By Jose Luiz Rangel joseluizrangel@icloud.com York University Ladders Made of Water, by Canadian writer, poet, philosopher and scholar BW Powe, is a genuine “work in progress” that obviously forms part of a trilogy that began with the amazing Blakean book, The Charge in Global Membrane (2019), and will be completed, as announced in some sections

Tetyana (Tanya) Krupiy — Newcastle University — tanya.krupiy@newcastle.ac.uk Abstract: Traditionally, human rights activists gathered evidence about violations of particular individuals’ human rights to demand that states change their conduct and adopt measures to prevent further violations. Deploying artificial intelligence as part of the decision-making process creates challenges for activists to detect all sources of harm

Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu The American journalist and op-ed columnist for the New York Times David Brooks (born in 1961 in Toronto; B. A., University of Chicago, 1983) once mentioned my favorite scholar the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong’s most widely read, and most widely translated, 1982 book Orality and Literacy:

Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu After Time magazine named the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (born in 1989) Person of the Year 2023, on December 6, 2023, I read the 44-year-old Oxford-educated British author Mary Harrington’s short provocatively titled online article “The dark truth about Taylor Swift: Too many young women yearn for

Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu Berkeley’s distinguished sociologist of religion Robert N. Bellah’s 775-p. magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011) constructs an evolutionary Big History account in which to situate Karl Jasper’s account of the ancient axial age (roughly, the first millennium BCE) in

Thomas J. Farrell University of Minnesota Duluth. tfarrell@d.umn.edu I usually do not review reference books, because they are designed to be dipped into and consulted for specific targeted information, not read straight through. For example, biblical commentaries are usually designed to be used as reference books to be consulted for information about specific biblical passages,

Robert K. Logan Department of Physics and St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto logan@physics.utoronto.ca Abstract: Ong’s notion of secondary orality that emerged with the written word is expanded to include the way orality changed with the emergence of the alphabet, the printing press, telegraph, radio, television, computing, the Internet, social media and AI. Orality is

Robert K. Logan logan@physics.utoronto.ca Abstract: The notion that an AI device could spontaneously take control of its programmer/creators and then enslave or annihilate humankind is shown to be something that could never happen given that a computer cannot have any desires or a will of its own. A review of human, non-human animal, plant, fungi,

Robert K. Logan Department of Physics and St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto logan@physics.utoronto.ca Orality is the communication of humans with each other through the spoken word. Before the emergence of the written word, it was the primary and only form of human verbal communication. As pointed out by Walter Ong with the emergence of