectarian narratives that dominated the Iraqi landscape, and helped to justify the violence on the ground. The ayatollahs tackled this rhetoric head on. They rejected both the sectarian interpretation of Iraqi history and its implications for Iraq’s present and future. They appealed to pan-Iraqi unity and nationalism. They worked hard to undo the narrative that held Iraq to be a “patchwork” of incommensurable groups. They instead offered a counter-narrative of unity and harmony and issued decrees about the harm of communal violence. Most importantly, the ayatollahs wrote extensively about the need for a centralized state and a redefinition of citizenship away from sectarian notions. This chapter focuses on the writings of Ayatollahs Sistani, Saeed al-Hakim and Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad.

The chapter argues that the artificiality of Oscar Wilde’s wit and style exemplifies the logic and method of genuine, undogmatic political pluralism in a deeply consistent and illuminating way. The chapter argues that while the most widely known current approaches to political pluralism suffer from the unacknowledged and unmanaged contradiction of definitively rejecting all nonpluralistic positions, Wilde acknowledges and manages that contradiction. His work presents the serious and unartificial possibility of things’ being essentially otherwise than they can be conceived to be in any given standpoint. Now, raising the possibility of thoroughly new meanings, entirely unrelated to all the familiar meanings we have access to in considering that possibility, is nonsensical: it undermines its own meanings in raising that possibility as something it aims to mean. But, as the book argues, this kind of nonsense is so thoroughgoing that it cancels itself in turn and restores the original sense whose conflicts produced it. As a result, this process both opens the possibility of essentially new standpoints and also validates incompatible, familiar standpoints exactly as they are. This validation, then, involves the self-canceling recognition, without simple mutual elimination, of essentially different and therefore mutually exclusive “spaces.”

This chapter enquires into a selection of poems by Oscar Wilde, examining ways by which eros is inscribed in the decorative surface of poetry. It highlights Wilde’s borrowed idea of ‘impossible eros’ (‘l’amour de l’impossible’). Tinkering with the juxtaposition of permanence and transitoriness in descriptions of seasonal and natural beauty, Wilde frames death as taking place within a larger framework of a perpetual recycling of life. Within this framework, demonstrated by his poem ‘Panthea’ (1881), he accommodates a diffused and impersonal sensuality. The chapter then examines the ephemeral, impressionistic artificiality mostly of Wilde’s city lyrics. In the last section, the ideas explored in ‘Panthea’ inform ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1884).

Moving on to Arthur Symons poetry, chapter 4 argues that in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) the fragmented, impressionistic sensations and images of the city mirror the poet’s fragmented consciousness and state of mind. The city is a matrix of darkness and light that limits and specialises the art of gazing. Through their impressionistic lens, Symons’s speakers are flâneurs that perceive the phantasmagorias of London, or Paris, from new angles and perspectives. The city becomes a gigantic textual tangle of artificiality that invites deciphering. In this sense, the female figures populating it with their masks of make-up and dress are textual enigmas. The sexual encounter within private quarters, or the constellation of dancers in the music hall, becomes a mirror of the city exterior.

“Centric positionality” is a form of organism-environment relation exhibited by animal forms of life. Human life is characterized not only by centric but also by excentric positionality—that is, the ability to take a position beyond the boundary of one’s own body. Excentric positionality is manifest in: the inner, psychological experience of human beings; the outer, physical being of their bodies and behavior; and the shared, intersubjective world that includes other human beings and is the basis of culture. In each of these three worlds, there is a duality symptomatic of excentric positionality. Three laws characterize excentric positionality: natural artificiality, or the natural need of humans for artificial supplements; mediated immediacy, or the way that contact with the world in human activity, experience, and expression is both transcendent and immanent, both putting humans directly in touch with things and keeping them at a distance; and the utopian standpoint, according to which humans can always take a critical or “negative” position regarding the contents of their experience or their life.

A number of prominent intellectuals in the 1960s, including Hannah Arendt, Lewis Mumford, Loren Eiseley, Rene Dubos and Paul Tillich, were uneasy with what they believed would be a dehumanization that stemmed from Apollo and the technological society it represented. This chapter examines intellectual concerns over technology, artificiality, objectification of the Earth, false hopes of escape, the demoralization that may come from a full understanding of humanity’s isolation in the universe, and the possible evolution of spacefarers in wholly artificial environments into a new posthuman species.

This chapter offers an innovative interpretive analysis of Rousseau’s literary and political works, highlighting how his formulation of popular sovereignty as the immediate expression of the people rests on a critique of the theater’s conspicuous artificiality. Contrary to the established reading, Rousseau’s alternative to the theater is not the public festival, which he finds unpredictable and fragile due to its performative nature. Rousseau models his conception of politics on a different form of aesthetic experience, which he develops in Pygmalion—a monodrama that depicts the encounter between a sculptor and his work of art. The Social Contract embodies this aesthetic experience whose paradigmatic example comes from plastic arts. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the antidemocratic implications of this turn to plastic arts, which resurfaces in the works of contemporary theorists who share Rousseau’s idealization of the supposed immediacy of spontaneous action and his desire to remedy its fragility and unpredictability.