Bei geriatrischen, oral ernährten Patienten mit Dysphagie entstehen insbesondere bei der Kostformanpassung ethische Konflikte. Die Abwägung zwischen Aspirationsrisiko und Lebensqualität fällt oft zugunsten der Fürsorge – also einer Risikominimierung – aus, Autonomie und das Nicht-Schadens-Prinzip werden in den Entscheidungen weniger beachtet.Ziel dieser Studie war die Erfassung relevanter Aspekte aus der Patienten- und Angehörigenperspektive bezüglich der Abwägungen zwischen Aspirationsrisiko und Lebensqualität. Zudem wurde die Erprobung des im Rahmen der Studie entwickelten Interviewleitfadens und die Entwicklung von Hypothesen für weiterführende Studien angestrebt. Acht (...) geriatrische Patienten mit leicht- bis schwergradiger Dysphagie und mindestens einer Woche stark adaptierter Kost sowie vier Angehörige wurden in halbstandardisierten, problemzentrierten Interviews befragt. Die Auswertung erfolgte auf Basis der qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse nach Mayring. Die problemzentrierten Interviews und der Interviewleitfaden erwiesen sich als geeignetes Instrument, das individuelle Erleben der Situation differenziert zu erfassen. Es konnte ein breit gefächertes Spektrum möglicher Hintergründe zu Risiko-Lebensqualitäts-Gewichtungen und ethischen Konfliktsituationen gefunden werden, die im Rahmen der Kostformadaption eine Rolle spielen. Diese wurden in drei Hauptkategorien zusammengefasst: Aspekte für eine höhere Risikotoleranz, Aspekte für eine niedrigere Risikotoleranz, Aspekte für die Instabilität von Entscheidungen.Die gewonnenen Kategorien geben einen ersten Überblick über die komplexen Einflüsse auf Risiko-Lebensqualitäts-Abwägungen oral ernährter, alter Menschen mit Dysphagie. Die Ergebnisse können ein Ausgangspunkt für weiterführende Studien mit einer größeren Fallzahl bilden und auf dieser Basis zur Entwicklung eines Orientierungsrahmens für Kostformentscheidungen in der geriatrischen Dysphagietherapie beitragen. (shrink)

El confinamiento 2020 – 21 obligó a la humanidad a adaptarse al nuevo modo de vida y creación de nuevos escenarios con tecnologías que transformaron espacios físicos y tradicionales de enseñanza, abruptamente reemplazados por escenarios virtuales. Este estudio transversal, exploratorio y descriptivo, realizado aplicando formularios y entrevistas semiestructuradas a estudiantes y docentes de Diseño UCTemuco; recogió la percepción e implementación de la docencia a distancia realizada y evaluó el retorno presencial. Levantamos fortalezas, dificultades y oportunidades en esta nueva forma de (...) enseñanza que se nos desafía interpelándonos a raíz de aprendizajes adquiridos, emergentes metodologías, plataformas educativas y políticas de internacionalización institucionales. (shrink)

Se intenta explicar la conexión entre la existencia y el propósito de la Crítica de la razón pura (fundamentar la metafísica). Para ello se tratan algunos aspectos básicos de la comprensión kantiana del conocimiento humano, así como de la concepción kantiana de la existencia objetiva. Los análisis r..

Este ensayo interpreta KrV A592-602/B620-630 no sólo como la refutación al argumento ontológico, sino como el lugar donde Kant encara una cuestión más radical: cómo puede el entendimiento humano, considerado desde un punto de vista lógico-general, predicar la existencia. Esta primera parte analiza específicamente la refutación del argumento ontológico. Este análisis concluirá que se requiere de una facultad diferente del entendimiento para conocer lo existente como tal.

Este ensayo interpreta KrV A592-602/B620-630 no sólo como la refutación al argumento ontológico, sino como el lugar donde Kant encara una cuestión más radical: cómo puede el entendimiento humano, considerado desde un punto de vista lógico-general, predicar la existencia. Esta primera parte analiza específicamente la refutación del argumento ontológico. Este análisis concluirá que se requiere de una facultad diferente del entendimiento para conocer lo existente como tal.

Este ensayo interpreta KrV A 592-602/B 620-630 no sólo como la refutacióndel argumento ontológico, sino como el lugar donde Kant encara una cuestión más radical: cómo puede el entendimiento humano, considerado desde un punto de vista lógico-general, predicar la existencia. Esta segunda parte argumenta que la discusión de la tesis “‘existe’ no es un predicado real” es una contribución a la solución de aquella cuestión que es independiente de la discusión del argumento ontológico.

In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the (...) simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. -/- Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language. (shrink)

It seems to me that we should aim at something very much like this today: protected spaces of many different sorts matched to the needs of the different tribes. Michael Walzer (1994)They [animals] are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. Henry Beston (1928).

This essay argues that the racialized geopolitics of the rhesus monkey trade conditioned the trajectory of tissue culture in polio research. Rhesus monkeys from north India were important experimental organisms in the American “war against polio” between the 1930s and 1950s. During this period, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis expended considerable effort to secure the nonhuman primate for researchers’ changing experimental agendas. The NFIP drew on transnational networks to export hundreds of thousands of rhesus monkeys from colonial and later (...) postcolonial India amid the geopolitical upheavals of World War II, the 1947 Partition, and the Cold War. In this essay, I trace how NFIP officials’ anxieties about the geopolitics of the monkey trade configured research imperatives in the war against polio. I show how their anxieties more specifically shaped investment in tissue culture techniques as a possible means of obviating dependence on the market in monkeys. I do so by offering a genealogy of the contingent convergence between the use of rhesus monkeys and HeLa cell cultures in the 1954 Salk vaccine trial evaluation. Through this genealogy, I emphasize the geopolitical dimensions of the search for the “right” experimental organisms, tissues, and cells for the “job” of scientific research. The technical transformation of polio research, I argue, relied on the convergence of disparate, racialized biomedical economies. (shrink)

The ability to understand both the self and others as purposeful agents — with thoughts, beliefs, and desires — seems to be central to the emergence of cultural processes both phylo- and ontogenetically. This ability has been termed second-order intentionality or “theory of mind” and has been conceptualized as a species-specific “trait” which is genetically predetermined, naturally selected and the resident of a dedicated module within the mind. Alternatively, we see it emerging out of a more general process — symbolization. (...) The paper discusses the emergence of the symbolic function from previously existing forms of communication by analyzing the structures and functions of different kinds of signs used in human and non-human vocal communication. We reinterpret evidence from the study of non-human primate vocalizations and suggest that these vocalizations embody a semiotic type that, like all signs, is more highly developed than a signal, but is not catalogued within the basic Peircean triad of sign types . This form, the double indexical, is intermediary between indexes and symbols. We speculate on what structural and functional reorganization is required to establish a developmental continuity from signals through the various types of signs to the well-known structure of the symbol — and possibly beyond. (shrink)

Representing members of racial minorities as apes or monkeys is a special case of dehumanization and cannot be properly understood outside of a general theory of dehumanization. We argue that to fully understand any particular case of dehumanization it is mandatory to consider the intersection of its psychological, cultural, and political determinants: the psychological component explains the distinctive form of dehumanizing thinking, the cultural component explains the significance of the choice of animal with which members of the dehumanized population are (...) equated, and the political component explains the ideological function of particular cases of dehumanization. We apply analysis to the special case of the simianization of people of African descent. (shrink)

The simian virus 40 chromosome, a model for the mammalian replicon, is a uniquely powerful system for the study of drugs and treatments which target enzymes of the mammalian replication apparatus. High resolution gel electrophoretic analysis of normal and aberrant viral replication intermediates can be used effectively to understand the molecular events of replication failure. These events include breakage of replication forks, aberrant topoisomerase action, failure to separate daughter chromosomes, protein‐DNA crosslinking, single and double strand DNA breakage, alterations in topology (...) and inactivation of replication intermediates. The SV40 replication system can also be used to study the recombinational events which often follow drug‐induced replication failure. (shrink)

Evolutionary ethics has a bad reputation. But we must not remain prisoners of our past. Recent advances in Darwinian evolutionary biology pave the way for a linking of science and morality, at once more modest yet more profound than earlier excursions in this direction. There is no need to repudiate the insights of the great philosophers of the past, particularly David Hume. So humans’ simian origins really matter. The question is not whether evolution is to be linked to ethics, but (...) how. (shrink)

Donna Haraway's work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as an historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader brings (...) together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work. Included is her "Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she famously wrote that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness , and Simians, Cyborgs and Women , as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought. (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

In the summer of 2008, the Spanish legislature resolved to grant great apes (though not all simians) basic human rights. While the decision to grant such rights came about largely through the lobbying efforts of the Great Ape Project (GAP), the decision has potential reverberations throughout the scientific world and beyond in its implications for shaping determinations of “what is human.” Such implications do not appear to be lost on various groupings of scientists who have spoken about their opinions about (...) the case and the project in general. These groupings of scientists, I argue, using the work of Mary Douglas and others, can be compared to “tribes” actively advancing and defending their classifications of the “human” in a bid for a retention or expansion of power. (shrink)

Nonhuman primates represent an important reservoir for the transmission of new infectious diseases to humans. While several working groups and international agencies have grappled with the ethics of xenotransplantation, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics have recently published a comprehensive and far-reaching series of recommendations that, while not eliminating the infectious disease risks, have nonetheless detailed the major points for concern and have developed a rational approach to minimizing these risks. This report should serve as the blueprint from which to proceed (...) with xenotransplantation. Dr. Allan’s research focuses on simian retroviruses, including simian immunodeficiency viruses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AsphyxiationsSteven Connor (bio)Recent events and sociorhetorical expatiations upon them have reaffirmed breathing as the ideal form of free and unimpeded life, that struggles against the throttlings of oppression. The root meaning of oppression, from the past participle of Latin opprimere, is to press, crush or bear down upon, and the word oppression has commonly been used to signify the feeling of the difficulty of breathing, through some constriction or (...) pressure, as in the nocturnal attentions of the nightmare, the spirit imagined as settling suffocatingly on the chest of the sleeper. As a mare that rides rather than being ridden, the spirit is often imagined as a female succubus, though in Fuseli's 1781 painting the mare is accompanied by a simian incubus who squats on the chest of a female sleeper, prompting these lines from Erasmus Darwin:So on his Nightmare through the evening fogFlits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;Seeks some love-wilder'd maid with sleep oppress'd,Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.(Darwin 2.16)'Pressing' meant the forcing of somebody into some condition or service, typically the army or navy. In oppressive weather, the clouds may seem to 'lower', or the humid air to cramp and confine the body.We think of breathing as opening or release, of a piece with open windows and unbounded spaces. Human beings have brewed up fantasies for centuries of more complete modes of breathing that would overcome the constriction represented by the respiratory apparatus, exhorting themselves and each other to breathe more deeply, suffusing, not just the lungs, but the diaphragm, the head, and other items of phantasmal physiology. Indeed, the factitiously hollow spaces of the body–the head that we seek to keep 'clear'–are the proof of the belief in the strange principle of vital vacuity, the idea that we exist most fully in empty spaces of innerness, bodily enclosures evacuated of body. Without this sense of the animating function of the breath, the body suffers the inanition of a "want of living [End Page 74] breath in its lungs, which are full of gases but empty of spirit" (Wilkinson 78). In being taken in and given out, breath seems to commute between what Wittgenstein calls "two kinds of worlds, worlds built of different materials." The fact that "the mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal," seems to Wittgenstein to be related to "the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy,–when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an aethereal object" (Wittgenstein 47). The conception of the soul as an afflatus, or a special kind of magic gas, which has been common among so many different peoples, suggests just this kind of aethereal object-that-is-not-one. It embodies the conviction that we are most essentially present as ourselves where we are closest to being nothing, in an out-of-body kind of body.We breathe out–phew, originally in the seventeenth century a violent expression of disgust or emancipatory emptying, as we might nowadays plosively and purifyingly say poo–when we 'ex-press', as we say, our sense of being, as we also say, 'relieved,' from re + levare, to lift up, implying a lightening, or levitation, that approaches in imagination the condition of air itself. To ventilate is to levitate. To be relieved is to dream of remission from the clinging pressure of your own embodiment, as though you could simply emit or expel your own weight. To inhale is to prepare for stress and struggle: to exhale is to relax, to sigh into satisfaction, converting becoming momentarily to being. Exhalation is therefore the decorporizing of the body, or the corporealization of the incorporeal. But though human beings exalt imaginary emptying, as the purifying expulsion of what is evil, infective, invasive, persecutory, expiration is also death. Speech is the expressive sound formed from the impressing of exhaled breath, the dissolving openness of air given imaginary... (shrink)

Enhancer elements are short stretches of nucleotides operationally defined by their cis‐acting ability to increase the transcription of nearby genes. They function relatively independently of position, orientation, and distance. Some show narrow tissue specificity while others permit constitutive expression in many different cell types. Although the first enhancer was described for simian virus 40 (SV40) more than five years ago, its mechanism of action has remained unclear. This review describes some of the models proposed to explain the physical role of (...) enhancers in eukaryotic transcription. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Philosophical Anthropology of Nonhuman AnimalsKalpana SeshadriIn medieval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simian dei [ape of God]. In Linnaeus’s optical machine, whoever refuses to recognize himself in the ape, becomes one: to paraphrase Pascal, qui fait l’homme, fait le singe [he who acts the man, acts the ape].—Giorgio Agamben, Man and Animal[It is] then, not just (...) about animals. It concerns whether or not we can conceive of ethical relationships beyond either continuism or separatism, beyond identity politics or abyssal alterity.—Kelly Oliver, Animal LessonsI owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors of the four provocative and challenging papers on HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, not only for their thoughtful consideration of my work, but for pinpointing and interrogating an uncertain “failure” in my text, namely the absence of the animal as such. David Wood asks if it would be unfair to characterize HumAnimal as a work of “anthropocentric posthumanism.” Ellen Armour, too, wonders about animals and where they figure in my project. She suggests that HumAnimal doesn’t “quite cross the putative line between humans and animals as such,” but [End Page 197] she immediately and generously qualifies the observation as a “good thing, a productive thing.” Rebecca Tuvel, on the other hand, worries that in following Agamben, I appear to uphold “the binary logic that posits animals in opposition to humans because they lack language.” Animals, she suggests, “do seem to communicate with us in important ways, ways that are worth hearing.” These astute comments undoubtedly hit the mark; HumAnimal has nothing to say about animals as such, and despite the lure of the title, there is nary a squeak nor a snout that scuttles between the covers.Rather than explain or defend this absence, let me turn to the title of this response: Why a philosophical anthropology rather than a zoology of animals? Obviously, there is a paradox inherent in calling for an anthropology of autozoōn, instead of a philosophical zoology. The latter would perhaps entail theories of evolution and animal behavior, research areas better left to natural scientists than to philosophers and critical thinkers. The problem with zoology is the way in which the philosophical question is supplanted by biological fact. An anthropology of animals on the other hand, would mean that we focus on the question of what it means to be something. In other words, my sense is that the question of the animal in philosophy can only be raised as a question of human propriety. To lose sight of the fraught co-implication of human propriety and animal alterity is to lose sight of the contribution that philosophy can make to hum(an)animal studies. Thus, where the animal is concerned what we must think is not merely whether the animal has language, whether we are in some kind of biological or social continuity with it, or whether between the animal and human is a condition of implacable alterity, a gulf that cannot be breached. We must also think the kind of necessity charged by the animal as such for thought or for any thinking to take place, and for any interrogation of (human) being. In other words, to follow Derrida in his deconstruction of the animal as such, the animal that is only a word, (l’animot) an abstraction that refers to nothing and everything, an idea of nonhuman life predicated on the ideal of man, must we not abandon, once and for all, the natural attitude toward animals? Must we not begin with the acknowledgment that the animal as such cannot be spoken of, that animals as such do not exist, but what exists is the signifier “animal” as the necessary correlative to any thought, construction or deconstruction of human-being? And that now in our current epoch of posthumanism, the strategic concept of “the natural animal” serves as an inconceivable ideal directing our ethics and our politics? Thus, I suggest that what we must contend with today, what must be encountered not once and for all but repeatedly, is the logical non sequitur that confronts us; that is... (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- PART I: COMPLEXITY IN ANIMAL MINDS -- Introduction: M.McGonigle-Chalmers -- Relational and Absolute Discrimination Learning by Squirrel Monkeys: Establishing a Common Ground with Human Cognition; B.T.Jones -- Serial List Retention by Non-Human Primates: Complexity and Cognitive Continuity; F.R.Treichler -- The Use of Spatial Structure in Working Memory: A Comparative Standpoint; C.De Lillo -- The Emergence of Linear Sequencing in Children: A Continuity Account and a Formal Model; M.McGonigle-Chalmers&I.Kusel (...) -- Sensitivity to Quantity: What Counts Across Species?; S.T.Boysen&A.M.Yocom -- PART II: COMPLEXITY IN ROBOTS -- Editorial Introduction; D.McFarland -- Towards Cognitive Robotics: Robotics, Biology and Developmental Psychology; M.Lee, U.Nehmzow&M.Rodriguez -- Structuring Intelligence: The Role of Hierarchy, Modularity and Learning in Generating Intelligent Behaviour; J.J.Bryson -- Epistemology, Access, and Computational Models; G.Luger -- Reasoning About Representations in Autonomous Systems: What P´Olya and Lakatos Have To Say; A.Bundy -- PART III: LANGUAGE, EVOLUTION AND THE COMPLEX MIND -- Editorial Introduction; K.Stenning -- How to Qualify for a Cognitive Upgrade: Executive Control, Glass Ceilings, and the Limits of Simian Success; A.Clark -- Private Codes and Public Structures; C.Allen -- The Emergence of Complex Language; W.Hinzen -- Language Evolution: Enlarging the Picture; K.Stenning&M.Van Lambalgen -- Epilogue: Reminiscences of Brendan McGonigle -- Index. (shrink)

We described herein the potential health risks and some bioethics considerations derived from the antipolio vaccines contaminated with the oncogenic monkey DNA virus, named simian virus 40 (SV40). The SV40 contaminated antipolio vaccines were administered to the human populations world-wide during the years 1955–63. Recently, with the advent of the PCR techniques, many groups found SV40 footprints in human tumour specimens as well as in normal tissues. Although no firm conclusions have yet been established for human diseases and S V40 (...) infections. The introduction of a monkey virus with oncogenic potential in the human population provoked great concern and criticisms. (shrink)

We described herein the potential health risks and some bioethics considerations derived from vaccines accidentally contaminated with the oncogenic monkey DNA virus, named simian virus 40. SV40-contaminated vaccines, mainly antipolio vaccines, were administered to human populations world-wide during the years 1955–63. Recently, by PCR techniques, many groups reported the presence of SV40 footprints in human tumour specimens as well as in normal tissues. Although no firm conclusions have yet been established for human diseases and SV40 infection, the administration of a (...) monkey virus with oncogenic potential in the human population provoked great concern and criticisms. (shrink)

Locke & Bogin (L&B) propose that humans are unique in possessing stages of childhood and adolescence. Arguments to the contrary include evidence for a similar and adaptive juvenile period in simians of slow growth, intense play and learning, and provisioning with solid food by adults. Likewise, simians as well as humans undergo a compensatory growth spurt during puberty.

Recent debates over evolutionary ethics have often circled around T. H. Huxley's late claim that “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step.” In writing “Evolution and Ethics” and its long Prolegomena, however, Huxley may instead be wrestling with the nature and origin of human agency. Early in his career he saw evolution and social progress as converging, but as he came to find cosmic process alien to human welfare, he found moral agency more essential but (...) more problematic. Within “Evolution and Ethics,” evolution retreats into a cyclical stasis while ethical challenges end up submitting to it. Huxley implies, however, that in acknowledging these cycles as “natural,” ancient sages begged the question of whether resistance to them were possible. And when evolutionary ethicists delimit humanity's potential by its simian origins, Huxley invokes Hume's “naturalistic fallacy,” asking them how factual evidence can support their prescriptive conclusions. Both his naturalist and idealist reviewers then drove him to turn his Prolegomena into a rebuttal to the original essay. Here, advocating a balance between altruism and selfishness, Huxley works to relegate agency to a question of degree. In both essays, Huxley's epigrammatic prose demarcates the dead ends of much Victorian thought and points toward alternate paths not explored until the twentieth century. (shrink)

In The Ciceronian, Erasmus ridiculed as "apes" humanists who imitated Cicero superficially. Methods developed in cognitive literary theory provide a framework for understanding that these simian metaphors are not just ornamental: they are integral to the dialogue's meaning, helping to configure the connections that it draws between literary style and paganism. Metaphorical blending in the Ciceronianus takes on added significance when read alongside the Adages, in which Erasmus glossed classical sayings about monkeys to comment on simian and human nature. The (...) blending of conceptual metaphors both within and between these texts is itself the process by which new meanings emerge. (shrink)