No abstract

In this Critical Exchange, political theorists and philosophers of the contemporary condition were asked to reflect on the politics of mourning. Political theorists have increasingly turned to mourning as a prism through which to view the differential politics of grief and grievance (for an overview see McIvor and Hirsch, 2019). Yet in this particular moment it is impossible to think about the linkages between politics and grief outside the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. As this exchange was coming together, the virus was beginning its spread. While only some of the contributions directly confront the question of death and democracy during a pandemic, all speak to the ways that loss, grief, and politics are intertwinedsomething that the current crisis has made abundantly clear.

No abstract

Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are social insects that makes frequent use of volatile pheromone signals to collectively navigate unpredictable and unknown environments. Ants have been shown to effectively use pheromone trails to find the shortest path between two points, the nest and the food source. The ant pheromone trails are accomplished by depositing pheromones which are then diffused passively, creating isotropic (i.e., non-directional and axi-symmetric) signals. In this study, we report the first instance of the honey bees’ ability to solve the shortest path problem to localize the queen and aggregate around her by using a collective flow-mediated scenting strategy. In this strategy, individual bees not only emit pheromones but also fan their wings to actively direct the flow of the signals, providing colony members with directional messages to the queen’s location. We use computer vision and deep learning approaches to perform automatic and accurate image analysis. As a result, we quantify the number of bees in the short and long paths, and show that the short path is frequented by significantly more bees over time. We also reconstruct attractive surfaces using the positions and directions of scenting bees, and show that this surface is more “attractive” along the short path and around the queen as scenting bees send out directional messages and the swarm makes their way to the queen. Overall, we show that honey bees can effectively use the collective scenting behavior to overcome local and volatile pheromone communication and find the shortest path to the queen.

This paper challenges an orthodoxy in recent philosophical discussions of grief, namely, that grief is essentially tied to the thought that a person of significance to oneself has died. As first-person reports make clear, one can find oneself cut off from the significant other not simply in body but also in thought. This is not, moreover, an isolated difficulty but one that may have repercussions for one's capacity to form an outlook on the social world, the natural world, and the world viewed from one's own scheme of ends. Taking C. S. Lewis's diary of grief as a guide, I argue that our capacity to think of our significant others depends, surprisingly enough, on our capacity to acknowledge their independence from us even in death.