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The question of whether a God is needed to justify or ground moral facts is mooted by the fact that true moral facts exist in all possible universes that contain rational agents. This can be demonstrated in three stages. First, it is necessarily the case that true moral facts can only be described as the imperatives that supersede all other imperatives. Second, it is necessarily the case that for any rational agent there will always be true hypothetical imperatives that supersede all other imperatives. And third, if there are true hypothetical imperatives that supersede all other imperatives, they are then, necessarily, the only true moral facts. As this follows for any rational agent in any possible universe, the presence of God is irrelevant to the existence of moral facts. God could be more capable of identifying those true moral facts, but he cannot author or ground them. And though a God could casuistically alter moral imperatives by altering the corresponding physics, he is constrained in what he can make true this way by moral fundamentals that are always necessarily true. God is therefore not necessary for there to be moral facts.

The paper analyses a contemporary Georgian novel – Zura Jishkariani’s Chewing Dawns: Sugar-free. The novel belongs to the sub-genre of bio-punk. The aim of the paper was to identify the defamiliarized and ironized socio-cultural processes taking place in the contemporary Georgian society, considering the narratological concept of alternative worlds and the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor. The outcomes of the research would draw the cultural-intellectual orientations of contemporary Georgian society. Based on these two conclusions, the paper aimed to find an age-long similarity between the social-political challenges of the 1920s and the contemporary problems of the Georgian society. Research has proved that numerous systems of values have been deconstructed and carnivalized by means of a play with alternative worlds. The development of the world depends on the activation of the human brain capacity, which ensures the cognition of the “higher reality“. The literary text under analysis reflects current achievements in cognitive sciences. The mental trips reflect the capacity of the human brain. The text describes the protagonist’s aspiration towards manipulating and stimulating of the human brain. This is the only way to overcome the banality of life. The manner of narration and the idealization of the aim serve the purpose of description of the revolutionary spirit.

Erika Gottlieb and E. J. Brown have both argued that Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) owe varying degrees of debt to Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We (1921). In the following article it will be argued that the narrative structures and characters of both these British novels constitute more fundamentally a secular transformation of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), but incorporate elements of futility and pessimism not present to the original religious allegory, due to liberal humanist and democratic values replacing the religious vision.

My essay is premised on the observation that while canonical theories of fantastic genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror) proposed by critics such as Tzetvan Todorov and Darko Suvin center on epistemic aporia, most recent examples in popular culture reject fundamental difference, alterity, and the unknown in favor of postmodern play within a limited set of generic conventions. I argue that today, tabletop roleplaying game systems (RPGs) provide a superior hermeneutic for understanding how the fantasy genre operates in mass culture than does traditional genre theory. After providing a brief overview of the historical development of fantasy gaming out of wargaming and mass market fantasy literature in the 1970s, I show how RPGs formalized fantasy’s generic tropes into a modular system that enabled participants to produce fictions across and between genres. Through a reading of Poul Anderson’s use of the “multiverse” trope in his novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, the notion that reality consists of an infinite number of interconnected worlds, I argue RPGs completed a reorientation toward the fantastic begun by mass-market fantasy literature. Epistemological concerns, distinctions between fantastic genres, and individual authorship are de-emphasized in favor of established formal conventions, a shift which encourages a participatory model of consumption and ease of transmission across diverse media. I then use the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones novels as an example of how this paradigmatic shift in the fantastic has moved beyond the niche markets of fantasy fiction and roleplaying games to manifest itself today as a hegemonic cultural norm.

Patrick Bond provides a biography of Amin’s work as a global political thinker and leader on the left. From his early days building the Third World Forum and establishing “origins of a South-centric organic intelligentsia with global visions” to his work with the World Social Forum process, Amin dedicated his life to trying to lay the foundations for a Fifth International. Bond notes Amin’s frustration with the extreme fragmentation and limited policy impacts of left struggles. Yet he points out some recent exceptions here in the successes of global South campaigns around the right to water, access to medicines and the right to health, and Via Campesina and MST’s success in building global resistance to corporate land grabbing.

El objetivo de este artículo es el de visualizar la posibilidad de mundos alternativos al actual a partir del análisis de la integridad teórica interna de las teorías subalternas de las Relaciones Internacionales (Neogramscismo, Teoría Crítica, Posestructuralismo, Feminismo y Poscolonialismo). Para dar cumplimento a dicho objetivo se realizará una investigación de índole documental. La metodología escogida para tal efecto es un análisis documental que aspira a diseccionar los argumentos principales, los conceptos clave y las valoraciones realizadas por exponentes emblemáticos de las teorías subalternas. La principal conclusión a la que llega este artículo es que a pesar de unas inquietudes comunes sobre la manera de superar las estructuras ideacionales de dominación, las teorías subalternas enfrentan obstáculos aparentemente insalvables que pueden poder en riesgo la posibilidad de subvertir el orden establecido.

From galaxies of stars to the tiny particles that constitute atoms, objects interact with each other according to rules that scientists think they understand. [...] maybe the arrow of time points in our direction (that is, toward the \"future\") in half the universes and in the opposite direction (toward the \"past\") in the other half.

Nora Lester Murad uses her own experience to expose the incompatibility of the common ‘development’ worldview with political realities in Palestine; and she critiques the development community for playing along with the charade that Palestine is ‘post-conflict’. Using the findings of research with grassroots civil society organizations, she shows how dependence on development cooperation often contributes to the denial of Palestinians’ right to self-determination. She argues for honest self-reflection by the international development community, the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian civil society to end complicity with efforts that maintain structural inequality rather than challenge it.