Research

Criticism of Tarkovsky's Stalker typically rests on the assumption that the film's protracted duration is ultimately redeemed as insight, density, or meaning. Drawing on Bataille and Lacan, I argue that the film instead approaches a general economy of cinematic time with duration as expenditure without return, withdrawing the tacit guarantee that the spectator's time will pay off. This demand for conversion invites further examination in any time-based medium.

Contemporary evolutionary biology models human altruism as a cost-benefit exchange, most influentially through Hamilton's rule. I argue that such models are not merely reductive but predictively empty, since their variables are derived from the data they claim to forecast, and their scope excludes the non-kin, non-reciprocal altruism that humans exhibit most characteristically.

Further, the positivist commitment underwriting them cannot accommodate the normative dimensions of altruistic behaviour, thereby positioning mathematical justification as subsidiary to empirical justification rather than a substitute for it.