Members of the lay public are turning increasingly to the internet to answer health-related questions. Some authors suggest that the widespread availability of online health information has dislodged medical knowledge from its traditional institutional base and enabled a growing role for alternative or previously unrecognized health perspectives and ‘lay health expertise’. Others have argued, however, that the organization of information retrieved from influential search engines, particularly Google, has merely intensified mainstream perspectives because of the growing consolidation of the internet with (...) traditional, commercial media sources. In this paper we describe an analysis of ‘first page’ results retrieved through Google searches about several common health concerns, each of which has been the subject of controversy as a result of uncertain aetiology, diagnoses, outcomes and/or contested approaches to treatment. Our findings suggest that the online search tactics used by most lay health information seekers produce sources of information that, for the most part, reflect mainstream biomedical discourses, often linked to commercial interests, rather than a plurality of voices that offer a variety of perspectives and resources. We discuss the implications for health-interested internet searchers who fail to look beyond the ‘first page’. (shrink)

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, _Relational Psychoanalysis_ continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, _Volume 4_ carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at recent developments in relational theory. Included here are chapters on sexuality and gender, race and class, identity (...) and self, thirdness, the transitional subject, the body, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Neil Altman, Jessica Benjamin, Emanuel Berman, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Susan Coates, Ken Corbett, Muriel Dimen, Martin Stephen Frommer, Jill Gentile, Samuel Gerson, Virginia Goldner, Sue Grand, Hazel Ipp, Kimberlyn Leary, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Owen Slavin, Charles Spezzano, Ruth Stein, Melanie Suchet. (shrink)

Building on the success and importance of three previous volumes, _Relational Psychoanalysis_ continues to expand and develop the relational turn. Under the keen editorship of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, and comprised of the contributions of many of the leading voices in the relational world, _Volume 5_ carries on the legacy of this rich and diversified psychoanalytic approach by taking a fresh look at the progress in therapeutic process. Included here are chapters on transference and countertransference, engagement, dissociation and self-states, (...) analytic impasses, privacy and disclosure, enactments, improvisation, development, and more. Thoughtful, capacious, and integrative, this new volume places the leading edge of relational thought close at hand, and pushes the boundaries of the relational turn that much closer to the horizon. Contributors: Lewis Aron, Anthony Bass, Beatrice Beebe, Philip Bromberg, Steven Cooper, Jody Messler Davies, Darlene Ehrenberg, Dianne Elise, Glen Gabbard, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Steven Knoblauch, Thomas Ogden, Spyros Orfanos, Stuart Pizer, Philip Ringstrom, Jill Salberg, Stephen Seligman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, Paul Wachtel. (shrink)

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently (...) of calculative reason—for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility. Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject—and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical—in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas? (shrink)

The Renaissance, known primarily for the art and literature that it produced, was also a period in which philosophical thought flourished. This two-volume anthology contains 40 new translations of important works on moral and political philosophy written during the Renaissance and hitherto unavailable in English. The anthology is designed to be used in conjunction with The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, in which all of these texts are discussed. The works, originally written in Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, cover (...) such topics as: concepts of man, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and Epicurean ethics, scholastic political philosophy, theories of princely and republican government in Italy and northern European political thought. Each text is supplied with an introduction and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

Jill North offers answers to questions at the heart of the project of interpreting physics. How do we figure out the nature of the world from a mathematically formulated theory? What do we infer about the world when a physical theory can be mathematically formulated in different ways? The notion of structure is crucial to North's answers.

This book, like the practice of medicine itself, is about the value of life. Health care is one of the clearest and most visible expressions of a society's ...

We are used to talking about the “structure” posited by a given theory of physics, such as the spacetime structure of relativity. What is “structure”? What does the mathematical structure used to formulate a theory tell us about the physical world according to the theory? What if there are different mathematical formulations of a given theory? Do different formulations posit different structures, or are they merely notational variants? I consider the case of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian classical mechanics. I argue that, (...) contrary to standard wisdom, these are not genuinely equivalent theories: they differ in statespace structure. I suggest that we should be realists about statespace structure. (shrink)

In this introductory textbook to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Jill Vance Buroker explains the role of this first Critique in Kant's Critical project and offers a line-by-line reading of the major arguments in the text. She situates Kant's views in relation both to his predecessors and to contemporary debates, explaining his Critical philosophy as a response to the failure of rationalism and the challenge of skepticism. Paying special attention to Kant's notoriously difficult vocabulary, she explains the strengths and (...) weaknesses of his arguments, while leaving the final assessment up to the reader. Intended to be read alongside the Critique, this guide is accessible to readers with little background in the history of philosophy, but should also be a valuable resource for more advanced students. (shrink)

Altered Reading will interest philosophers, literary critics, scholars of religion, and others drawn to Levinas's work.

This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ (...) from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. _Empathic Vision_ will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics. (shrink)

Written nearly fifty years ago, at a time when the world was still wrestling with the concepts of Marx and Lenin, 'The Illusion of the Epoch' is the perfect resource for understanding the roots of Marxism-Leninism and its implications for philosophy, modern political thought, economics, and history. As Professor Tim Fuller has written, this "is not an intemperate book, but rather an effort at a sustained, scholarly argument against Marxian views." Far from demonising his subject, Acton scrupulously notes where Marx's (...) account of historical and economic events and processes is essentially accurate. However, Acton also points out that Marx is generally right about things that were already widely known and accepted in his own time and indeed had been long understood in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Acton shows that in many cases Marx either is simply wrong or has stated his views so as to render his theories immune to disproof. Acton also explains why the embodiment of Marxist-Leninist theory in an actual social order would require coercive support if it were not, sooner or later, to collapse of its own contradictions. (shrink)

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. An (...) extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)