The embodied cognition thesis claims that cognitive functions cannot be understood without making reference to the interactions between the brain, the body, and the environment. The meaning of abstract concepts is grounded in concrete experiences. This book is the first edited volume to explore the impact of the embodied cognition thesis on the scientific study of film. A team of scholars analyse the main aspects of film (narrative, style, music, sound, time, the viewer, emotion, perception, ethics, the frame, etc.) from (...) an embodied perspective. By combining insights from various disciplines such as cognitive film theory, conceptual metaphor theory, and cognitive neuroscience, they show how the process of meaning-making in film is embodied and how empathy and embodied simulation play a role in understanding the way in which the viewer interacts with the film. (shrink)

Levinas's account of responsibility challenges dominant notions of time, autonomy, and subjectivity according to Cynthia D. Coe. Employing the concept of trauma in Levinas's late writings, Coe draws together his understanding of time and his claim that responsibility is an obligation to the other that cannot be anticipated or warded off. Tracing the broad significance of these ideas, Coe shows how Levinas revises our notions of moral agency, knowledge, and embodiment. Her focus on time brings a new interpretive lens to (...) Levinas's work and reflects on a wider discussion of the fragmentation of human experience as an ethical subject. Coe's understanding of trauma and time offers a new appreciation of how Levinas can inform debates about gender, race, mortality, and animality. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have documented the racial disparities of mass incarceration. In this paper we argue that, although retributivism and deterrence theory appear to be race-neutral, in the contemporary U.S. context these seemingly contrary theories function jointly to rationalize racial inequities in the criminal justice system. When people of color are culturally associated with criminality, they are perceived as both irresponsible and hyperresponsible, a paradox that reflects their status as what Charles Mills calls subpersons. Following from this paradox, criminality (...) is understood as an atemporal characteristic of people of color, such that they are conceived as pre-criminals, criminals, or post-criminals. In Frantz Fanon’s account, overdetermination expresses this exclusion of people of color from full agency by capturing them within a rigid, immutable essence, which then controls the social meaning of their actions. The backward-looking quality of retribution and the forward-looking quality of deterrence then treat people of color as more deserving of punishment (and more severe punishment) and as threats to the social order who have to be restrained. We should read the racialization of mass incarceration as a symptom of how precariously people of color participate in the social contract and as reflections of how theories of punishment have been racially deployed. (shrink)

This paper considers the resources MacIntyre provides for undertaking empirical work using his goodsvirtues-practices-institutions framework alongside the attendant challenges of doing such work. It focuses on methods that might be employed in judging the extent to which observed social arrangements may conform to the standards required by a practice-embodying institution. It concludes by presenting the outline of an empirical project exploring at a music facility in the North East of England, The Sage Gateshead.

I argue in this paper that habits of moral attention, such as those that sustain racism and xenophobia, should be understood as attempts to deflect responsibility as Levinas describes it. The provocation to responsibility is fragile in the face of these moral habits, which separate the morally considerable from the morally inconsiderable. But in its traumatic quality, responsibility cannot be deflected entirely—it impacts the self prior to and outside of our attempts to manage our obligations. Levinas’s description of the interaction (...) between the conatus and responsibility should thus be read as a supplement to critical race theory, as an account that recognizes the power of moral habits but also the constant possibility of their interruption. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the efficacy of scaffolded writing assignments in teaching critical thinking and writing in lower-division philosophy courses. Scaffolding involves converting the skills one expects students to display on a culminating assignment (in this case an argumentative paper) into a progressive series of smaller assignments, moving from papers that use relatively simple skills, such as summarizing small pieces of text, to much more complex skills, such as evaluating others’ positions, constructing their own judgments about an issue, (...) and defending those claims. I use this technique in a course oriented around the idea of enlightenment, so that students see the writing assignments as part of the practice of intellectual maturity. (shrink)

School improvement is much sought and often claimed. However, it is questionable whether overall achievement in countries such as the USA or England has improved by any significant amount over thirly years. Several school improvement programmes have been claimed as successful, but evaluations, even where they exist, are generally poor: based on the perceptions of participants, lacking any counterfactual or reporting selectively. Accounts of improvement in individual schools are numerous, but are inevitably selective; the attribution of causality is problematic and (...) knowledge of the conditions under which such phenomena are likely to be replicated is limited. School effectiveness research also has yet to identify specific strategies with clear causal effects. In short, many claims of school improvement are illusory. Nevertheless, there are some improvement strategies that are well-defined, feasible and robustly shown to be effective. In future, we need greater clarity and agreement about what constitutes success. Evaluation must be taken more seriously, and its results treated more critically. (shrink)

There exists a serious gap in the minds and lives of many believers between what they know to be the goal of sanctification and growth and where they know they actually are in their life. The church and its leaders would be better equipped to address this “sanctification gap” if its ministries were informed by a robust Spiritual Theology, understood in two senses or forms that are interrelated: its more general form of drawing out the spiritual and existential implications of (...) theology in order to better understand and participate in the process of transformation; its fullest sense as a theological discipline in its own right that attempts to integrate the Scriptural teaching on sanctification with observations and reflections of the Spirit's actual work in the believer's spirit and experience. This paper addresses the nature of Spiritual Theology and a brief justification for it including various examples, for the sake of equipping leaders to meaningfully address transformation in the church. (shrink)

There are many dedicated Christians who are in the grips of a great moral temptation, which attempts to deal with spiritual failure, guilt and shame by means of spiritual effort and disciplines in the power of the self. This article theologically-psychologically explores this moralism as a type of legalism similar to what Paul confronts in Galatians in order to address: why we are tempted to be moralists on account of original sin and early parenting; How to determine whether one is (...) tempted by moralism in light of a theology of guilt and conscience; How to avoid moralism by opening the heart to our Justification and the ministry of the Holy Spirit; and What will happen to us if we fail to resist moralism. The goal is to clarify the implications of the Cross and the Spirit for daily Christian living in resisting moralism and moving from moral to spiritual formation. (shrink)

Kierkegaard and Luther reveals what Kierkegaard lauded, lanced, missed, and misjudged of Luther and spotlights the concord the two actually shared, namely, the negative yet necessary role that Christian suffering (Anfechtung) plays in Christian life.

Nineteenth-century Lutheran giants C.F.W. Walther and Søren Kierkegaard both stressed over the application of Martin Luther’s doctrine of Law and Gospel. Both viewed Law and Gospel as concepts to be distinguished and as concepts that dialectically belong together. To his Pelagian audience tempted to abuse the Law and abolish the Gospel, Walther stressed the distinction of Law and Gospel. To his Antinomian audience tempted to abuse the Gospel and abolish the Law, Kierkegaard stressed the dialectic of Law and Gospel. Walther (...) and Kierkegaard’s contrasting Law and Gospel emphases are clearly seen in their contrasting accounts of the Rich Young Ruler in the Synoptic Gospels. (shrink)

Both Kant and Levinas contrast morality with a vision of the lives of animals, governed by self-interested instincts. Despite this shared Hobbesian-Darwinian account of the struggle for existence, there are significant differences: Kant positions reason as the path to transcending instinct and inclination, through respect for the moral law, but as a survivor of the Shoah, Levinas claims that reason is continuous with self-interested motivations, and the ethical should instead be understood as a form of anarchy that traumatizes the self-possessed, (...) autonomous subject. Central to both accounts is a commitment to ethics as the transcendence of animality, and we should question whether that shared association between animality and self-interested violence is warranted. (shrink)

Requiring that a woman who is seeking an abortion be given the opportunity to view an ultrasound of her fetus has spread from anti-abortion “pregnancy resource centers” to state laws. Proponents of these laws claim that having access to the ultrasound image is necessary for a woman to make a medically informed decision. In this paper, we argue that ultrasound examinations frame fetuses visually and linguistically as persons and interpellate pregnant women as mothers, with all of the cultural meaning invested (...) in those two normative concepts. Presenting these judgments as medical information is misleading. Because women are being subjected to these cultural expectations unknowingly, mandatory ultrasound laws in fact undermine women’s autonomy. Fully informed consent would include a critical engagement with social norms around femininity and a recognition that such laws are meant to advance the state’s interest in preserving potential life. (shrink)

This volume examines the complex dialogue between German Idealism and phenomenology, two of the most important movements in Western philosophy. Twenty-four newly authored chapters by an international group of well-known scholars examine the shared concerns of these two movements; explore how phenomenologists engage with, challenge, and critique central concepts in German Idealism; and argue for the continuing significance of these ideas in contemporary philosophy and other disciplines. Chapters cover not only the work of major figures such as Husserl, Heidegger, and (...) Merleau-Ponty, but a wide range of philosophers who build on the phenomenological tradition, including Fanon, Gadamer, and Levinas. These essays highlight key themes of the nature of subjectivity, the role of intersubjectivity, the implications for ethics and aesthetics, the impact of time and history, and our capacities for knowledge and understanding. Key features: · Critically engages two of the major philosophical movements of the last 250 years · Draws on the insights of those movements to address contemporary issues in ethics, theory of knowledge, and political philosophy · Expands the range of idealist and phenomenological themes by considering them in the context of gender, postcolonial theory, and environmental concerns, as well as their global reach · Includes new contributions from prominent, international scholars in these fields This Handbook is essential reading for all scholars and advanced students of phenomenology and German Idealism. With chapters on Beauvoir, Sartre, Scheler, Schutz, Stein, and Ricoeur, The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Phenomenology is also ideal for scholars researching these important figures in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The topic and practice of contemplative prayer has become a major controversy in Evangelical spirituality. For those critical of the spiritual formation movement in general, contemplative prayer is often raised as one obvious spiritual practice that is foreign to the Scriptures and a Christian world-view, and more akin to New Age and eastern religions. This paper is also critical of any approach to contemplation and contemplative prayer that is not grounded in the Christian Faith. However, I will argue that the (...) Nicene theology of the fourth century CE already addressed some of these concerns in its response to Origenic spirituality and, in turn, provided a theological correction to sub-Christian views of contemplation and contemplative prayer. Furthermore, this paper argues that a truly Christian approach to contemplative prayer can be made consistent with Christian theology and that the Scriptures actually teach a form of contemplation and contemplative prayer. (shrink)

This paper, using modern Darwinian theory, proposes an explanation for the increasingly high incidence of breast cancer found among pre-and post-menopausal women living today in westernized countries. A number of factors have been said to be responsible: genetic inheritance (BRCA-1), diet (specifically the increased consumption of dietary fat), exposure to carcinogenic agents, lifetime menstrual activity, and reproductive factors. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate the value of a perspective based on Darwinian theory. In this paper, Darwinian theory (...) is used to explore the possibility that the increased incidence of breast cancer is due primarily to the failure to complete in a timely manner the reproductive developmental cycle, beginning at menarche and continuing through a series of pregnancies and lactation. On the basis of comparative data, we assume that most women in ancestral populations began having children before age 20 or so and tended to remain either pregnant or nursing for most of their adult lives. If a woman did not have a child by age 25 or so, she probably would never have one. Therefore, selection would probably not have acted against deleterious traits, such as cancer, that appeared after that age, just as it does not act against such traits in old age. (shrink)

Levinas's work persistently challenges the claim that the sovereignty of the ego is the foundation for ethics, a claim he attributes to the Greek philosophical tradition. This claim emerges in dominant accounts of responsibility, in which the agent's intentions define his or her culpability. However, in Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles also attempts to undermine this strict pairing of responsibility and deliberate choice. Oedipus undergoes a fundamentally Levinasian narrative arc by moving from self-assured sovereignty, based on his ability to comprehend the world, (...) to an awakening to responsibility. In this essay I examine the points of intersection and divergence between the tragic narrative of Oedipus and the traumatic subject in Levinas's work. (shrink)

This work examines the use and understanding of metaphor in wildfire discourse. We focus on the framing of wildfires as monsters, seen in statements such as “Monster wildfire rages in Colorado” and “Two monster wildfires in Northern California are slowly being tamed,” which reflect a “wildfire is monster” metaphor. Study 1 analyzes how and when this phrase is used in TV news reports of wildfires, and Study 2A and Study 2B investigate how it influences reasoning about risks associated with wildfire. (...) The results show that metaphor is widely used in framing news reports about significant wildfires, and that its use influences how people reason about them. The work is part of a project aimed at developing better ways to communicate about risks related to natural events and climate change. (shrink)

The conception of subjectivity that dominates the Western philosophical tradition, particularly during the Enlightenment, sets up a simple dichotomy: either the subject is ultimately autonomous or it is merely a causally determined thing. Fichte and Freud challenge this model by formulating theories of subjectivity that transcend this opposition. Fichte conceives of the subject as based in absolute activity, but that activity is qualified by a check for which it is not ultimately responsible. Freud explains the behavior of the self in (...) terms of biological drives and social pressures, yet both forces are actively interpreted by the subject itself. The tensions that arise from these very different approaches show that both Fichte and Freud are trying to overcome this deeply imbedded dichotomy between freedom and determinism. Although some would respond to these tensions by trying to forge a Hegelian synthesis, such a resolution covers over the paradoxical nature of finite subjectivity. (shrink)