This essay argues that pre-health humanities programs should focus on intensive research practice for baccalaureate students and provides three guiding principles for implementing it. Although the interdisciplinary nature of health humanities permits baccalaureate students to use research methods from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, pre-health humanities coursework tends to force students to adopt only one of many disciplinary identities. Alternatively, an intensive research approach invites students to critically select and combine methods from multiple disciplines to ask and answer (...) questions about health problems more innovatively. Using the authors’ experiences with implementing health humanities baccalaureate research initiatives at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the authors contend that pre-health humanities programs should teach and study multiple disciplinary research methods and their values; examine how health humanities research might transfer across disciplines; and focus on mentoring opportunities for funding, presenting, and publishing research. These recommendations have the potential to create unprecedented research experiences for baccalaureate students as they prepare to enter careers within and beyond the allied health professions. (shrink)

Focuses on the encounters of feminist and queer theories, on the ways in which basic terms such as - sex, gender, and sexuality change meaning as they move from one body of theory to another. This book includes essays by Judith Butler, Evelynn Hammonds, Biddy Martin, Kim Michasiw, Carole-Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Weed.

In this paper I will present the accounts of two influential contemporary moral philosophers, Grace Clement and Amartya Sen, to argue for the social context and inter-related nature of autonomy. In fact, there can be no autonomy for anyone without a loving and caring social environment that actively promotes independent thinking and capacity empowerment among people. This social dimension of autonomy has often been ignored by traditional theorists, who have considered autonomy to be an individual accomplishment that is a function (...) of an individual's will power, intellectual ability, or self-discipline and virtue. (shrink)

Abstract:Although Angelina Weld Grimké's 1916 play, Rachel, has historically been read as a sentimental, anti-lynching drama, such classifications might limit the play's anarchic potential. Instead of viewing the characters as responding to anti-Black violence, this paper proposes reframing the play's discussion within a context of Black maternity and its necessary engagement with the Afro-pessimist concept of social death. Such reorientation suggests that Rachel works within the theater's very materiality in order to explore the effects of anti-Blackness on Black life. Specifically, (...) this paper argues that the play's performances of abiological Black maternity—and, particularly, the titular character's performances—fugitively evade the natal alienation of social death. Furthermore, such performances link past, present, and future stage productions as well as character representations, recreating kinship formations within Black social life to stage spatio-temporal disruptions on the equation of Blackness as social death. In this way, Rachel offers modern scholars an understanding of how older works might yet be read in light of the more recent theoretical work of radical Black feminist and Afro-pessimist scholars. (shrink)

This paper argues for an understanding of emotion based upon Merleau-Ponty's conceptions of embodiment and passivity. Through a critical assessment of cognitive theories of emotion, and in particular Solomon's theory, it argues (1) that there is a sense in which emotions may be judgments, so long as we understand such judgments as bodily enactments of meaning, but (2) that even understood in this way, the notion of judgment (or construal) can only account for a subset of emotions which I call (...) "emotional clichés," and not for authentic passions. In contrast with Solomon's account which conceives the subject as constituting, this account of emotion requires us to understand subjectivity as moved by meanings in the world, and as sometimes, in an authentic passion, dispossessed by those meanings. (shrink)

“To consent to love or be loved,” said Merleau-Ponty, “is to consent also to influence someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other.” This essay explicates that idea through a meditation on intimacy. I propose, first, that, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, we are always transgressing into each other’s experience, whether we are strangers or familiars; I call this “ontological intimacy.” Concrete experiences of intimacy are based upon this ontological intimacy, and can take place at two levels: (...) (1) at-this-moment (such that we can experience intimacy even with strangers, by sharing a momentary but extra-ordinary mutual recognition) and (2) in shared interpersonal institutions, or habitual, enduring, and co-enacted visions of who we are, how to live, and what matters. Through particular examples of dynamics within these layers of intimacy (drawing upon work by Berne and by Russon), I claim that we are always, inevitably, imposing an “unfreedom” upon our intimate others. Freedom, then, can only develop from within and by virtue of this “unfreedom.” Thus, what distinguishes empowering or emancipating relationships from oppressive ones is not the removal of transgressive normative social forces; it is rather the particular character of those transgressive forces. Some transgressions upon others’ experience—some forms of “unfreedom”—will tend to promote freedom; others will tend to hinder it. This amounts to a call for promoting agency and freedom not only through critical analysis of public institutions, practices and discourses, but also through critical insight into and transformation of our most private and intimate relationships. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose that human development is the emergence of something significantly new out of a past situation that does not hold that novel achievement as a determinate potential except retrospectively. Development, in other words, might best be understood as a “realization” in the sense of a making-real of some new form of being that had no prior place in reality, that was not programmed in advance, but that once realized can have its roots traced back to determinate (...) conditions and potentials in its own past. This amounts to a rethinking of the nature of developmental potential as retrospectively determined. But it also involves a reconception of the locus of such potential: I argue that developmental potential must be understood as located in the human-organism-in-its-situation, rather than simply in the human organism. I take my bearings from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and I make my case by elucidating three different forms of human development described by Merleau-Ponty: intellectual realizations of insight; the realization of a new perceptual-motor skill; and a child’s realization of a new lived way of making sense of the interpersonal world. (shrink)

Against recent claims that infants begin with a sense of themselves as distinct selves, I propose that the infant's initial sense of self is still indeterminate and ambiguous, and is only progressively consolidated, beginning with embodied perceptions of others. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Hegel's notion of mutual recognition, and with reference to empirical studies in developmental psychology, I argue that perceiving other persons is significantly different from perceiving inanimate things. Until sufficient motor capacities have developed for exploring (...) and perceptually disambiguating inanimate things, it is only in perceiving others who recognize her that the infant is able to realize herself as a self. As the physiological and behavioural evidence suggests, whereas inanimate things initially captivate and dispossess the young infant, other people return her to herself. This paper lends support to the ideas that humans are ontologically social beings, and that selfhood is socially conditioned rather than given with consciousness. (shrink)

This study identified a range of pedagogies developed to promote global citizenship within a university Latin American dance unit. It implemented changes to teaching and learning approaches in the...

This book proposes a new, rationally-justified, evidence-based theory concerning values. It discusses practical applications of these universally-applicable values, especially to morality, society, education and upbringing. In doing so, it discusses sexism, sexuality, racism, freedom, politics, law, animal rights, environmental ethics, health-care, war, economics, psychology, science, literature, religion, and much more.

This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole as well as the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such, but is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and (...) that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself. Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy. This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty. Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels. (shrink)

Emotion is usually conceived as playing a relatively external role in education: either it is raw material reshaped by rational practices, or it merely motivates intellectual reasoning. Drawing upon the philosophy of Hegel and Plato’s Socrates, I argue, however, that education is a process of existential transformation and that emotion plays an essential, internal role therein. Through an analysis of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic, I argue that emotions have their own logic and that an individual can be propelled to (...) increasingly rational emotional stances by the demands of the emotional situationitself, even in the absence of any intellectual reasoning or rational training. Appealing also to the structure and content of Socrates’ conversations, I argue that intellectual reasoning can lead to self-overcoming only insofar as it involves a particular emotional orientation towards the emotional challenges of genuine learning, that is, insofar as it is “conscientious reasoning.”. (shrink)

This is a French abstract, published in _Chiasmi_, describing an English-language article entitled "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be” .".

This is an Italian abstract, published in _Chiasmi, describing an English-language article published under the title "Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of “Letting Others Be”.".

Though singularity of the self can be understood in different ways, this essay argues that it ought ultimately to be understood temporally, in terms of becoming and the establishment of what Merleau-Ponty calls «personal institutions». Anorexia is used as a case study: anorexics can oscillate between feeling themselves expressed in their anorexic desires, and feeling themselves expressed in their opposition to anorexic desires. I argue, drawing upon Laing’s understanding of psychopathology, that neither is their «true singular self» but that singularity (...) ultimately realizes itself in the process of this oscillation. Guided by Merleau-Ponty’s concept of «institution», I propose that oscillations result from lived efforts to resolve indeterminately felt existential problems; that the repetitions and «binary rhythm» involved in such oscillations are endemic to personal becoming; and that what enables success rather than failure in such becoming singular are relations with others who act in recognition of this process. (shrink)

The core insight of Dr. Angelica Tratter’s essay, as I see it, is that we can approach the question of a person’s ways of being in the world in an ‘ontological’ rather than ‘ontical’ manner. Tratter communicates this insight primarily through a rehabilitation of Ludwig Binswanger’s notion of ‘world-design.’ In what follows, I wish both to affirm Tratter’s insight, and also, through my own elaboration of it, to propose some possible divergences of thought. As Tratter notes, Heidegger was unhappy with (...) Binswanger’s appropriation of his thought. Binswanger, Heidegger claims, mistakenly begins with the subject–object divide, and understands “being in the world” as bridging this divide ;.. (shrink)

This is a French abstract for an English-language article, published as "Life is Inherently Expressive: A Merleau-Pontian response to Darwin's _The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals_".

In this work, Mercedes Rubio argues that St. Thomas Aquinas’s In I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3 is his final reading of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed on the topic of the knowledge of God. According to Rubio, this text reveals the influence of the Guide on Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine attributes, his understanding of the role of faith and his Five Ways.Rubio’s central thesis is most likely to be met with skepticism, since many scholars who (...) work on both Aquinas and Maimonides readily acknowledge Maimonides’ influence on the development of a number of Aquinas’s ideas, including the Five Ways. With respect to her central thesis, then, Rubio painstakingly reconstructs the history of the Quaestio, arguing that it was written around 1266, roughly fourteen years after the original Commentary was composed, and then inserted back in the Commentary on the Sentences. Rubio argues further that Aquinas wrote the Quaestio in order to respond to allegations against the writings of Peter of Tarantasia to the effect that. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on FriendshipJennifer Hart WeedDaniel Schwartz. Aquinas on Friendship. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii + 189. Cloth, $55.00.In the introduction to Aquinas on Friendship, Daniel Schwartz admits that his treatment of Aquinas’s theory of friendship is not exhaustive. His central argument is that Aquinas reworks several elements of Aristotle’s view of friendship in accordance with his Christian commitment to the ideal of friendship with God (...) and to the theological virtue of charity (viii). Schwartz develops this argument through a detailed description of some of the elements of Aquinas’s theory, most notably the concept of concordia, along with responses to the challenges posed by those elements, drawn from such luminaries as John Duns Scotus, Cicero, and St. Paul.According to Schwartz, Aquinas identifies three acts of friendship: concordia, benevolentia, and beneficentia. While he claims that these three acts represent the larger themes of the volume, its content and subject index suggest otherwise. Chapters two through four address the nature of concordia and the possible impediments to it, such as heresy, disparity of circumstances, and pride. Missing, however, are similarly detailed treatments of benevolentia and beneficentia. Chapters five and six describe the importance of hope for friendship and the relationship between friendship and justice. More surprisingly, chapter seven considers the satisfaction account of justice (as in the doctrine of the Atonement) and how this might affect Aquinas’s understanding of the restoration of friendship.According to Schwartz, “Faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues, are conceived of by Aquinas as stages in a process reaching its fulfillment in friendship with God” (14). Despite this admission and its importance for Aquinas’s theory of friendship, the link between friendship and the theological virtues is not discussed at length. In fact, the theological virtue of faith is not given much attention at all, although Schwartz references sacramental satisfaction and Christ’s atonement. Given Schwartz’s central argument, one would expect him to focus more on the three theological virtues, rather than concordia, which emerges as the theme of the volume. Additionally, there is an abrupt shift from philosophical and political concerns to theology in subsequent chapters, which are structured around the concepts of hope, satisfaction, and charity.Schwartz also includes more than one puzzling theological claim. For example, in reference to the theological virtues, he writes, “Human beings, however, must make themselves worthy of these goods in the eyes of God. For Aquinas, the process leading to friendship with God begins with the pursuit of these spiritual goods” (14). Those familiar with Aquinas’s commitment to the doctrine of original sin and his repudiation of Pelagianism will wonder how such a characterization of Aquinas’s theology is possible. Again, Schwartz also claims, regarding the Atonement, that “merit and satisfaction is made by voluntary actions. Yet, individual participation in Christ’s Passion is not always voluntary—infant baptism being a case in point” (159). Perhaps it is theological quibbling to point out that Aquinas condemns the forced conversions of unbelievers, or that he believes infants whose parents willingly bring them forward for baptism are not baptized involuntarily (Summa theologiae III.68.9 ad. 1). But the book invites such quibbles.There is also no discussion of the difference between Aristotle and Aquinas on friendship, particularly on the possibility of friendship between humans and God. Certainly, Aquinas’s [End Page 136] willingness to accept this possibility is innovative. But Schwartz simply offers Aquinas’s account of how friendship between humans and God is possible and then defends Aquinas from various objections (45–46). A more detailed comparison between the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas is found on the topic of concordia.In summary, Schwartz’s aim is ambitious for a volume of less than two hundred pages, but there is much to enjoy in the book. There is an interesting discussion of Aquinas’s endorsement of Seneca rather than Aristotle on gratitude and ingratitude in his brief discussion of beneficentia (16–19), and Schwartz’s treatment of the tension among justice, friendship, and charity is also illuminating. Finally, Schwartz is to be commended for his extensive use of almost the entire corpus of... (shrink)

What is the role of language in social interaction? What does language bring to social encounters? We argue that language can be conceived of as a tool for interacting minds, enabling especially effective and flexible forms of social coordination, perspective-taking and joint action. In a review of evidence from a broad range of disciplines, we pursue elaborations of the language-as-a-tool metaphor, exploring four ways in which language is employed in facilitation of social interaction. We argue that language dramatically extends the (...) possibility-space for interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action plans, and mediates the cultural shaping of interacting minds. (shrink)

Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in the box at the top right corner of the article..

Linguistic repetitions in children are conceptualized as negative in children with autism – echolalia, without communicative purpose – and positive in typically developing (TD) children – linguistic alignment involved in shared engagement, common ground and language acquisition. To investigate this apparent contradiction we analyzed spontaneous speech in 67 parent–child dyads from a longitudinal corpus (30 minutes of play activities at 6 visits over 2 years). We included 32 children with autism and 35 linguistically matched TD children (mean age at recruitment (...) 32.76 and 20.27 months). We found a small number of exact repetitions in both groups (roughly 1% of utterances across visits), which increased over time in children with autism and decreased in the TD group. Partial repetitions were much more frequent: children reused caregivers' words at high rates regardless of diagnostic group (24% of utterances at first visit), and this increased in frequency (but not level) over time, faster for TD children (at final visit: 33% for autism, 40% for TD). The same happened for partial repetition of syntax and semantic alignment. However, chance alignment (as measured by surrogate pairs) also increased and findings for developmental changes were reliable only for syntactic and semantic alignment. Children with richer linguistic abilities also displayed a higher tendency to partially re–use their caregivers' language (alignment rates and semantic alignment). This highlights that all children commonly re–used the words, syntax, and topics of their caregivers, albeit with some quantitative differences, and that most repetition was at least potentially productive, with repeated language being re–contextualized and integrated with non–repeated language. The salience of echolalia in ASD might be partially explained by slight differences in frequency, amplified by lower semantic alignment, persistence over time, and expectations of echolalia. More in–depth qualitative and quantitative analyses of how repetitions are used and received in context are needed. (shrink)

The precautionary principle brings a special challenge to the practice of evidence-based public health decision-making, suggesting changes in the interpretative methods of public health used to identify causes of disease. In this paper, precautionary changes to these methods are examined: including discounting contrary evidence, reducing the number of causal criteria, weakening the rules of evidence assigned to the criteria, and altering thresholds for statistical significance. All such changes reflect the precautionary goal of earlier primary preventive intervention, i.e. acting on insufficient (...) evidence, the least amount, or minimum level, of evidence for causation. Evaluating the impact of these changes will be difficult without a careful study of how well the current methods of causal inference work, their theoretical foundations, and the ethical implications of their applications. That research program will be most productive if it is jointly developed by public health professionals trained in the ethics and philosophy and by bioethicists and philosophers trained in the theories, methods, and practice of public health. (shrink)

Epidemiology is a core science of public health, focusing on research related to the distribution and determinants of both positive and adverse health states and events and on application of knowledge gained to improve public health. The American College of Epidemiology (ACE) is a professional organization devoted to the professional practice of epidemiology. As part of that commitment, and in response to concerns for more explicit attention to core values and duties of epidemiologists in light of emerging issues and increased (...) scrutiny of epidemiology, the College developed, adopted, and published a set of Ethics Guidelines. The structure of the ACE ethics guidelines is in four parts: (1) a brief statement of core values and duties of epidemiologists, coupled with the virtues important to professional practice; (2) concise statements of key duties and obligations; (3) exposition of the duties and obligations with more applications; and (4) a brief summary and conclusion. The Guidelines have been published on the ACE website and in the official College journal Annals of Epidemiology. The guidelines contain (and maintain) core elements that define the discipline of epidemiology and its fundamental duties, but they are also intended to be dynamic and evolving, responsive to a changing professional and social environment. (shrink)

In recounting some of the key sociological insights offered by over 30 years of research on emotion management, or emotion regulation, we orient our discussion around sociological answers to the following questions: What is emotion management? How does emotion management occur? Why does it occur? And what are its consequences or benefits? In this review, we argue that emotion and its management are profoundly social. Through daily interactions with others, individuals learn to differentiate which emotions are appropriate when, as well (...) as the most effective ways to bring their feelings in line with culturally agreed-upon emotion norms. Emotion management is also functional, not only for the individuals who perform it, but also for the dyads, groups, institutions, and societies in which they are embedded. The social processes through which individuals learn to display culturally appropriate emotions have important implications on many levels, from interpersonal interactions to the development of social movements. (shrink)

In the shadowy world between philosophy of science and ethics lie the paired concepts of underdetermination and incommensurability. Typically, scientific evidence underdetermines the hypotheses tested in research studies, providing neither proof nor disproof. As a result, scientists must judge the weight of the evidence, and in doing so, bring scientific and extrascientific values to bear in their approaches to assessing and interpreting the evidence. When different scientists employ very different values, their views are said to be incommensurable. Less prominent differences (...) represent partial incommensurabilities. The definitions and analyses provided by McMullin and by Veatch and Stempsey lay the foundation for the description of partial incommensurabilities in the current practice of assessing and interpreting epidemiologic evidence. This practice is called "causal inference" and is undertaken for the purpose of making causal conclusions and public health recommendations from population-based studies of exposures and diseases. Following the work of Bayley and Longino, several suggestions are examined for dealing with the partial incommensurabilities found in the general practice of causal inference in contemporary epidemiology. Two specific examples illustrate these ideas: studies on the relationship between induced abortion and breast cancer and those on the relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast cancer. (shrink)

Against the tide of philosophers committed to this view this book presents a naturalistic view of human thinking, arguing that computers are merely...

In this work, Mercedes Rubio argues that St. Thomas Aquinas’s In I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3 is his final reading of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed on the topic of the knowledge of God. According to Rubio, this text reveals the influence of the Guide on Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine attributes, his understanding of the role of faith and his Five Ways.Rubio’s central thesis is most likely to be met with skepticism, since many scholars who (...) work on both Aquinas and Maimonides readily acknowledge Maimonides’ influence on the development of a number of Aquinas’s ideas, including the Five Ways. With respect to her central thesis, then, Rubio painstakingly reconstructs the history of the Quaestio, arguing that it was written around 1266, roughly fourteen years after the original Commentary was composed, and then inserted back in the Commentary on the Sentences. Rubio argues further that Aquinas wrote the Quaestio in order to respond to allegations against the writings of Peter of Tarantasia to the effect that. (shrink)

The so-called "problem of religious language" is a philosophical problem generated by some of the doctrines of classical theism. For example, if one conceives of God as infinite, then it would seem that words used to describe finite creatures might not adequately describe him. The ambiguity in meaning with respect to the divine names is the "problem of religious language" or the "problem of naming God." ;There are three possible solutions to the problem of naming God: the equivocal approach, the (...) analogical approach, and the univocal approach. The equivocal view argues that words used with respect to God have a different meaning than the same words used with respect to creatures. After outlining Maimonides' view of equivocity, I argue that his approach limits speech about God to divine actions and negations. Given the richness of the monotheistic traditions and their assumption that truths about God can be communicated about God beyond the divine actions, this position seems unlikely. ;The univocal view argues that words used with respect to God are used in the same sense as when they are applied to creatures. After outlining William Alston's view of univocity, I argue that Alston's approach is to be rejected because it cannot accommodate the differences between God and human beings with respect to perfection. Alston's commitment to the functional interpretation of mental concepts permits him to predicate terms of God and of human beings that he alleges to be "partially univocal." I argue that on the basis of functionalism, only complete univocity could exist between God and human beings and that Alston, himself, rejects complete univocity between God and human beings on the basis of divine perfection. ;The analogical view argues that words used with respect to God signify the same thing as words used with respect to creatures, but in a different mode. I argue that the analogical approach of Thomas Aquinas provides the best means of naming God within the context of classical theism and that it does not fall prey to those problems faced by the equivocal and the univocal views. (shrink)

In the introduction to Aquinas on Friendship, Daniel Schwartz admits that his treatment of Aquinas’s theory of friendship is not exhaustive. His central argument is that Aquinas reworks several elements of Aristotle’s view of friendship in accordance with his Christian commitment to the ideal of friendship with God and to the theological virtue of charity . Schwartz develops this argument through a detailed description of some of the elements of Aquinas’s theory, most notably the concept of concordia, along with responses (...) to the challenges posed by those elements, drawn from such luminaries as John Duns Scotus, Cicero, and St. Paul.According to Schwartz, Aquinas identifies three acts of friendship: concordia, benevolentia, and beneficentia. While he claims that these three acts represent the larger themes of the volume, its content and subject index suggest otherwise. Chapters two through four address the nature of concordia and the possible impediments to it, such as heresy, disparity of. (shrink)

'24 and Philosophy' is a book you just can't do without. It's all here, folks: the reason Presidents trust him; how Jack cuts through the lies and ambiguities; why he puts his life on the line for others; and how he knows which knee cap to blow out to get that all-important next lead. With the help of twenty "'24' crazed" philosophers, you'll figure out what makes this guy tick, and much much more. A witty, but philosophical exploration of the (...) popular television series '24', now in its sixth season Addresses pressing ethical issues relating to torture, terrorism and warfare Raises fascinating questions about knowledge, loyalty, and suspicion Explores in-depth the character and behaviour of Jack Bauer Written by philosophers who are all serious fans of the show. (shrink)