This chapter contains sections titled: Asking for Reasons Narrative Framing Alternative Narratives Revelation and Reason Mystery Notes.

This paper integrates personal narratives with the methods of phenomenology in order to draw some general conclusions about ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to be depressed. The analysis has three parts. First, it explores the ways in which depression disrupts everyday experiences of spatial orientation and motility. This disruption makes it difficult for the person to move and perform basic functional tasks, resulting in a collapse or contraction of the life-world. Second, it illustrates how depression creates (...) a situational atmosphere of emotional indifference that reduces the person’s ability to qualitatively distinguish what matters in his or her life because nothing stands out as significant or important anymore. In this regard, depression is distinct from other feelings because it is not directed towards particular objects or situations but to the world as a whole. Finally, the paper examines how depression diminishes the possibility for ‘self-creation’ or ‘self-making’. Restricted by the illness, depression becomes something of a destiny, preventing the person from being open and free to access a range of alternative self-interpretations, identities, and possible ways of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief comparative overview of the development of the reproductive sciences especially in agriculture in the UK and the US. It begins with the establishment by F. H. A. Marshall in 1910 of the boundaries that framed the reproductive sciences as distinct from genetics and embryology. It then examines how and where the reproductive sciences were taken up in agricultural research settings, focusing on the differential development of US and UK institutions. The reproductive sciences were also (...) pursued in medical and biological settings, and I discuss how the intersections among all three allowed the circulation of both ideas and scientists’ careers. Across the twentieth century, scientific leadership in the reproductive sciences alternated between the UK and US, and these patterns are elucidated. I conclude with thoughts on future research that might emphasize the elaboration of industrialization processes in agriculture and new capacities to transform both reproductive processes and their products—life itself—as biopower comes to be more ambitiously understood as extending across all species. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life by Stanley Hauerwas, and: Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church by Stanley HauerwasLaura M. HartmanApproaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life Stanley Hauerwas grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2013. 251 pp. $24.00Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church Stanley Hauerwas new york: seabury books, 2013. 169 pp. $18.00Stanley Hauerwas is prolific. By my count, there are forty-six (...) books to his name, including these two from 2013. And yet in the preface to Without Apology, he writes, “I am often asked, ‘How many books have you written?’ My truthful answer must be, ‘I have no idea.’ … I could count them, but I have no interest in doing so” (ix). Hauerwas’s reluctance to number his career in books shows his preference for smaller units of measurement (“how some reader may find this sermon, or that sentence or chapter … helpful”), but it also reflects his view that he is not the sole author of his works. To his credit, he mentions two influential women—his wife, Paula Gilbert, an experienced clergywoman, and his assistant, Carole Baker, who gives the sermons a “work-over” after they are written (ix).Those who know Hauerwas know what to expect from these volumes: thoughtful arguments that unflinchingly assert the centrality of Christ and of the Church; a heavy dose of pacifism; major appearances from John Howard Yoder and Karl Barth (as well as multiple cameos from fascinating authors who are now on my to-read list); and accessible, open prose outlining clear, thought-provoking arguments. The two books reviewed here are quite different from one another: Without Apology is a book of sermons; Approaching the End is a book of essays loosely organized around a theme of eschatology. But both contain the hallmarks of “classic Hauerwas”—his signature mix of virtue ethics, communitarian interests, and narrative sensibilities.Without Apology contains recent sermons, primarily in Episcopal churches. Drawing on lectionary readings, Hauerwas brings his own theological interpretation and creates fairly short, satisfying sermons, which he readily describes (in Paula Gilbert’s words) as “tight” (87). This collection also includes four sermons on the topic of priesthood and some other writings of note: the already-classic “An Open Letter to Christians Beginning College” (good for use with Christian undergraduates) and “Sexing the Ministry” (food for thought for [End Page 215] seminarian and clergy alike). Without Apology manifests several major themes, but the biggest of these connects with the title: Hauerwas is “unapologetic” about his Christian faith and doesn’t engage in theology of the “apologetic” style. His emphasis, rather, is on being truthfully present with one another in the church community.Approaching the End promises eschatological reflections and delivers on the promise. Although he is writing about eschatology, Hauerwas strongly maintains that he is not reaching his own “end” and disavows any contention that Approaching the End is a kind of “swan song” (xiv). He addresses politics and war in several chapters. In “The End of Sacrifice: An Apocalyptic Politics,” he makes the case that if Christians believe Jesus’s sacrifice was “the end of all sacrifices,” then we should not “continue to participate in the sacrifice of war” (36). Similar themes emerge in “War and Peace,” later in the volume. In “Church Matters: On Faith and Politics,” Hauerwas writes, “One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians” (68). He welcomes the “end” of churches and denominations as we know them because “it means that the church is finally free to be a politics” (86).Hauerwas also discusses the future of churches and denominations. “The End of Protestantism” reiterates that “if the church is to be faithful … then we must recover what it means for the church to be an alternative politics” (92). This chapter’s emphasis on Methodism and his appraisal of Methodists as “free church Catholics” (94) is of note. In “Which Church? What Unity?” Hauerwas discusses the ecumenical movement, prompted by George Lindbeck’s challenge to do so (98). Hauerwas’s... (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D One of my philosophy professors told me there were two sets of alternatives at the heart of philosophy, which is another way of saying that there are two fundamental choices between two different ways at the heart of understanding life. The years have proven, at least as far as I am concerned, just how insightful this observation was. The two sets of alternatives are one and many, and being and flux. The solemn feast of Pentecost, the (...) last day of our Easter season, gives us the opportunity to reflect on the first set: one and many. When we look out at the world, are we the kind of persons who see what we have in common with others and see what unites us, or are we the kind of persons who first notice the differences between us and other people: either our gender, or our skin colour, or our language, or our religion, or our social status, or our nationality, or our education, or our occupation? There are so many things that make us different from one another that it is a rare person who is able to focus on what makes us one. (shrink)

In the fall of 2005, Mark C. Taylor, the controversial public intellectual and widely respected scholar, suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom thought he would not live, fought to save him. Taylor would eventually recover, but only to face a new threat: surgery for cancer. "These experiences have changed me in ways I am still struggling to understand," Taylor writes in this absorbing memoir. "After the past year, I am persuaded (...) class='Hi'>that I have done enough fieldwork to write a book that combines philosophical and theological reflection with autobiographical narrative. Writing is not only possible but actually seems necessary." _Field Notes from Elsewhere_ is Taylor's unforgettable, inverted journey from death to life. Each of his memoir's fifty-two chapters and accompanying photographs recounts a morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. When we confront the end of life, Taylor explains, the axis of the lived world shifts, and everything must be reevaluated. As Taylor sorts through his remembrances, much that once seemed familiar becomes strange, paradoxical, and contradictory. He reads his experience with and against ghosts from his past, recasting the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying. "You never come back from elsewhere," Taylor concludes, "because elsewhere always comes back with you.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 63-67 [Access article in PDF] A Buddhist Reflects (Practices Reflection) on Some Christians' Reflections on Buddhist Practices Grace Burford Prescott College A tourist lost in New York City asks of a passerby, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"The musically inclined informant replies, "Practice, practice, practice!" Often people who have just heard I am a college professor with a specialty in Buddhism ask me "Are (...) you a practicing Buddhist?" This question has always stumped me. My most common retort (it's not really an answer), "I keep practicing; maybe someday I'll get it right," both evades and critiques the question. As we use the term in everyday conversation, "practice" generally means disciplined repetition of an activity, usually in preparation for a performance of some kind. In relation to a religious path, "practice" usually refers to the integration of certain prescribed actions (practices) in one's life. My retort derives from the mixing of these two meanings of the word "practice," and the assumption that--for one reason or another--religious practice does not lead to a perfect performance in the spiritual equivalent of Carnegie Hall.The form of the question puzzles me. Why do they ask about my practice? Why not just ask me "Are you a Buddhist?" I think they expect to discover that I engage in a Buddhist equivalent of going to church. Maybe the inclusion of practice in the question indicates anticipation of some level of earnestness, of application of my self/energy/time in service of my religion--some outward, observable manifestation of my religious orientation, above and beyond just teaching college students about this religion. Perhaps they expect me to confess to being a vegetarian, or meditating, or chanting, or attending Buddhist services of some kind. Although I find the question somewhat intrusive, I understand that most often it arises from well-meaning curiosity, if not genuine interest, and I try to follow my retort with something more pedagogically effective.For most of my life, practice has been about music. I sang before I talked; I began to study piano at an early age; in elementary school I took up guitar and clarinet; in high school I started voice lessons. Learning to play all of these instruments required [End Page 63] practice. Recently, I took up the electric bass guitar, and I'm back to daily practicing. Practice does produce something; it is linearly causal. If I practice my instrument, I get better at producing the sounds I want to produce. Only a nonmusician would say this does not amount to a real accomplishment. At the same time, the activity one practices is the same activity one hopes to perform: I play the bass when I practice, in order to be able to play the bass. Still, I must practice--to get where I want to go, to improve the quality of my playing. After all, I first heard the Carnegie Hall joke from my guitar teacher, who told it both to amuse me and to inspire me to practice, practice, practice. At about the same time, author Catherine Drinker Bowen advised a group of us high school students that--based on her experiences growing up in a family full of musicians--the most effective way to learn an instrument is to fall in love with one's music teacher. In other words, desire serves the crucial function of inspiring one to practice. Yet I know that the same desire that motivates me to practice so that I can play more skillfully (as in "practice makes perfect") can hold me back if I focus on that future desired skillful playing (the "perfection") instead of the present moment of my playing. Further, I can practice to the point of technical expertise--I can accomplish that skill level I am aiming for in practice--and still not produce the musical quality I aspire to play. Practice does produce something necessary, but that something does not suffice. Musicians are no better at naming that other necessary ingredient than are... (shrink)

Amartya Sen's memoir, Home in the World, is a compelling read, giving a fascinating view of the making of the mind of one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time. In reflections on the first three decades of his life—all filled with an amazing range of experiences, encounters, and intellectual explorations that span Asia, Europe, and North America—Sen weaves a comprehensive and interlocking narrative that brings together a unitary worldview where two multi-dimensional themes are juxtaposed throughout the (...) book: the presence of the past and the convergence of the near and the far. In this essay, I highlight some of the life experiences and lessons shared in Sen's memoir grounded in his ideas of identity and shared humanity. These ideas took on a prominent place in Sen's life, in part, through his educational experience at the innovative school founded by the visionary poet Rabindranath Tagore. I draw on the views of both Sen and Tagore, as discussed in Sen's memoir. These lessons and ideas can help us in appreciating the power of knowledge, the value of education, and the allure of diversity. They can also guide us in our search for a more just world. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that (...) set our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that (...) set our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

This article uses a Chinese narrative of ‘nature-human harmony’ as the main thread to connect the contributions of ontological anthropology. I argue that the best of the critiques of nature-human or nature-culture dualism in social anthropology propose rebuilding a world that ‘pursues harmony while preserving difference’ in the double sense of nature and culture. Given that most social scientific problems are indeed related to utilitarian individualism, I argue that research on ‘ontology’ should re-engage the ancient notion (...) of ‘ ji’, construed as ‘others-comprised self’, which forms the foundation of a perspective of ‘broad human relationship’ between humans and their others (other humans, things, and divinities). Perspectivism inherits many categories of Western cosmology that it critiques and represents a kind of inert ontology. Grounded in the cosmology of life ( sheng), we hope to contribute to a new anthropology of the compatibility between self/others and subject/objects. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE BIBLE AND MODERNITY: REFLECTIONS ON LEO STRAUSS John Ranieri Seton Hall University espondingto the criticisms made by Eric Voegelin and Alexandre Lojeve ofhis book On Tyranny, Leo Strauss wonders whether the attempt to restore classical social science is not, perhaps, Utopian, "since it implies that the classical orientation has not been made obsolete by the triumph ofthe biblical orientation" (Strauss 1991, 177-178). In similar fashion Strauss remarks (...) to Karl Lowith how "there can be no doubt that our usual way of feeling is conditioned by the biblical tradition," even if he refuses to rule out the possibility of correcting that feeling (Lowith and Strauss, 111). This "triumph ofthe biblical orientation" concerns Strauss, since he believes no synthesis is possible between the competing claims of Athens and Jerusalem. The cultural predominance of one of these cities would jeopardize the vitality ofwestern civilization, which depends upon the tension between them for its dynamism and life (Strauss 1989, 72; 1997, 116, 121). To speak ofthe triumph ofthe biblical in the modern West is to call attention to a disruptive imbalance. Strauss's overall project of reviving the classical orientation in politics can be understood as an attempt to restore a sense of equilibrium. If the modern world reflects a victory ofthe biblical orientation, it is relevant to ask just how Strauss conceives the relationship between modernity and the Bible. Given Strauss's well known criticism of modernity, we may wonder whether this criticism is also an implicit criticism ofthe Bible and its influence. Answering this question is not an easy task. For someone who considered the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem to be the central issue confronting western civilization, Strauss 56John Ranieri devotes a relatively meager amount ofspace to analysis ofthe Bible.1 With rare exception we find nowhere near the amount of detailed commentary on biblical texts that we find in his treatment ofthe classics. What are we to make ofan author who writes three books on Xenophon's Socrates, while limiting his only detailed biblical commentary to the first two chapters of Genesis? This discrepancy would pose no problem, but for the fact that Strauss repeatedly emphasizes the importance ofkeeping alive the question ofthe relationship between Greek and biblical traditions. By comparison, a thinker like Heidegger simply tends to dismiss or ignore the relevance of the Bible in addressing what he would take to be the contemporary crisis of western civilization. But Strauss insists that we cannot understand the modern world without a serious consideration ofthe claims ofAthens and Jerusalem. His reticence, then, in treating biblical texts (especially the New Testament) with the same degree of probity as he employs when consideringthe texts ofclassical Greece, is puzzling. We are leftwondering whether his own observation about Machiavelli is applicable to himself: "The silence ofthe wise man is always meaningful. It cannot be explained by forgetfulness" (Strauss 1958, 30; see Grant 1964; Steintrager 1968). Strauss's silence may be significant, but arguments based upon an author's omissions are always more precarious than those which rely on written or spoken evidence. In the case of Strauss, there are in fact sufficient statements and hints in his work to enable us to recognize ways in which he construed the relationship between the Bible and modernity. Three themes stand out. The first is the notion that the eschatological vision ofthe Bible survives in modern times in transfigured and distorted form as the idea of progress. The second is Strauss's contention that the "final atheism" characteristic of late modernity is the child of an "intellectual 1 As far as 1 can tell, Strauss devoted only one essay to a specific book ofthe Bible. That essay is "On the Interpretation of Genesis" (Strauss 1995b; Orr 1995). Strauss deals with much ofthe same material in his "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections" (Strauss 1995; Orr 1995), although the second part ofthe two part essay (constituting a quarter ofthe entire essay) contains briefquotes from Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Another place in which he discusses the influence ofthe Bible is "Progress or Return? (Strauss 1 997). There is no extended treatment of any New Testament text anywhere in Strauss's published work. By contrast, Eric Voegelin (another... (shrink)

None of us will escape the experience of personal loss, illness, aging, or mortality. Yet, psychoanalysis seems to shy away from a discussion of these core human experiences. Existential vulnerability is painful and we all avoid this awareness in different ways. However, when analysts fail to explore the topic of mortality, their own and their patients, they may foreclose an important exploration and short-change patient and therapist. _Entering Night Country_ focuses on the existential condition, and explores how it penetrates professional (...) lives, analytic work, and theoretical formulations. Each chapter explores this topic, shifting the lens from analytic process, to include theoretical assumptions, and professional communities. _Stephanie Brody_ shows how the analytic process is a journey, no less profound than the epic journeys depicted in the classic literature of Homer and repeated in the patient’s own heroic and painful stories. Weaving literary references into the clinical experience of psychoanalysis, Brody reveals the transformative power of the analytic process for the patient and for the analyst. By relating the ancient past to our current struggles, psychoanalyst and patient together are guided to a destination, a life of meaning in the universe of possibilities. Clinical vignettes and personal reflections intersect with motifs from the epic poems and fantasy fiction, where the despair of loss and trauma do not extinguish the wish for change and the search for intimacy. __Entering Night Country__ highlights the common themes that arise for patient and analyst as any person entering an unknown territory. It is intended for psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists, and mental health clinicians. It will also be accessible to those outside the clinical profession, even to individuals who have little understanding of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Recollections of humanistic and transpersonal psychology’s origin’s morph into the pros and cons of humanistic/transpersonal oriented schools developing APA accredited clinical programs. This discussion dovetails with the question will ATP ever become an APA division, raising an interesting alternative for those of us considering a career in counseling: becoming a spiritual coach. Enter the issue of psychedelic therapy and the Supreme Courts decision to allow ayahuasca as a sacrament by the Uniao Do Vegetal Church, and the importance of why (...) humanistic and transpersonal psychology need to clearly map out the territories and sub-divisions of science and religion. Finally this conversation raises a concern, that Maslow’s call for a “trans-human” psychology sought to encourage creating what we now call ecopsychology. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool for determining students' spiritual health and life orientation. For this purpose, the Spiritual Health and Life-Orientation Measure (SHALOM) inventory developed by Fisher (2010) is adapted to Turkish. The adaptation study was carried out on 1591 high school students in three study groups studying in Ankara and Muş. The original English measure consisting of four dimensions and twenty items was translated into Turkish, factor analysis, validity and reliability (...) tests were conducted on the sampling data. As a result of the study, the Turkish-adapted inventory consists of four dimensions (personal, social, environmental and transcendental) which resemble the original inventory. In addition, internal consistency coefficients of the inventory dimensions were in perfect harmony with the original inventory and served the purpose of the scale. In Conclusion The Turkish adaptation of the SHALOM Inventory can be used in different disciplines of psychology, educational sciences, and social sciences. Summary: The concept of religion, which is an important dynamic and carrier of the social field, has gone into a double distinction since the second half of the 18th century; the concept of spirituality has begun to be refined from the concept of religion. The concepts of religion and spirituality are very difficult to define; While the concept of religion focuses ideology and rules of belief, spirituality centers on individual experiences and interrelationships that extend religion. For this reason, different spirituality and religion definitions are made from different perspectives and different spirituality scales were developed within this framework. However, the results of these studies differ significantly from each other; this means that spirituality was defined and conceptualized based on the scale that was used. Early period studies on spirituality mostly focus on religion, health, psychology and work life. In these studies, after defining the concept of spirituality; the relationship between the concept and health, religion, psychology and business life or necessity for human life is discussed. In the West, until the 1950s, the concepts of religion and spirituality were used interrelated. However, today these two concepts are almost completely separated from each other.Literature consists of numerous inventory development studies to measure spirituality. The fact that the inventory works based on different conceptual foundations makes it difficult to draw a general, meaningful and consistent conclusion about spiritual health and life orientation. Furthermore, spirituality measurements reflecting the religion and values ​​of a particular culture cannot be comprehensive or universal. At this point, Fisher criticizes the measurement tools developed for the purpose of measuring spirituality: in terms of "mixing religion and spirituality", "relying on the world of values", "not taking into account cultural differences", "and questioning only the mystical/spiritual experience". As a result, it can be said that no measurement developed in the conceptual structure of the West does not take into account the cultural flexibility and accept its spiritual values as universal or prevalent.The SHALOM inventory developed by Fisher, which adapted to the Turkish culture in present study, is based on four basic (individual, social, environmental and transcendent) areas that constitute the world of interpersonal relationship. In this study, spirituality, as in Fisher's work, emphasizes the interaction with certain concepts of different intensities that are considered as independent from religion and above religions. In this context, the concept of spirituality communicates with one's personal space, social position, nature, and transcendental power. This adaptation study will provide useful information and comments on the students' spiritual health levels. This is the most important motive behind the idea of adapting the SHALOM inventory developed by Fisher to the Turkish culture. In addition, by adapting the SHALOM inventory, which is emphasized to have cultural flexibility and adapted to different languages, a new and different measurement tool will be available to understand the nature of the concept of spirituality.This research was carried out to adapt the inventory of Spiritual Health and Life Orientation scale developed for students to Turkish culture. This inventory adaptation study was performed with the data collected from three working groups in Ankara and Muş provinces and 1591 high school students. The first study group was carried out with 414, the second study group with 788, and the third group with 389 high school students. While the data collected from 414 students were used for Exploratory Factor Analysis (AFA) analysis, data collected from 788 students were used for Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In addition, 389 students were used to determine the criterion validity of the inventory. The original language of the SHALOM inventory, which is intended to be adapted into Turkish, is English, and translation studies are conducted separately by three linguistic experts who know the grammar and semantic characteristics of both languages. After the translation studies, the scale was applied to the sampling group and AFA was performed on the sample data. The AFA results showed that a factor roof resembling the original inventory was formed. Determining factors are given appropriate names (personal, enviromental, social and transcendental) by taking into consideration the theoretical names and the dimension names in the original form of the SHALOM. The structure was confirmed by DFA, and as a result of the DFA, X2/sd (1.72) ratio and IFI (0.96) fit indicator was found to be the appropiate fit for the model tested. As a result, it is understood that the Spiritual Health and Life Orientation Inventory consists of four dimensions as in the original inventory, the internal consistency coefficients of the inventory dimensions are in harmony with the original inventory and serve the purpose of the scale. In conclusion the Turkish adaptation of the SHALOM Inventory can be used in different disciplines of psychology, educational sciences, and social sciences. Spirituality should not only be defined within the framework of Western theories, but the nature and likelihood of the spirituality predicted by Islam should be discussed. Moreover, the types and dimensions of Islamic spirituality should be determined by taking into account the cultural subjectivity of an Islamic character. In the study of spirituality, the human model which modernity presents universally should not be accepted as the only truth. It should be tried to develop human models that come from Islamic culture and history and which are specific to us and define us. This should be taken into account not only in mental health / religious studies, but also in psychology of religion in general. In addition, culture-specificity should be given importance, and the experience gained from the cultural accumulation developed by the Turkish civilization with the Islamic doctrine should lead to the studies of spirituality. In this respect, this study aims to adapt the value and spiritual orientation of a different culture to Turkish culture, but it is problematic to construct the concept with Western values. Although Western values are similar to Islamic values and principles, it is envisaged that it may be difficult to measure the concept of spirituality in practice. (shrink)

The sixteenth-century Chinese vernacular novel Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 was a groundbreaking work for its vivid presentation of the domestic life of women in an affluent merchant household, a topic seldom touched upon by previous works in the genre. The rich descriptions of food and dining in the novel have attracted various socio-historical studies. This paper offers a different critical approach and studies the rhetorical and narrative functions of food and dining scenes in the novel with a particular focus on (...) the female participants. Taking a dining party episode from chapter 23 of the novel as an example, the essay looks at how food and dining are used as a narratological device to reveal the female characters’ psychology and their interpersonal power dynamics. The essay argues that this use of food for revealing the female characters’ inner worlds is a narrative strategy for coping with the historical limitations of Chinese vernacular storytelling in describing female characters’ private lives and interior thoughts. Its successful implementation in Jin Ping Mei set an important precedent for a literary genre that had previously been dominated by a public and male-dominated mode of storytelling. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 63-67 [Access article in PDF] A Buddhist Reflects (Practices Reflection) on Some Christians' Reflections on Buddhist Practices Grace Burford Prescott College A tourist lost in New York City asks of a passerby, "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"The musically inclined informant replies, "Practice, practice, practice!" Often people who have just heard I am a college professor with a specialty in Buddhism ask me "Are (...) you a practicing Buddhist?" This question has always stumped me. My most common retort (it's not really an answer), "I keep practicing; maybe someday I'll get it right," both evades and critiques the question. As we use the term in everyday conversation, "practice" generally means disciplined repetition of an activity, usually in preparation for a performance of some kind. In relation to a religious path, "practice" usually refers to the integration of certain prescribed actions (practices) in one's life. My retort derives from the mixing of these two meanings of the word "practice," and the assumption that--for one reason or another--religious practice does not lead to a perfect performance in the spiritual equivalent of Carnegie Hall.The form of the question puzzles me. Why do they ask about my practice? Why not just ask me "Are you a Buddhist?" I think they expect to discover that I engage in a Buddhist equivalent of going to church. Maybe the inclusion of practice in the question indicates anticipation of some level of earnestness, of application of my self/energy/time in service of my religion--some outward, observable manifestation of my religious orientation, above and beyond just teaching college students about this religion. Perhaps they expect me to confess to being a vegetarian, or meditating, or chanting, or attending Buddhist services of some kind. Although I find the question somewhat intrusive, I understand that most often it arises from well-meaning curiosity, if not genuine interest, and I try to follow my retort with something more pedagogically effective.For most of my life, practice has been about music. I sang before I talked; I began to study piano at an early age; in elementary school I took up guitar and clarinet; in high school I started voice lessons. Learning to play all of these instruments required [End Page 63] practice. Recently, I took up the electric bass guitar, and I'm back to daily practicing. Practice does produce something; it is linearly causal. If I practice my instrument, I get better at producing the sounds I want to produce. Only a nonmusician would say this does not amount to a real accomplishment. At the same time, the activity one practices is the same activity one hopes to perform: I play the bass when I practice, in order to be able to play the bass. Still, I must practice--to get where I want to go, to improve the quality of my playing. After all, I first heard the Carnegie Hall joke from my guitar teacher, who told it both to amuse me and to inspire me to practice, practice, practice. At about the same time, author Catherine Drinker Bowen advised a group of us high school students that--based on her experiences growing up in a family full of musicians--the most effective way to learn an instrument is to fall in love with one's music teacher. In other words, desire serves the crucial function of inspiring one to practice. Yet I know that the same desire that motivates me to practice so that I can play more skillfully (as in "practice makes perfect") can hold me back if I focus on that future desired skillful playing (the "perfection") instead of the present moment of my playing. Further, I can practice to the point of technical expertise--I can accomplish that skill level I am aiming for in practice--and still not produce the musical quality I aspire to play. Practice does produce something necessary, but that something does not suffice. Musicians are no better at naming that other necessary ingredient than are... (shrink)

An individualized and coherent life story has been described as the form of identity that is required by highly mobile individualistic Western societies, whereas more family-oriented, traditional societies require more role-based, synchronic identities. Therefore entire life narratives can be expected to be more coherent and to contain more autobiographical arguments that contribute to life narrative coherence in individualistic cultures. This cultural group difference is expected to be mediated by individuals’ conformity to their respective cultural normative concept of (...) biography. We tested these expectations by eliciting entire life narratives and cultural life scripts from students of technical universities from provincial and metropolitan Turkey, as well as from students with a Turkish migrant and a German background in urban Germany (N= 96). Expectations were confirmed for global life narrative coherence and autobiographical arguments with self-event connections. Conformity with a normative concept of biography indeed mediated cultural influences on life narrative coherence. Life narratives from Turkey also contained more family-related events and, unexpectedly, were more negative. Thus creating a coherent life narrative is more typical for cultures that require autonomous, individualized selves rather than for cultures requiring more related selves, reflecting the life story’s suitability for expressing individualized identities and its lesser suitability for expressing interdependent identities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Voice of Thersites:Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of EqualitySiep StuurmanIn the first century bc the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus observed that there were kings before the discovery of writing.1 Diodorus was right: the shared reflection about the human condition made possible by writing emerged in societies where distinctions between ruler and ruled, man and woman, master and slave, lord and commoner, and finally native and (...) foreigner constituted the "deep normality" of social life. No wonder that so much of early social and political thought consists of justifications of inequality. Powerful discourses of inequality told everyone what their station in life was and instructed them to speak and behave accordingly.What is truly remarkable, viewed against this background, is the emergence of ideas of equality. Why and how did people arrive at the daring and implausible idea that men are equal? In the history of political thought this question is usually discussed in the context of the advent of democratic rule in the Greek polis, that is, in a situation in which the demos is already constituted as a political actor. To constitute itself politically, however, the people or its spokesmen must already command a language in which the claim of equality can be expressed. In this essay I seek to retrieve the origins of that language, the historical moment when equality became thinkable in a setting in which the politicized demos had not yet appeared on the horizon. I will examine the famous Thersites episode in Homer's Iliad to show how this could happen, but my argument goes beyond the case of Homer. In the conclusion of this essay I will outline a general framework for the analysis of the interplay between social experiences, available languages, and the origins of ideas of equality. [End Page 171]Equality was not an empirical idea.2 Quite the contrary, the numbing repetition of the daily routines of inequality would seem to make it almost unthinkable, in the same category as black suns and men walking upside down. In such circumstances where was there space for the very thought of equality? How could it even find a voice amidst the deafening roar of kings, priests, and aristocrats? That simple question is my starting point.I will approach this question by means of an equally simple conjecture. Ideas of equality emerge when men or women draw on the egalitarian potentialities of available shared languages, and they do so to make sense of and to change or sustain determinate social experiences. Notions of equality do not arise out of the blue. They usually take the form of a critique of prevailing ideas about the superiority of some people above others. In that sense every discourse of equality is grafted upon some previously articulated discourse of inequality. All discourses of equality are potentially egalitarian because "equality, as an idea, consists in the belief that things can be alike and when alike should receive similar treatment."3 When somebody asserts that "we" are in some relevant sense "like them," the very utterance of the claim implies a questioning of the given relationship between "us" and "them."Where to begin our investigation? I start from the assumption that civilizations are, among other things, defined by the texts on which they confer canonical status. That is not to say that such texts are unquestionable or that their message is unequivocal. Canonical texts are not simply commands or prescriptions, they rather provide the master narratives and exemplary stories later authors draw upon to formulate authoritative interpretations. The major canonical texts of civilizations can usefully be seen as the stepping stones leading to the main interpretative traditions. The Homeric epics, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur'an, and the Analects of Confucius are outstanding examples of such canonical texts. The first step in our investigation is therefore an examination of such texts, looking for critiques of inequality as well as implicit or explicit notions of equality.Homeric Equality?On the face of it Homer may seem an unlikely source for the emergence of any notion of equality. In his influential history of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that the Homeric concepts of goodness... (shrink)

The thesis argued for in this work is that under certain conditions the use of violence is morally obligatory. The thesis is advanced as an alternative to both the pacifist and the liberal, right-oriented theses which are rooted in the idea that violence is evil. The defense consists of an exposition of the problems of the pacifist and liberal theses on the one hand and the development of a system that makes it possible to conceive of (...) the use of violence as morally obligatory on the other hand. ;The work begins with an examination of the socio-practical consequences of the idea that violent is evil--the blindness and insensitivity toward violence that most of us exhibit most of the time. Next comes an analysis of the pacifist and liberal moralities of violence that point out the two are grounded in similar utopian visions of a harmonious world and how they fail to be responsive to the demands of practice. The idea that violence is evil is examined next and a morally neutral conception of violence, an idea of non-abusive violence, is suggested as a preliminary to the consideration of an alternative morality of violence. ;The construction of an alternative begins with the outline of a schema for a moral system. The idea of human dignity is taken as its unifying notion and the ideals of justice, freedom and respect for persons as unfolding it. Moral rules understood as specifying moral obligation are taken as the mechanism of practical morality. The idea of moral policy is introduced as a middle ground between moral ideals and moral rules. The moral ideals are used to draw a distinction between savagery and a violent social world. The choice of a violent social world is understood as the choice of a world in which violence is morally regulated by rules that specify when we are morally obligated to use violence and when we are morally obligated to refrain from the use of violence. A discussion of such rules completes the construction of the alternative. (shrink)

Este artículo es producto de una reflexión etnográfica sobre el proceso de cambio sufrido por una cultura del trabajo asociada a la explotación del carbón y su vinculación con la ciudad de Lota, ubicada en el centro sur de Chile, la que se constituye comohabitacional y de servicios junto con el desarrollo de la monoindustria desde la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Por una parte, se analiza cómo, desde la condición laboral, social y de vida de los trabajadores y la (...) población, se configura un sujeto histórico con identidad laboral y de clase, el que genera un discurso teleológico que da paso a una visión utópica durante el ciclo de vida de la explotación del mineral. Por otra, se analiza cómo el fin de la explotación del mineral en 1997, tras el cierre de los yacimientos, hace que los sujetos transformen su utopía en ucronía; es decir, cómo el fin de la narrativa que movilizaba las acciones genera una temporalidad alternativa que no tiene tiempo real, lo que revela las dificultades para reestructurar la biografía y memoria de una comunidad especializada. This article is the result of an ethnographic observation of the process of change undergone by a labor culture associated to the coal mining and its relationship with the city of Lota, located in the center South of Chile a city that has been constituted as a residential and services center along with the development of the monoindustry, from the second half of the nineteenth century. On one hand, it analyzes how this has shaped an historical subject with labor and class identity considering the working, social and living conditions of the mining workers and the population. This historical subject generates a teleological discourse that leads to a utopianist vision during the service life of the mineral´s exploitation. On the other hand, we analyze how the end of the mining activity in 1997, after the coal mine´s closing, causes the subjects to transform their utopia into uchronia; that is to say, how the aim of the narrative that addressed the actions generates an alternative temporality that has no real time, which reveals the difficulties to reconstruct the biography and memory of a specialized community. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 263-265 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Silent Dialogue: Zen Letters to a Trappist Monk Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit: The Place of Zen in Christian Life The Silent Dialogue: Zen Letters to a Trappist Monk. By David G. Hackett. New York: Continuum, 1996. 157 pp. Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit: The Place of Zen in Christian Life. By Robert E. Kennedy. New York: Continuum, 1997. (...) 144 pp. Two very different books recently published by Continuum seem to complement each other in unexpected ways. Father Kennedy, Catholic Zen Teacher, Jesuit Priest, openly shares with us his own journey into unknowing and self-emptying. As he notes in his preface, "what I looked for in Zen was not a new faith, but a new way of being Catholic that grew out of my own lived experience..." (p. 13). David Hackett, now an associate professor of religion, freely shares his youthful search for genuine spiritual experience. His book is drawn from correspondence from the 1970s with Father Thomas Keating and the monks of the St. Joseph's Abbey during his two-year stay in Japan. Hackett says in his Prologue, "I became a Catholic through Zen meditation..." (p. 17). In both cases, rather than threaten or diminish their Christian faith, Zen practice served as a wonderful "can-opener," prying off lids of rigid ideas and concepts, allowing the depth of the spirit to be more deeply experienced.Part I of Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit, addressed primarily to the Christian reader, offers an excellent introduction into Buddhism, Zen, and the essential elements of practice. In this section Kennedy has reflected the questions Christians have asked during the years he taught at the Zen Community of New York. His teacher there, Bernard Tetsugen Glassman Roshi, clarifies in the foreword Father Kennedy's position as a lay Zen Teacher who remains a Catholic priest. Kennedy weaves a consistent thread of Christian contemplative teachings side by side with the Zen teachings, making very visible the fact that Zen reminds us, as do Eckhart, Merton, and many other contemplatives, that the highest point of our Christian mysticism is reached not in the experience that I know God or that I love God--not in any I-Thou experience--but in the experience that God lives in us (p. 36).The book has been structured according to the four stages of human growth: knowledge, love, purification, and union. These stages have been likened to the stages of alchemy: lead, quicksilver, sulphur, and gold--these four elements provide Kennedy with his titles for the four parts of his book. This very structure makes clear that the goal of both Christian mysticism and Zen practice is transformation of being. With a firm foundation of knowledge and teachings from both traditions, then it is time to actually enter the fire of practice itself. I am reminded of the stages of practice outlined in the ancient Chinese Zen ox-herding pictures. The herdsman sets out with some knowledge, longing for his True Nature. He sees traces--footprints in the sand--and a deep yearning, the quicksilver of desire and inspiration, begins to ache in his heart. As he begins to see and experience his own True Nature, he must pass through the fire of struggle, surrender, deep letting go, until finally both herdsman [End Page 263] and ox disappear, self-emptying is complete in Union. There are no shortcuts. Jesus and Buddha both have invited us to practice radical poverty. Kennedy states, "The poverty of not clinging, not projecting, not finding shelter, and not seeking parallel lives, can lead us to the deepest intimacy of all" (p. 114).Kennedy received his early formative Zen training under Koun Yamada Roshi, a beloved and deeply appreciated teacher, in Kamakura. His Roshi offered a style of practice which utilized the koan (rationally unsolvable question or paradox) to provoke the student into a direct experience rather than an explanation or idea about it. Kennedy Sensei has shared his insight into many... (shrink)

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to describe the experience of enduring marriage in mid-life. The literature reveals a lack of research about contemporary mid-life marriage, reflecting only theoretical pieces and research studies on marital happiness, factors that make a marriage successful, and variables contributing to divorce. Noticeably absent are studies conducted from a phenomenological philosophical perspective. Questioning what enduring marriage involves for individuals in mid-life served to orient the researchers to the meaning of the experience. Seventeen (...) volunteers participated in twenty-six initial and follow-up interviews. Using van Manen's methodological structure of human science research, a composite description that reflects enduring marriage in mid-life emerged. Two essential themes that characterize the experience, The Threads that Bind Us and A Season of Change and seven sub-themes explicating these essential themes portray the partnership of enduring mid-life marriage. The themes that comprise the structure of the experience reflect its form as a relational, time-space, and corporeal phenomenon. The findings are described in detail using narrative description in order to offer a rich account of each theme, and the implications provide a direction for future research. (shrink)

This paper deals with the concept of three eras, as brought to us firstly in the Babylonian Talmud, and later reshaped and reformulated by Christian theologians Joachim of Fiore, Amalric of Bène, and finally by Luce Irigaray. In the first part, we start with the idea of the three eras. This is followed by a critical approach to Sloterdijk’s You must change your life in which religion is substituted by the anthropotechnics. We argue that even in these secular times, (...) the salvation history still remains unfulfilled and that our world is in need of a new, post-Christian materially spiritual narrative. The second part is entirely dedicated to Amalricians and their teachings. Also by tackling strong Islamic influences, we try to find a new opening towards the post-Christian era beyond the mentioned anthropotechnics/atheism divide. In the third part, the Age of the Spirit is approached and defined as a future messianic-utopian era in which a hidden and forgotten inner spiritual core will be revealed to us and in which humanity will give itself a gift of becoming spiritually transformed and divinized. (shrink)

This article provides a discussion of the limits of both narrative and culture based on a close textual analysis of the short story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” by Lorrie Moore. In this story, a mother describes her experiences on a pediatric oncology ward when her infant son develops Wilms' tumor. The authors examine how the story satirically portrays the spurious claims of language, story, and culture to protect us from an (...) unjust universe and then exposes their false promises. The various personal, professional, and genre-specific narratives we use to create order and coherence from the terror of serious illness are ultimately ineffective. Similarly, the superficially comforting culture of the hospital ward cares more about creating the illusion of control than it does about the suffering of sick children. Language and culture cannot make sense of human anguish, the article concludes, yet they are all we have to hold back the chaos. Mystery and uncertainty, as part of the human condition, must become part of our stories and part of our culture. (shrink)

The bestseller from our pre-eminent philosopher, A.C. Grayling 'Grief and loneliness, depression, despair and failure - those things are the common human lot at least at times in all our lives'. Yet it is philosophy which, while not providing an answer to these problems, can enable us to prepare for them, and create strategies with which to deal with them. It is only through reflecting upon the world around us, reading, thinking, questioning, enjoying, that we can inculcate understanding, (...) tolerance and importantly the courage to live our lives. It is our responsibility to live such 'considered lives' and to realise that we are authors of a narrative that can be shaped and controlled. This is the fifth in a series of essay miscellanies from our foremost philosopher A.C. Grayling, reflecting upon the form of our world and its multiplicity. The essays are grouped by theme into reflections upon life and the standards we live by, including vivid polemics and perceptive pieces on significant thinkers, contemporary rights and liberties issues. This book brilliantly articulates the philosophical debate and reflection that is needed to prepare us for life in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Object Life in Monique David-MénardJudith ButlerThe three papers published here were originally given as part of a colloquium, “Objects, Phantasms, Life, and Death” on the work of Monique David-Ménard at Columbia University in April 2014. Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher who has been teaching at the Université de Paris VII-Diderot and has been engaged in private psychoanalytic practice for many years. Her work is distinguished (...) in part because of the way she brings clinical experience to philosophical inquiry, and how she understands the unconscious to support and disrupt various philosophical systems. Trained in the Lacanian school, but returning time and again to Freud with her own questions, she has written extensively on the problem of drives, the role of biology in psychoanalysis, all along staging a way of thinking about philosophy and psychoanalysis as mutually illuminating. Engaged by feminist philosophy, she has offered a way of thinking about sexual alterity, social embodiment, [End Page 80] and gender, to offer a different “French feminist” trajectory than those usually canonized in English.David-Ménard completed a master’s degree in philosophy with Paul Ricoeur (Université de Nanterre, 1968), a doctorate in psychopathology and psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (Université Paris-VII, 1978), and a doctorate in philosophy with Jean-Marie Beysade (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-III, 1990). She was a professor of philosophy in Reims, Sceaux, and Paris-VII, and received her psychoanalytic training at the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) then led by Jacques Lacan; she was a member of that school in 1979–80. Between 1982 and 1994 she was a member of the Centre de formation et de recherches psychanalytiques (CFRP) and then became a member of the Société de psychanalyse Freudienne in 1994. She was Directrice of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris from 1992 to 1995, and served as its vice president from 1995 to 1998. In 1999 she was appointed professor of psychopathology and psychoanalysis at the Université de Paris-VII, Denis Diderot, where she has served as Directrice of the Centre des études du vivant. In addition she is a co-founder of the Société Internationale de Philosophie et Psychoanalyse.Her publications include works on the relation of psychoanalysis to biological and philosophical discourses, hysterical conversion in Freud and Lacan, the Freudian account of drives as a “threshold” phenomenon; bodies and language, constructions of the universal, exemplified most dramatically by a consideration of “madness” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and gender and melancholia.1 The range of her work is relentless and impressive: it includes an early work on Kant’s reading of Swedenborg that initiates a critique of universality through the study of how sexuality and madness inform the text; a study of hysteria “between” Freud and Lacan that establishes her own way of negotiating between the two; several essays on drives and their various vicissitudes; theories of embodiment; feminism and philosophy; the difference between the sexes, the process of sexuation, desire, narcissism, what to do with an organless body following from an impressive, if disconcerting, study on the convergence of Deleuze with psychoanalysis. She has also written on the status of contingency in chaos theory. Although historically trained in Kant, Spinoza, and Husserlian phenomenology, she has also engaged Lacanian thought in a selective and critical way, working with its productive potentials and refusing some of its more rigid formulations. She draws from science, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to weave together a set of theoretical reflections prompted by an event, an occasion, or a challenge. Penelope Deutscher’s contribution to this volume shows how this cross-theoretical inquiry works. David-Ménard, for instance, makes use of a Foucaultian form of inquiry to establish a certain problematic within psychoanalysis and philosophy, posing questions about how the initial impetus for [End Page 81] a theoretical system both conditions, orients, and disrupts any effort at full systematicity. As Deutscher explains, the task is neither to psychoanalyze Foucault nor to apply Foucault to psychoanalysis, but to formulate and pursue an inquiry in which the driving impetus informs and precludes the systematic closure of the theory itself.And... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. From his (...) early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

In this commentary on Brown and colleagues’ paper, entitled ‘Against Moral Responsibilisation of Health: Prudential Responsibility and Health Promotion’, I highlight the tension between individual responsibility—even when this is prudential and not moral—and systemic factors that impact people's health. Brown and colleagues and I agree that individuals are frequently held inappropriately responsible for health-related behaviours or diseases that have become associated with the so-called ‘lifestyle’ diseases. We further agree that health is an instrumental value to people, (...) allowing them to achieve their goals or plans. However, while Brown and colleagues argue that health promotion is justified in providing education campaigns that highlight the pragmatic reasons people have for improving their health-related behaviours, I argue that this amounts to the same inaction on systemic issues as holding individuals morally responsible. Further, without action on systemic issues such as the social determinants of health, some people lack the kinds of future-oriented pragmatic reasons that Brown and colleagues place at the centre of their argument. Rather, for some groups, the pragmatic thing is to enjoy current pleasures even if unhealthy, rather than to forego them for the sake of health in a mythical future. (shrink)

HOME . ABOUT US . CONTACT US HELP . PUBLISH WITH US . LIBRARIANS Search in or Explore Browse Publications A-Z Browse Subjects A-Z Advanced Search University of Cambridge SIGN IN Register | Why Register? | Sign Out | Got a Voucher? prev abstract next Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes A Devout Catholic? Knowledge of The Mental Thought and Language Descartes as A Natural Philosopher Substance Dualism Notes Two Approaches to Reading the Historical Descartes Author: Desmond M. Clarke (...) DOI: 10.1080/09608780902986680 Publication Frequency: 5 issues per year Published in: British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 17, Issue 3 June 2009 , pages 601 - 616 John Cottingham: Cartesian Reflections: Essays on Descartes's Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 40.00 (hb.). ISBN 978-0-19-922697-9 John Cottingham, in a new collection of essays, asks the question: 'what exactly did Descartes himself chiefly take himself to be doing?' (254). 1 While the question is relatively clear, and while it acknowledges implicitly that Descartes was probably doing a range of different things, the answer that is apparently proposed here emerges only on reading the whole collection. Cottingham distinguishes in Chapter 1 - which is a new, synoptic overview of what is discussed in the other chapters, all of which were previously published - between two approaches to reading Descartes. One is to see him as 'a dummy on which to drape various suspect doctrines (such as “Cartesian dualism”)' (3), which contemporary analytic philosophers have shown to be radically mistaken. Another approach is adopted by historians of ideas 'who make it their life's work to pay meticulous scholarly attention to the philosophical works of past ages' (3). Cottingham does not explicitly criticize either of these approaches, but he hints at situating his own as some kind of Aristotelian middle course between the two. Since the two reference points are dangerously close to straw men or what Cottingham calls 'extreme positions', the proposed middle way may simply combine elements of two approaches, each of which is entirely legitimate. I return to this question at the conclusion. In fact, many of these essays were intended to show (rightly!) that Descartes never held the philosophical positions that are often attributed to him. The interpretation of Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, provides a good example of how mistaken one can be: The Cogito ergo sum radically changed the way of doing philosophy … After Descartes, philosophy became a science of pure thought: all that is being- the created world, and even the Creator, is situated within the ambit of the Cogito, as contents of human consciousness. Philosophy is concerned with beings as contained in consciousness, and not as existing independently of it. (257) The only way to address such a caricature is to refer back to what Descartes actually wrote. Cottingham does precisely that, often quoting the original Latin or French texts. However, having shown successfully, by a close reading of the texts, that Descartes did not hold many of the views that are attributed to him, it still remains to say what Descartes did hold or teach about various philosophical problems that retain their perennial interest for us. This is how the question arises, intermittently, about what Descartes thought he was 'chiefly' doing, or what was his primary objective, in the course of an intellectual career that spanned three decades. However, the apparently legitimate desire to bring Descartes' intellectual endeavours into sharp focus may be frustrated by the evidence. His life and work manifestly lack the coherence or unity of purpose that one finds, for example, among many of his French or Dutch contemporaries. It is comparatively easy to 'read' the life of Gisbertus Voetius as that of an unwavering Calvinist theologian, to see Antoine Arnauld as a staunch and consistent theological defender of Port Royal, and even to interpret the obviously fragmentary contents of Pascal's unpublished notebooks (subsequently, the Penses) as an extended search for authentic religious faith, in opposition to what he perceived as the corruption of ecclesial structures. In contrast, Descartes' life reveals features that are difficult to integrate into a coherent pattern. He lived and published during a critical juncture in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Although baptized into the Catholic Church soon after his birth in the Loire district of France, he chose to live most of his life in the aggressively Calvinist United Provinces, in which other religious practices were officially (though often ineffectively) banned. Descartes may have adopted the motto from Ovid, at least early in his career: 'bene vixit qui bene latuit' (he lives well who conceals himself well), and he seems genuinely to have wished to avoid theological controversies. However, he engaged in very public controversies with so many of his contemporaries - including Hobbes, Gassendi, the French Jesuits (collectively) and Father Dinet (in particular), Voetius and the University of Utrecht, Regius, Fermat, Roberval, Revius and other theologians at Leiden - that one might conclude that his claimed preference for a quiet life was a disingenuous mask. 2 Descartes published four books during his lifetime, and wrote at least one other that he had intended to publish. The latter was his first major composition, Le Monde, which he suppressed when he heard about Galileo's condemnation by Rome in 1633. This was followed, in 1637, by Descartes' first book (also written in French), which he tried to publish anonymously by withholding his name from the title page: the Discours de la methode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verit dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique, les meteors, et la geometrie, qui sont des essais de cete methode. Four years later Descartes published the first edition (in Latin) of Meditationes de prima philosophia, in quibus Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstrator, which also included six sets of objections and replies. The Principia philosophiae appeared (in Latin) in Amsterdam in 1644, and was followed five years later by Les Passions de l'Ame (in French). 3 In parallel with these publications, Descartes carried on a very extensive correspondence over a thirty-year period (in both Latin and French), and preserved copies or drafts of his letters with a view to future publication. Given the range and variety of his interests, and the sheer volume of writings, published or otherwise, that have survived from his pen, one may be tempted to engage in a comparative evaluation, as Cottingham does, by selecting one of Descartes' books as his primary contribution to philosophy. Cottingham claims that the Meditations was Descartes''masterpiece' (44), 'the definitive statement of Descartes's philosophy' (45) and the 'definitive statement of his metaphysics' (68). He also describes the Meditations more narrowly as 'his metaphysical masterpiece' (259, 303) and, more broadly, as 'his philosophical masterpiece' (289), and he lists it with the Discours as one of Descartes' two 'masterworks' (280). The Principia offers some competition in this comparative judgement when it is described as 'the canonical presentation of his metaphysical views' (114), while 'the construction of a moral system … was the crowning aim of his philosophy' (231). Having pitched repeatedly for the Meditations as Descartes' primary text, Cottingham claims that its author was 'a devout Catholic' (215), that he was 'a devoutly religious philosopher' (256), and that he could not free himself 'from the influence of the long years of theological study he had dutifully completed at La Flche' (62). Accordingly, the Meditations should be read as 'in essence a work of theodicy' (220); 'what has pride of place in the construction of his philosophical system is … an appeal to God … the nature and existence of the Deity is something that lies at the very heart of his entire philosophical system' (255). Without quite saying so, there are hints here that Descartes was a devout Christian whose primary intellectual contribution was to write a work of metaphysics, in which God is central and in the course of which the author alternates between proving God's existence and contemplating God - the latter a seventeenth-century version of Bonaventure's Journey of the Soul to God. 'Descartes's attraction to a contemplative mode of philosophizing' (305) is reflected, in the Meditations, in 'the language of the soul's coming to rest in adoring contemplation of the light' (306). Cottingham also accepts the overwhelming evidence from Descartes' correspondence that he 'devoted most of his career not to metaphysics but to science' (108), although he quibbles elsewhere with those who adopt the shorthand term 'science' to describe part of what was called 'natural philosophy' in the seventeenth century (282). He also refers to the '(notoriously lame) argument for the essential incorporeality of the thinking self' in one of Descartes' masterworks (60), and he describes the 'strange, seemingly isolated world of his metaphysical meditations' (139), with its 'creaking ontology' (147), when read in isolation from the rest of his work as a natural philosopher. How should we read him, then, in the twenty-first century? A Devout Catholic? That Descartes was a devout Catholic is possible, unlikely and undecidable. He seems not to have studied theology at all while at school at La Flche, although he completed the pre-theology college cycle in the company of Jesuit students who then continued their studies in theology. Descartes consistently attempted to avoid public entanglement with religious and theological controversies, and said so frequently. 4 Given the alignments that prevailed at the time, both in France. (shrink)

The question of the ethical life is arguably one of the most compelling, and urgent, questions of our time. As Peter Singer, among others, has pointed out, almost 10 million children die each year due to poverty, some of whom would not die if the amount of aid that we now offer increases significantly. As Singer has also pointed out, the exploitation of human beings and other animals is a major ethical and practical concern. There can be little reasonable (...) doubt that pain and suffering abound, in the world today, due to many causes such as poverty, disease, environmental degradation and destruction and anthropocentrism among others, just as there can be little reasonable doubt that some of the pain and suffering is preventable. So, what does it mean to live ethically today? Does it mean taking the point of view of the universe, as Sidgwick put it, memorably, rather than a narrow anthropocentric or speciesist view? Does it mean living in accordance with duties or obligations, or in light of recognised virtues, or with the minimisation of pain and suffering primarily in mind? Does it entail a consideration of the interests of other species and a rejection of the principle of the sanctity of human life? Does it mean not eating animals when other healthy alternatives are available, especially when those animals have been treated in ways that are inconsistent with their interests, whatever they may be? Does it mean taking active steps to reduce poverty on our part on a day to day basis? Is ethics exhausted in some sense today? And if we could reach some consensus on these questions, what difference would the ethical life make? Some argue that speciesism and the exploitation of human beings and other animals might diminish; that pain and suffering, especially gratuitous pain and suffering, would decrease, or at the very least, not increase; or that we will become more aware of the limitations of things such as "the traditional ethic of the sanctity of life", as Singer calls it. Some argue that the ethical life is closely related to a life of relationships, reflection and deliberation, all of which deepen our understanding and enrich us personally. Others argue that the ethical life is closely related to our search for a meaningful life - that the ethical life can help us to find meaning in a world in which "meaning", defined broadly, can seem elusive, enigmatic or unsubstantial. These and related issues and questions are explored in this collection, which illustrates the relevance, vitality and dynamism of ethics today. (shrink)

At several points in his later writings Wittgenstein discusses imaginary forms of life and ways of thinking that appear queer or alien from our point of view; concepts so different from ours that those who think from within them seem to be alternatives to us. In this paper I argue that reflection on the notions of difference and possibility in play here shows that imaginary cases of alien conceptual schemes or forms of life such as those (...) considered by Wittgenstein are not all cases of concepts that are entirely unintelligible for us; rather they may represent possible, albeit distant, ways of thinking for us. Such cases serve to aid imaginative reflection on our own case(s). By making us appreciate the possibility of the strange, they help us better to appreciate the arbitrariness of the familiar. I end the paper by considering what the implications of this reading of Wittgenstein’s position might be for Donald Davidson’s rejection of conceptual relativism. (shrink)

The months preceding and following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States have incited furious debate about the authenticity of media discourse in the shaping of reality, including in particular the reporting of refugees from predominantly Muslim regions and their resettlement in Western nations. Much of this debate is rooted in how opposing discourse clans, such as liberal and conservative ideologies, construct a narrative of nationhood around contested views of refugees. Examining mainstream and (...) class='Hi'>alternative media from a critical discourse analytic perspective, the article uncovers how two key narratives about the Syrian refugee crisis emerge when the media attempt to orient their respective audiences to government policy through the discursive formation of the American Dream. Drawing on aspects of historicity, linguistic and semiotic action, and social impact, the analysis of the data reveals a discursive fracas between a humanistic perspective on the crisis that exploits a banal understanding of the American Dream and a more dichotomous narrative that homogenises refugees as a threat to the American way of life. These observations add to the growing body of literature that questions the ways in which the media discursively shapes, and is shaped by, political ideologies. (shrink)

Our world can be a bewildering place. The sense of awe and wonder at the states of affairs in which we find ourselves immersed give rise to philosophical questions. Philosophical reflection is a critical attempt to come to grips with our place in the world and the various problems we encounter in respect to the complexities encountered in everyday life. In the most basic terms, phenomenology is the study of the structures and relations of phenomena. Phenomenology begins from a descriptive (...) analysis of our experiences of the world. It grants precedent to the first person perspective-how phenomena appear to consciousness. There are any number of problems related to the plenitude of kinds of experiences which confront us through the course of our lives, in addition to the structure of consciousness itself. This volume presents a variety of views on a number of the phenomena of our everyday lives, offering positions on such things from the nature of consciousness to the structures of religious or political experiences. Its appeal, however, should not be limited to philosophers alone-given that all persons can relate to the subject matter of the essays. For instance, one author asks, "what is friendship?" The present work may also be understood as a gesture toward bridging the division between the valuable insights of continental and analytic philosophical traditions. The authors include a combination of established academics, such as Jeffrey Wattles-the best-selling author of The Golden Rule-and young scholars from varied philosophical backgrounds. This collection is divided into four sections: (I) Foundational Elements of Experience; (II) The Experiencing Subject: What is it to be a Subject?; (III) Amongst Others: The Social World; and (IV) Social Objects and Institutions. Each section represents a level of experience, from the most basic structures of experience, to the subject's experience of the world and objects in it, to experiences and interactions with others, ending at the results of the codifications of certain social practices and beliefs. The sections treat their respective topics principally, even if they share material with other essays. Our experiences of the life-world, the world of human praxis, contain a multiplicity of elements; the divisions of this work are meant to demarcate various types of phenomena, not to offer any definitive thesis regarding a hierarchy or structure of relations. (shrink)

Starting dialysis at an advanced age is a clinical challenge and an ethical dilemma. The advantages of starting dialysis at “extreme” ages are questionable as high dialysis-related morbidity induces a reflection on the cost- benefit ratio of this demanding and expensive treatment in a person that has a short life expectancy. Where clinical advantages are doubtful, ethical analysis can help us reach decisions and find adapted solutions. Mr. H is a ninety-year-old patient with end-stage kidney disease that is (...) no longer manageable with conservative care, in spite of optimal nutritional management, good blood pressure control and strict clinical and metabolic evaluations; dialysis is the next step, but its morbidity is challenging. The case is analysed according to principlism (beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and respect for autonomy). In the setting of care, dialysis is available without restriction; therefore the principle of justice only partially applied, in the absence of restraints on health-care expenditure. The final decision on whether or not to start dialysis rested with Mr. H (respect for autonomy). However, his choice depended on the balance between beneficence and non-maleficence. The advantages of dialysis in restoring metabolic equilibrium were clear, and the expected negative effects of dialysis were therefore decisive. Mr. H has a contraindication to peritoneal dialysis (severe arthritis impairing self-performance) and felt performing it with nursing help would be intrusive. Post dialysis fatigue, poor tolerance, hypotension and intrusiveness in daily life of haemodialysis patients are closely linked to the classic thrice-weekly, four-hour schedule. A personalized incremental dialysis approach, starting with one session per week, adapting the timing to the patient’s daily life, can limit side effects and “dialysis shock”. An individualized approach to complex decisions such as dialysis start can alter the delicate benefit/side-effect balance, ultimately affecting the patient’s choice, and points to a narrative, tailor-made approach as an alternative to therapeutic nihilism, in very old and fragile patients. (shrink)

This paper discusses Wittgenstein understood the language of the dimensions of the human form of life point of view, we oppose the idea and the text is the interpretation of the relationship between the nature of the argument. Move to reposition Wittgenstein language, means the direct meaning of the moment, rather than explain, and not because of our shortage of facts and work to a standstill. The main thrust of this significance and the fact that a direct interaction between (...) the current text of the practice of continuing involvement, the text was able to express the meaning of the moment between the facts and narrative unity. In other words, Wittgenstein on the rules, customs, or life in the form of reflection, allows us to claim the author intended meaning of the text depends on the point of view, and negative with the intention of the author of a variety of relativism between the interpretation of , the transfer can be prudent to try to speculate Huan room. For example, Stanley Xu fee claim, meaning diverse, according to the interests of our interests, goals and assumptions of the "default" of the "premise" and different. But Wittgenstein's writings, pointed out that the rules in order to grasp the meaning of such person does not involve the "premise" of the argument. Is a form of life on our training the next day, and thus to control of both the immediate and direct facts and meaning. This allows us to re-confirm, indeed, does not rely on the text to explain the fact that there is, in fact and thus understand the text for further explanation for the fact that between the true distinction. Meaning and truth of the "total structure" does not eliminate the practice of interpretation, but will be classified as appropriate Field, is the world we start to go beyond the immediate text directly taken to the open practice. • We will be reading Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park", for example, to influence our thinking about changing the form of text to read way to view this view. This paper argues that a Wittgensteinian understanding of language as an integral dimension of human forms of life speaks against the view that our relationship to texts is interpretive in nature. Wittgenstein's re-orientation to language entails that meaning is immediate rather than interpretive, and that our works don't stop short of the facts. The aim of this paper is to show that the immediate mutuality of meanings and facts carries over to our textual practices so that our texts make available immediate unities of meanings and narrative facts. That is, Wittgenstein's reflections on following rules, customs or forms of life allow us to steer a careful course between the view that a text is determined by the author's intentions and a relativism of variable interpretations that results from denying the relevance of authorial intentions. For example, Stanley Fish holds that meanings vary insofar as they are "predetermined 'by our" presuppositions "-our interests, goals and assumptions. But Wittgenstein's work suggests that following rules, and hence grasping meanings, does not involve something as variable as individual" presuppositions. "Rather , our training into forms of life opens up a second-nature where grasp of both facts and meanings is immediate. This allows us to re-affirm the view that there are textual facts that do not depend on interpretation; that there is a difference between apprehending the facts of a text and going on to provide further interpretations of those facts. The 'co-constitution' of meanings and facts does not foreclose interpretive practices but allocates them to their proper sphere-as practices that we may wish to undertake in order to go beyond the initial immediate openness of the world of a text. We can test this view by considering the way our changing forms of forms affect the way we read a text such as Jane Austen's Mansfied Park. (shrink)

Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses. Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing (...) in people-helping professions, as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a (...) panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Husserl’s theories, which systematise the role of reflection and consciousness, can be used to give an alternative view of organisational evolution as the flow of presence punctuated by absence. This perspective adopts a contrasting approach to that of the poststructuralist. A synthesis of the Identity metaphor with the theory of strategy allows us to contextualise an application of Husserl’s theory of the epoche (the intentional reduction) and link both ontological and epistemic dimensions in a theory of organisation. The (...) firm is seen as acquiring a temporal dimension through the consciousness of strategic policy and its successive images are modelled as analogous with the epoche. This modelling process also links in with the collective belief system of the organisational paradigm, which is represented to the organisation and unfolded extrinsically as a series of images which are the discernible face of Strategic policy. This facilitates a modified social-constructivism which is better able to accommodate the actuality of organisational development than more extreme process-orientated accounts of organisation. A debate is re-opened on these themes which have influenced organisation studies from a philosophical slant. (shrink)

The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they (...) show to their designated audience (without intentionally telling)—and their designated audience recognizes (without rationally inferring)—both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non‐Gricean—sharers of such information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (shrink)

The scientific worldview is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, objective, and independent of time and context. The narrative worldview found in literature, myth and religion, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the concept of “agent”, supported by the theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, allows us to reconcile scientific and narrative perspectives. An agent follows a (...) course of action through its environment with the aim of maximizing its fitness. Navigation along that course combines the strategies of regulation, exploitation and exploration, but needs to cope with often-unforeseen diversions. These can be positive (affordances, opportunities), negative (disturbances, dangers) or neutral (surprises). The resulting sequence of encounters and actions can be conceptualized as an adventure. Thus, the agent appears to play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge and mystery that is very similar to the "monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies all myths and fairy tales according to Campbell [1949]. This narrative dynamics is driven forward in particular by the alternation between prospect (the ability to foresee diversions) and mystery (the possibility of achieving an as yet absent prospect), two aspects of the environment that are particularly attractive to agents. This dynamics generalizes the scientific notion of a deterministic trajectory by introducing a variable “horizon of knowability”: the agent is never fully certain of its further course, but can anticipate depending on its degree of prospect. (shrink)

Everyone, according to W.A. Mathieu, is musical by nature--it goes right along with being human. And if you don't believe it, this book will convince you. In a series of interrelated short essays, Mathieu takes the reader on a journey through ordinary experiences to open our ears to the rich variety of music that surrounds us but that we are trained to ignore; such as the variety of pitches produced by different objects, like glassware, furniture, drums--anything you can (...) tap; or sounds that hover on the border of music, like laughter, the clinking of glasses in a toast, or the unintentional falsetto produced by yawning. Along the way the author teaches aspects of music theory that nonmusicians might ordinarily shy away from. He reveals the way of music to be a profoundly spiritual path--one that is everyone's birthright. (shrink)

_National Jewish Book Award winner __ An internationally recognized scholar and theologian shares a Jewish mysticism for our times in this " humane, accessible " book (_Publishers Weekly_, Starred Review)__ “Green challenges traditional notions of God, Israel, and Torah, offering a radically new understanding and stimulating the reader to join him in a journey of discovery.”—Daniel Matt, Graduate Theological Union_ Judaism, one of the world’s great spiritual traditions, is not addressed to Jews alone. In this masterful book, winner of the (...) 2020 National Jewish Book Award in the Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Practice category, Arthur Green calls out to seekers of all sorts, offering a universal response to the eternal human questions of who we are, why we exist, where we are going, and how to live. Drawing on over half a century as a Jewish seeker and teacher, he shows us a Judaism that cultivates the life of the spirit, that inspires an inward journey leading precisely toward self-transcendence, to an awareness of the universal Self in whose presence we exist. As a neo-hasidic seeker, he is both devotional and boldly questioning in his understanding of God and tradition. Engaging with the mystical sources, he translates the insights of the Hasidic masters into a new religious language accessible to all those eager to build an inner life and a human society that treasures the divine spark in each person and throughout Creation. (shrink)

Atheists are frequently demonized as arrogant intellectuals, antagonistic to religion, devoid of moral sentiments, advocates of an "anything goes" lifestyle. Now, in this revealing volume, nineteen leading philosophers open a window on the inner life of atheism, shattering these common stereotypes as they reveal how they came to turn away from religious belief. These highly engaging personal essays capture the marvelous diversity to be found among atheists, providing a portrait that will surprise most readers. Many of the authors, for (...) example, express great affection for particular religious traditions, even as they explain why they cannot, in good conscience, embrace them. None of the contributors dismiss religious belief as stupid or primitive, and several even express regret that they cannot, or can no longer, believe. Perhaps more important, in these reflective pieces, they offer fresh insight into some of the oldest and most difficult problems facing the human mind and spirit. For instance, if God is dead, is everything permitted? Philosophers without Gods demonstrates convincingly, with arguments that date back to Plato, that morality is independent of the existence of God. Indeed, every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong. Moreover, they contend that secular life can provide rewards as great and as rich as religious life. A naturalistic understanding of the human condition presents a set of challenges--to pursue our goals without illusions, to act morally without hope of reward--challenges that can impart a lasting value to finite and fragile human lives. Collectively, these essays highlight the richness of atheistic belief--not only as a valid alternative to religion, but as a profoundly fulfilling and moral way of life. "This Atheists R Us compilation differs markedly in tone from Hitchens and Dawkins. Excellent fare for Christian small groups whose members are genuinely interested in the arguments raised by atheists." --Christianity Today "Readable, personal, and provocative.... Contrary to the popular image, atheism isn't all rebellious trumpets and defiant drums.... Here we have all the varieties of unreligious experience, a full symphony of unbelief." --Free Inquiry "Compelling and sophisticated arguments that religious people ought to confront." --Tikkun. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Benjamin ButtonHenry Alexander (bio)IBenjamin Button was born at the age of seventy and as the years accumulated, grew younger physically. There are in his life three separate lines or threads. His chronological age begins in September of 1860 and terminated seventy years later. His "bodily age" consists of those stages of physical changes and of the different ways that he looked to others and to himself. (...) In 1860, he was an old man; his hair was sparse, scraggly, and nearly white; he had "a long smoke-colored beard"; his eyes were faded, watery, and tired; his teeth were ancient; his skin wrinkled, his voice had a cracked quaver and he had an aged stoop, even though he was five feet eight inches tall. From that time on, he gradually and steadily lost these characteristics of old age and became younger looking both to others and to himself until that time in 1930 when, an infant in his white crib, everything "faded out altogether from his mind." Finally, the third thread in Button's life consists of various psychological stages, attitudes, and feelings: his querulousness, his compliancy, his inquisitiveness, his assertiveness, his love for his wife, his business ability, his generosity, his enthusiasm for pleasure, his discontent with home life, his love of military activity and excitement, his delight in the company [End Page 1] of young women, the pleasure he took in his youthful appearance, his ambition to succeed at Harvard, the humiliations he suffered, his childish cheerfulness. These three threads in Benjamin Button's life—his chronological age, his bodily age, and his psychological age are seldom congruent and frequently unharmoniously interwoven.There are times when in ordinary life we may distinguish one or another of these threads out of a person's life. We may on occasion comment that someone looks so much older than she is where physical hardship, unusual sickness, or emotional pressures have left their scars. We may remark that another is so very young for her age, where, for example, inexperience, callousness, naivete show themselves in a person whose age would not lead us to expect such traits. We may remark upon how well one has kept oneself in shape when one's physique, muscle tone, and endurance are those of a decidedly younger person. Sometimes, certain traits of character—crabbiness, bossiness, old womanishness, crankiness, arbitrariness—associated with the elderly, may unexpectedly emerge in young people. Sometimes, traits perhaps conventionally associated with youth may crop up at a later stage of life, for example, carelessness, daredeviltry, sensuality, self-absorption, etc. The theme comes out in cases where we are surprised or shocked by the discrepancies between age and appearance or by changes in appearance or by psychological shifts which strike one as dissonant with one's own or another's age. There must be numerous variations on such discrepancies and they crop up from time to time in the ordinary course of things.But Benjamin Button's life was not ordinary. Those three threads of a person's life which may on occasion be singled out or contrasted are in his case systematically independent of one another. His years bear little relation to his physical age. His psychological states reflect little, if anything, of his years. Except for his middle years (between thirty-five and forty, say), there was little congruence between his chronological age, on the one hand, and his physical appearance or his psychological life, on the other.This dissonance between physical and chronological age has its ironical twists. For instance, when Benjamin was about twenty (in years), he met Hildegarde Moncrief (to whom he was later married). During their first meeting, she mistook him for his father's brother and she told Benjamin that fifty is "the mellow age" and that she "loves fifty." Of course, he appears to be a man of fifty, but he has forgotten how he appears [End Page 2] to others. He even "longed passionately to be fifty" (p. 73).1 The irony is that to Hildegarde and to everyone else, he was fifty.One anomaly that runs through much of Benjamin Button's life is his unawareness as to how... (shrink)

More and more cities develop urban food strategies to guide their efforts and practices towards more sustainable food systems. An emerging theme shaping these food policy endeavours, especially prominent in North and South America, concerns the enhancement of social justice within food systems. To operationalise this theme in a European urban food governance context we adopt Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice: economic redistribution, cultural recognition and political representation. In this paper, we discuss the findings of an exploratory document analysis (...) of the social justice-oriented ambitions, motivations, current practices and policy trajectories articulated in sixteen European UFSs. We reflect on the food-related resource allocations, value patterns and decision rules these cities propose to alter and the target groups they propose to support, empower or include. Overall, we find that UFSs make little explicit reference to social justice and justice-oriented food concepts, such as food security, food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty. Nevertheless, the identified resources, services and target groups indicate that the three dimensions of Fraser are at the heart of many of the measures described. We argue that implicit, fragmentary and unspecified adoption of social justice in European UFSs is problematic, as it may hold back public consciousness, debate and collective action regarding food system inequalities and may be easily disregarded in policy budgeting, implementation and evaluation trajectories. As a path forward, we present our plans for the RE-ADJUSTool that would enable UFS stakeholders to reflect on how their UFS can incorporate social justice and who to involve in this pursuit. (shrink)

On the view that Nicholas Adams advocates in ‘Alternatives to Moral Common Ground’, ethics is complicit in undermining the commitments that constitute our moral lives, because by forcing us to articulate those commitments they lose their hold on us. In this paper I take Adams’ views as a starting point to explore the idea that ethics might be complicit in undermining our moral lives. Aiming to shed light on the relation between reflection and commitment, I will do (...) two things. First, I try to explain why ethics, as a reflective enterprise, undermines the unspoken hold our commitments have on us. Second, I will explore the idea that reflection is destructive in the sense that it falsifies our pre-reflective commitments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Focusing on The Experience:Exploring Alternative Paths for ResearchEleanor Stubley, Anneli Arho, Päivi Järviö, and Tuomas MaliWriting and speaking are essential means of understanding, studying, and sharing music in the Western art music tradition. As a group of researchers, our story begins with the gap that seemingly exists between theoretical definitions or accounts of music and our experience of it as music makers—that is to say as (...) composers, performers, conductors, and teachers. Poignantly sensitive to the ways in which our musical experience and knowledge is embodied, we found ourselves one day four years ago sitting around an electrically-charged dinner table where ideas, questions, and the joy of having found someone like-minded seemed to be the main entrée. Since then, we have been working as a group, [End Page 39] experimenting with different ways of collaborating, using writing as a means of exploring and sharing our experiences across long distances. At first, the goal was simply to find a common ground, a platform for developing an extended dialogue that would draw on our unique backgrounds and divergent ways of our thinking. But, in the absence of a common language, both linguistic and theoretical, there were problems. We had, for example, to come to understand what each of us meant by the word experience and the role it could play as the ground of research, not as a series of defining moments or events but as the largely invisible flow of human life. We also had to deal with the inter-wovenness of mind and body, individual, and culture, not to mention our individual musical sensitivity and artistry. Confronted by these larger issues, our differences soon became the means to explore gaps or openings that could be entered to reveal the continuous becoming of music and language, the places where they intersect and diverge, and our own being in relationship to both.The papers presented in this symposium were the outgrowth of our dialogue during the summer of 2004. Each of us worked independently, yet each of us was also aware of the direction, the themes, and the ways of the others. The result is kaleidoscopic, each author starting from a different place, but seemingly working from the same palette of colors.Eleanor Stubley writes as a philosopher and conductor. Her work here is part of a larger on-going study that examines the way in which the body fills both language and our experience of music, with a particular focus on the way in which an interest in the body renews our understanding of music, language, and thought. Through a series of inter-connecting meditations inspired by the letter A, she challenges the practice of grounding research and practice in definitions of music as "organized sound." Her writing makes visible the habitual of a variety of educational practices, asking us to think anew about instructional technologies such as the alphabet, scale, and taxonomies of musical form, and to find in what we have traditionally thought of as practices of the mind, the omnipresence of the body. It also offers a new perspective on the hand, not as a tool or muscle to be trained as a skill, but as the very ground from which to develop an aesthetics of music that combines and recognizes the multiple ways in which we know and encounter music, through sight, sound, movement, and touch.Anneli Arho writes as a composer, educator, and philosopher/researcher. She explores the power of working from within the factical situation of a musician making music, focusing in particular on the embodiedness of music, questions of meaningfulness, and the ways in which phenomenological reflection on her own musical experiences has allowed her to move beyond traditional research discourses. Her writing asks us as educators to re-think curricular definitions of [End Page 40] composition, not simply as a collection of skills to be acquired or languages to be learned, but rather as embodied ways of living in and through sound. Using notation as an example, she argues that composing generates its own practical and existential questions distinct from those of listener, performer, and researcher, and which can never be totally shared with others... (shrink)