Dan Burnett

Human attention has become a touchstone of widespread concern across the humanities, sciences, and broader culture in much of the world. The emergence of a new, heavily capitalized, and technologically sophisticated industry “commodifying” human attention (what has been called “human fracking”) has given rise to a transdisciplinary conversation about attentional problems. Philosophical analyses of attention take on special importance in the context of these new developments. Drawing on historical epistemology and the critical perspective of the history and philosophy of science, this paper examines the major positions in contemporary philosophy that have staked accounts of human attention. Ultimately, this metaphilosophical analysis juxtaposes analytic and Continental approaches, and contends that much current philosophical work on human attention fails to take adequate account of the sublated genealogy of instrumentalizing/cybernetic scientific practices that have constituted attention as an object of inquiry across the twentieth century. The implications for forward-looking investigations are considered.

The real history of the covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." A great deal of uncertainty--and even some genuine confusion--surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or "Order of the Third Bird." Sensational accounts of this "attentional cult" emphasize histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes--both to its ranks, and to its scholarship. In recent years, however, the revisionist work of the research collective ESTAR(SER) has done much to clear the air, bringing archival precision to the history of this covey of attention-artists who call themselves "The Birds." Gathering the best articles of the last twenty years of The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), this volume represents a landmark in the history of aesthetic practices, and will be a point of departure for future work wading the muddy marshes at the limits of historicism."--Publisher description.

From Galileo to the Bhopal tort litigation, Scopes to OncoMouse®, Lysenko to the lie detector, the agonistic and alethic forum of the courtroom has offered unique opportunities to witness science and scientists being made and unmade. Evolving legal systems have consistently been forced to draw on (or defensibly away from) scientific knowledge, scientific methods, and scientific experts in the pursuit of truth and justice. At the same time, courts—in many ways the original site for the production of social facts—have to a significant extent shaped both the theories and the practices of knowledge production central to the emergence of modern science. This Focus section draws together a set of scholars at work on these borrowings and aims to stimulate more research in an important and fast‐expanding area of scholarship.