This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Introducing Christian Ethics by Samuel Wells and Ben Quash, and: Christian Ethics: An Introductory Reader ed. by Samuel WellsBradley B. BurroughsReview of Introducing Christian Ethics SAMUEL WELLS AND BEN QUASH Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 400 pp. $49.95Review of Christian Ethics: An Introductory Reader EDITED BY SAMUEL WELLS Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 360 pp. $51.95Whether in a semester-long course or a textbook, the task of introducing Christian ethics generally (...) requires one to choose between various competing priorities. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Introducing Christian Ethics is that it eschews such choices. Instead of settling for an “either/or,” Samuel Wells and Ben Quash repeatedly push for “both/and.” Their introduction not only traces the historical development of Christian ethics, examining major historical thinkers and elucidating the larger arcs that connect them, but also treats the work of contemporary Christian ethicists. Moreover, on the one hand, the authors develop a typology of ethical thought that distinguishes various strands according to the audience to which ethical reflection is directed—universal ethics (which addresses all people), subversive ethics (which addresses the oppressed), and ecclesial ethics (which addresses Christians). On the other hand, the authors also show how notable representatives of these strands approach matters of contemporary ethical concern. To this, Wells adds a sourcebook that allows for readers to interact further with many of the thinkers treated in the introductory text as well as helps to shed further light upon these three strands of Christian ethics. The scope of the project represented by these two books is thus exceptionally ambitious: it strives to provide a comprehensive overview of the field and organize it according to an innovative typology.Introducing Christian Ethics proceeds in three parts. In part 1, Wells and Quash tell “the story of Christian ethics,” exploring the biblical, historical, and philosophical sources from which Christian ethics has most commonly drawn and offering brief depictions of a vast array of Christian thinkers, including Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others. Part 2, titled “The Questions Christian Ethics Asks,” lays out the threefold taxonomy of universal, subversive, and ecclesial ethics, illustrating each with reference to thinkers both historical and contemporary. Finally, part 3 turns to “the questions asked of Christian [End Page 233] ethics,” treating issues of “good order” (including the role of the state and the nature of justice), “good life” (economics, poverty, and work), “good relationships” (friendship, marriage, homosexuality), “good beginnings and endings” (contraception, abortion, euthanasia), and “good earth” (animals, crops ecology). For each of the issues treated in part 3, the authors offer an overview and an account of how thinkers from each of the strands of Christian ethics have addressed that topic.Wells and Quash bring an admirably broad view of the field to bear upon this project. Famous thinkers factor prominently. And yet the book also treats the work of those less likely to appear in introductory texts, such as Germain Grisez, John Mbiti, and Stephen Clark. Whether they are of the renowned or lesser-known, the sketches of thinkers that occur throughout the book are on the whole quite accurate. Although there are places where experts might wish to call out slight mischaracterizations, the renderings are precise enough to serve introductory readers. Wells and Quash’s broadness of vision also includes both Protestant and Roman Catholic thought. Whereas Introducing Christian Ethics focuses primarily upon papal encyclicals as exemplifying the latter, Wells’s introductory reader adds selections from Gustavo Gutiérrez, Margaret Farley, Dorothy Day, and others to help exemplify the complexity of Roman Catholic ethical reflection. Eastern Orthodoxy gets shorter shrift, an observation offered as a note to potential readers rather than a criticism.Even as its comprehensiveness equips Introducing Christian Ethics for use in a variety of ways and contexts, the quest for comprehensiveness appears to be at the heart of some of the book’s infelicities. Attempting to treat so many thinkers and concepts, it frequently moves at a brisk pace, touching upon complex phenomena and abruptly moving on. In many places, the questions the book answers for the entry-level readers at which it aims... (shrink)

The first feature film made about the design and deployment of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End, begins with fake newsreel footage depicting the burial in a time capsule of a copy of the film and a projector to show it on. The scene, with its funereal overtones yet grim optimism that, even in the face of catastrophic destruction, the germ of civilization will endure, recalls the ceremonies surrounding the interment of the Westinghouse time capsule at the New (...) York World’s Fair in 1939. Time capsules, this article argues, stand in a complex relation to war and temporality, seeking to at once anticipate and work through the challenge posed to futurity by the threat of global conflict. As a container, the capsule attempts to deliver and control the reception of a legible inventory of the present, yet the principle of selection and the impossibility of predicting how information might be received in the deep future – if it is received at all – threatens this aim. The dilemma faced by time capsule curators is, we argue with reference to William Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s so-called cut-up method of writing, one of control. By reading the time capsule through the cut-up, anticipated catastrophe can be seen to be functioning proleptically in the present and already active as a challenge to the capsule as proof against disaster. (shrink)

There are a number of geophysical and astrophysical problems with Burroughs' s setting. Perhaps it is pointless to complain, 75 years too late, about the "hardness" of such science fantasies, for the strong suit of Burroughs' writings always lay in their imaginative sweep, never their scientific accuracy. In the case of Pellucidar, however, Burroughs committed a blunder that sets the teeth of every physicist on edge: he assumed that gravity would pull toward the inner surface of a (...) hollow sphere. (shrink)

Environmental aesthetics is an emerging field of study that focuses on nature's aesthetic value as well as on its ethical and environmental implications. Drawing on the research of a number of disciplines, this exciting new area speaks to scholars working in a range of fields, including not only philosophy, but also environmental and cultural studies, public policy and planning, social and political theory, landscape design and management, and art and architecture. _Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty_ addresses the (...) complex relationships between aesthetic appreciation and environmental issues and emphasizes the valuable contribution that environmental aesthetics can make to environmentalism. Allen Carlson, a pioneer in environmental aesthetics, and Sheila Lintott, who has published widely in aesthetics, combine important historical essays on the appreciation of nature with the best contemporary research in the field. They begin with classic pieces by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Aldo Leopold, as well as an essay by Eugene Hargrove that lays out the scientific, artistic, and aesthetic foundations of current environmental beliefs and attitudes. The second section of the book addresses prevailing views on the conceptualization of nature and the various debates on how to properly and respectfully appreciate nature. The third section introduces positive aesthetics, the belief that everything in nature is essentially beautiful, even the devastation caused by earthquakes or floods. The essays in the final section explicitly bring together aesthetics, ethics, and environmentalism to explore the ways in which each might affect the others. (shrink)

We will next speak of Liberality. Now this is thought to be the mean state, having for its object-matter Wealth: I mean, the Liberal man is praised not in the circumstances of war, nor in those which constitute the character of perfected self-mastery, nor again in judicial decisions, but in respect of giving and receiving Wealth, chiefly the former. By the term Wealth I mean all those things whose worth is measured by money.

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that (...) they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. (shrink)

I think "schizo-culture" here is being used rather in a special sense. Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that this is a healthy sign. -- William Burroughs, from _Schizo-Culture_ The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 (...) France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his _History of Sexuality_ project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture. The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants. This slip-cased edition includes _The Book: 1978_, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and _The Event: 1975_, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-François Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, François Peraldi, and John Cage. (shrink)

My critics in this symposium illustrate one principle and three fallacies of disability studies. The principle, which we all share, is that all persons are equal and none are less equal than others. No disability, however slight, nor however severe, implies lesser moral, political or ethical status, worth or value. This is a version of the principle of equality. The three fallacies exhibited by some or all of my critics are the following: Choosing to repair damage or dysfunction or to (...) enhance function, implies either that the previous state is intolerable or that the person in that state is of lesser value or indicates that the individual in that state has a life that is not worthwhile or not thoroughly worth living. None of these implications hold. Exercising choice in reproduction with the aim of producing children who will be either less damaged or diseased, or more healthy, or who will have enhanced capacities, violates the principle or equality. It does not. Disability or impairment must be defined relative either to normalcy, “normal species functioning”, or “species typical functioning”. It is not necessarily so defined. (shrink)

Dr.Beitchman has created a variety, a plethora of interconnections and links and lines that connect many seemingly unconnectable literary elements and forms. Take for example the two political chapters...the first Shakespeare's King John and the last Jean Baudrillard's vision of 9/11; both deal with periods of crisis and loss of confidence/credibility of and in society conjuring a derangement that has become a syndrome. Drugs and literature connect Coleridge and Burroughs/ Kublai Khan and Naked Lunch and they in turn (...) connect with Platonism and the Russian Symbolist Theatre of the 20th century; Cabala obtrudes on the French writers discussed and the otherworldly ambiance of Villier's play Axel. And so the component essays and approaches play of against each other and enrich our view of a literature that transcends rather than merely compares. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of consent in decision making generally and its role in end of life decisions in particular. It outlines a conception of autonomy which explains and justifies the role of consent in decision making and criticises some misapplications of the idea of consent, particular the role of fictitious or “proxy” consents.Where the inevitable outcome of a decision must be that a human individual will die and where that individual is a person who can consent, then that (...) decision is ethical if and only if the individual consents. In very rare and extreme cases such a decision will be ethical in the absence of consent where it would be massively cruel not to end life in order to prevent suffering which is in no other way preventable.Where, however, the human individual is not a person, as is the case with abortion, the death of infants like Mary , or in the very rare and extreme cases of those who have ceased to be persons like Tony Bland, such decisions are governed by the ethics of ending the lives of non-persons. (shrink)

There are already many excellent books on existentialism. Some of them deal with particular problem or particular existentialist writers. Most of those that deal with existentialism as a whole divide their subject-matter according to authors, presenting chapters on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and the rest. Thus I think that there is room for the present book, which attempts a comprehensive examination and evaluation of existentialism, but does so by thematic treatment. That is to say, each chapter deals with a major theme (...) of existentialist philosophy, and these themes are arranged in the order of the existential dialect. Of course, each chapter is illustrated with material from the writings of existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Camus. (shrink)

Cadaver organs should be automatically availableThe shortage of donor organs and tissue for transplantation constitutes an acute emergency which demands radical rethinking of our policies and radical measures. While estimates vary and are difficult to arrive at there is no doubt that the donor organ shortage costs literally hundreds of thousands of lives every year. “In the world as a whole there are an estimated 700 000 patients on dialysis . . .. In India alone 100 000 new patients present (...) with kidney failure each year” . Almost “three million Americans suffer from congestive heart failure . . . deaths related to this condition are estimated at 250 000 each year . . . 27 000 patients die annually from liver disease . . .. In Western Europe as a whole 40 000 patients await a kidney but only . . . 10 000 kidneys”1 become available. Nobody knows how many people fail to make it onto the waiting lists and fail to register in the statistics. “As of 24th November 2002 in the United Kingdom 667 people have donated organs, 2055 people have received transplants, and 5615 people are still awaiting transplants.”2Conscious of the terrible and unnecessary tragedy that figures like these represent I have been advocating for more than 20 years now some radical measures to stem this appalling waste of human life. The measure which is the subject of Hamer and Rivlin’s paper 3 concerns the automatic availability of all cadaver organs—a measure, which I first advocated publicly in 1983.4THE AUTOMATIC AVAILABILITY OF DONOR ORGANSWe need to begin by being clear about just what it is I propose and why. At the moment in the United Kingdom we …. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

Analysing film. Distinguishing the filmic contribution to meaning -- Examples of filmic "textual organisation" -- Redrawing boundaries -- Organisation of the book -- Semiotics and documents. Semiotics and its relations to film -- The nature of discourse semantics -- The film as cinematographic document -- A combined view: filmic documents for filmic discourse -- Constructing the semiotic mode of film. Semiotic multimodality -- The internal organisation of semiotic strata -- Composing and combining semiotic modes -- Materiality and "epistemological commitment" -- (...) Christian Metz and the grande syntagmatique of the image track. The original model -- Two examples of analysis with the grande syntagmatique -- Revisions and rebuttals -- Foundations for analysis: filmic units. The basic units of film: preliminaries -- Audiovisual iconic representations -- Perception, perceptual realism and reliable measurement -- Multiplicity: from perception to discourse -- Filmic units revisited: discourse-motivated definitions -- The paradigmatic organisation of film. Beyond Metz: towards a grande paradigmatique -- Capturing discourse dependency structures in film -- The paradigmatic dimensions of projection, taxis and plane -- Two examples of paradigmatic analysis -- Summary and conclusions. (shrink)

The reviews of this book which greeted its appearance in America, where it won a Catholic Press Association Religious Book Award, speak for themselves. 'The real core of the book is the question that is raised - the demanding bone-crushing question we all face - alone - at one time - the question of death/life and immortality. In these few pages we set out on a journey - one that winds its way among ancient stories and myths ... one's constant (...) disturbing companion is death - a reality that keeps breaking in upon our imes, our friends, our dreams and hopes and even our changing and becoming. The richness of the book lies in the questioning and some of the answers other men's times have given in attempt to live with this probing. We meet Kazantzakis, Homer, Melville, Hegel, Dante in their humanness in the face of death and in their timeless answers' (National Catholic Reporter). From the Protestant side, Martin Marty commented how John Dunne, 'perhaps the most intuitive and natively talented Catholic around, has cast a new spell', and The Critic remarked: 'As a meditation ought to be, it is simple and profound at once. And it is beautifully done, in some ways the richest of John Dunne's works.' All of which amounts to an invitation to join the author as he poses the timeless dilemma of the human condition and seeks to resolve it through stories of adventures, journeys and voyages inspired by man's encounter with death; stories of childhood, youth, manhood and age; and finally stories of God and of man wrestling with God and the unknown. (shrink)

John Dillon presents an English translation of Alcinous' Handbook of Platonism, accompanied by an introduction and a philosophical commentary which explain the ideas in the work and show their intellectual and historical context. The Handbook purports to be an introduction to the doctrines of Plato, but in fact gives us an excellent survey of Platonist thought in the second century AD.

This brief paper shows that the idea of benefits to the subject compensating for the harms of disability is at best self defeating and at worst sinister. Equally benefits to third parties while real are dubious as compensating factors. This shows that disabilities are just that, a net loss and not a net gain.

Herodotus. Custom is king.--Engels, F. Ethics and law: eternal truths.--Sumner, W. G. Folkways.--Ross, W. D. The meaning of right.--Duncker, K. Ethical relativity?--Herskovits, M. J. Cultural relativism and cultural values.--Kluckhohn, C. Ethical relativity: sic et non.--Taylor, P. W. Social science and ethical relativism.--Ladd, J. The issue of relativism.--Redfield, R. The universally human and the culturally variable.--Bibliography (p. 145-146).

Utilizing a contractualist framework for understanding the basis and limits for the use of force by police, this article offers five limiting principles—respect for status as moral agents, proportionality, minimum force necessary, ends likely to be accomplished, and appropriate motivation—and then discusses uses of force that violate or risk violating those principles. These include, but are not limited to, unseemly invasions, strip searches, perp walks, handcuffing practices, post-chase apprehensions, contempt-of-cop arrests, overuse of intermediate force measures, coerced confessions, profiling, stop and (...) frisk practices, and the administration of street justice. (shrink)

When things go wrong with assisted reproduction we should look at what’s best for everyone in the particular circumstancesA RTBs, as we must now call them, are becoming more and more frequent. In the recent United Kingdom case Mr and Mrs A, a “white” couple, gave birth to twins described as “black”. The mix up apparently occurred because a Mr and Mrs B, a “black” couple, were being treated in the same clinic and Mrs A’s eggs were fertilised with Mr (...) B’s sperm. Mr and Mrs A love the twins and wish to keep them and the facts seem to be that Mrs A is the genetic mother of the twins but her partner is not the genetic father. Under English law, in assisted reproduction, the woman who gives birth to the child is the legal mother and this is true also in cases of surrogacy. I think there is no doubt in this case that English law has taken the right path and that it would be unconscionable to contemplate taking a child away from the woman who had undergone the risks and pains of pregnancy and childbirth and the bonding process that goes along with that when she wishes to keep the child particularly when there is no substantial and pressing evidence that she would be an unsafe parent. I argued this in my book The Value of Life4 and I think it is still true. So in this case justice, morality, and decency are served by confirming Mr and Mrs A as the parents of the children. Since in English law there is some ambiguity over paternity and how that is to be assigned and since Mr A is apparently not the genetic father, I think it is important …. (shrink)

Bu yazı organ nakli ile ilgili şu soruyu ele almaktadır: Doktorlar sağlıklı bir kişinin organlarını alarak organ nakline gereksinim duyan birden fazla kişinin yaşamını kurtarırlarsa ahlaksal açıdan yanlış bir şey yapmış olurlar mı? Her ne kadar sağlıklı bir insanın organlarını alarak onun ölümüne neden olmak kabul edilemez görünse de bunu yapmamanın daha çok sayıda kişinin ölümüne neden olacağı düşünülürse ortada araştırılmaya değer bir soru olduğu görülür.

Open‐ended tasks can be decomposed into the three levels of Newell's Cognitive Band: the Unit‐Task level, the Operation level, and the Deliberate‐Act level. We analyzed the video game Co‐op Space Fortress at these levels, reporting both the match of a cognitive model to subject behavior and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) to track subject cognition. The Unit Task level in this game involves coordinating with a partner to kill a fortress. At this highest level of the Cognitive Band, there is (...) a good match between subject behavior and the model. The EEG signals were also strong enough to track when Unit Tasks succeeded or failed. The intermediate Operation level in this task involves legs of flight to achieve a kill. The EEG signals associated with these operations are much weaker than the signals associated with the Unit Tasks. Still, it was possible to reconstruct subject play with much better than chance success. There were significant differences in the leg behavior of subjects and models. Model behavior did not provide a good basis for interpreting a subject's behavior at this level. At the lowest Deliberate‐Act level, we observed overlapping key actions, which the model did not display. Such overlapping key actions also frustrated efforts to identify EEG signals of motor actions. We conclude that the Unit‐task level is the appropriate level both for understanding open‐ended tasks and for using EEG to track the performance of open‐ended tasks. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

What are the purposes of education and what is the relationship between educational research and policy? Using the twin lenses of Visible Learning and educational philosophy these are among the many fascinating topics discussed in extended conversations between John Hattie and Steen Nepper Larsen. This wide-ranging, and informative book offers fundamental propositions about the nature of Education. It maps out in fascinating detail a coming together of Hattie's empirical data and world-famous Visible Learning paradigm with the rich heritage of (...) educational philosophy. As well as exploring the inevitable questions of the purpose of education and the development of students in a learning society. Part clash of cultures, part meeting of minds, always fascinating and illuminating, this intriguing book will inspire teachers, students and parents at all levels of the educational system - from kindergarten through school to university. Conversations include: What is the purpose of education? Does educational data speak for itself? What is the role of the teacher? Is learning a visible phenomenon? Is it important to teach and learn specific subjects? What is the role of Neuroscience research? What is the relationship between educational research and educational politics? What is the role of the state in education? (shrink)

Philosophy and Contemporary Issues contains contemporary readings of philosophical significance designed to introduce philosophy to college and university students. The authors' goal is to demonstrate how philosophy illuminates and helps solve some of the important problems facing contemporary man. This edition contains additional readings.

This paper discusses the provocative views of Skene and Parker as to the role of religious or other ideologically based interest groups in law and policy making. We draw distinctions between doctrine and prejudice and between argument and ideology which we trust take the debate further. Finally we recommend an ethereal, democratic, and populist partial solution.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career- long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces-extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions-so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field. Emeritus Professor John White has spent the last 35 years researching, thinking and (...) writing about some of the key and enduring issues in education. In this book, he brings together 16 key writings in one place. Starting with a specially written Introduction, which gives an overview of John's career and conceptualizes his selection within the development of the field, the chapters cover: · Mind · State and Curriculum · Well-being · Politics · Curriculum subjects. This book not only shows how John's thinking developed during his long and distinguished career; it also gives an insight into the development of the fields to which he contributed. (shrink)