In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Mary C. RawlinsonShannon Hoff (bio)Mary C. Rawlinson, The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” New York: University Press, 2021, 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-19905-6Mary rawlinson shows that to be genuinely receptive to a philosophical text one must be creative, and she brings the Phenomenology of Spirit to (...) life with her reading. It speaks of and to experience, and she makes it resound as such, matching its aptitude with her own rich descriptions of the character of experience. The reader is bound to learn a lot from her careful and vivid analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, where she displays her power to digest a text that is almost impossibly unwieldy. Both students and scholars of Hegel’s philosophy will find satisfaction here: her book will spark understanding and excitement in inexperienced readers and hone approaches to complex issues of interpretation in experienced ones.Rawlinson opens The Betrayal of Substance with the provocative thesis that Hegel “writes with both hands” (xv). On the one hand, he affirms the abundance of difference in life by insisting on the material realization of the abstract concept, on the life of the singleton (her translation of das Einzelne) as the site of this realization, and on the difference intrinsic to identities (xiii). On the other hand, she says, he aims at a science of logic beyond phenomenology, where singularity has been erased and difference comprehended, such that “nothing is other to it”; this is “an unrelenting insistence on an absolute [End Page 225] detachment from life” (53). Rawlinson tracks this severance of concept and life throughout the Phenomenology: in the abandonment of sensuousness in sense-certainty; in the thing’s dissolution in perception; in “the ‘loss of reality’ of the play of forces”; in the struggle to the death, where self-consciousness “risks life absolutely” (66); in stoicism and skepticism, which “install an absolute difference between life and thought” (47). The life of the singleton is severed from the concept by the production (on the part of the unhappy consciousness) of “ethics, culture, morality, and religion as institutional infrastructures sustaining the self-transcendence of the singleton in the ‘we’ of a community” (66); by reason’s erasure of singularity in its accomplishment of a universal consciousness (68); by perpetual reference to the Bacchanalian revel, that “frenzy of the group that survives [the singleton’s] collapse” (xxx). (Indeed, one of the book’s contributions is its illumination of the prevalence of the image of the revel in Hegel’s text.)In response, Rawlinson asserts the need for a double reading of this double writing: (1) to affirm the capacious narrative that dislodges “ready-made abstractions” and engages the “thick richness of life,” because that is where the truth lies (xxix–xxx); and (2) to oppose Hegel’s “completion” of the phenomenological project and the departure from it to logic, and with it the erasure of the singleton. The book reflects the style of this double reading at each turn, in turns rebellious and appreciative, at ease with its own ambiguity toward Hegel. Rawlinson produces three central pieces of evidence for her critique, three “dangling threads [that] refuse to be woven into the completed fabric of absolute knowing[:] sexual difference, the mortality of the singleton,... and the differences of style in art and literature” (xv). Her critique of Hegel’s abandonment of life sets in relief the critical centrality of Hegel’s identification of maternal love as “the most dangerous force with which the state must contend” (68): this love is a clear instance of affirmation of the singleton over the “we” in which it is submerged. Finally, Rawlinson opposes the idea that truth is “the fully realized series of shapes of knowing and figures of truth” in which “science will have been the truth of phenomenology” with the hypothesis instead that “phenomenology will prove to have been the truth of science” (xliv).Itself beginning several times, The Betrayal of Substance thematizes Hegel’s multiple beginnings and the insight ref lected thereby... (shrink)

This article examines an innovative experiment in democratizing international broadcasting through embracing a participatory model of production. In spring 2010, a political debate television series was co-created by BBC Arabic and citizen producers, using social media tools. Based around interviews with prominent political and controversial public figures, the programme (G710) was broadcast weekly on satellite TV across the Middle East and the Arabic-speaking world. Combining collaborative ethnography with corporate ‘big data’ analysis, the research team followed the experiment from (...) conception to premature closure. The article argues that the kinds of digital tools deployed in producing the programme, and used by BBC audience research to monitor user practices in real time, have become essential to corporate processes of BBC World Service governance and management procedures, business strategy, accountability measures, marketing practices and editorial decision-making. They act as change agents, presenting methodological problems and opportunities for the BBC’s audience researchers and academic researchers, as well as symbolizing the contradictory logic of empowerment and surveillance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetics of Asian Art:The Study of Montien Boonma in the Undergraduate Education ClassroomMary Ann Maslak (bio)John Dewey, in his Experience and Nature, expounds on the developmental nature of human experience premised on the concept of qualitative propinquity—the integration and harmonization with the environment exemplifies the essence of experience. This principal line of reasoning shapes his fundamental argument in Art as Experience, one of Dewey's most significant educational works (...) used today.1 In it he argues that the roots of experience lie in the commonplace occurrences in the course of human life. The integration of the meaning and value drawn from previous and present circumstances results in an "experience," which, in turn, constitutes a foundation of learning for the individual. Dewey's ideas are not only appropriate but also useful in the field of education. In what ways may future teachers experience art? How does the experiential process of examining art contribute to future teachers' pedagogical tools that can be used to incorporate art into the elementary school classroom?This article demonstrates how an experiential study of a work of art in an undergraduate education course—part of the St. John's University/Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education (LCIAE) Higher Education Collaborative program in New York City—contributes to the pedagogical repertoire of process-based learning for teachers and their future students. The article begins by providing a theoretical background for the work, followed by the definitions of three concepts that are pertinent to this piece: aesthetic education, the experiential approach to learning, and process-based instruction.2 The article then focuses on the specific aims of the university's arts course, the LCIAE Partnership Program, and data and analyses from the process-based aesthetic learning for the students enrolled in the course. It ends with conclusions about aesthetic education. [End Page 67]Theoretical BackgroundAssuming the sociocultural nature of learning suggested by Dewey demands consideration of the layers of experience, it is necessary to discern the learners' emerging thoughts in light of various experiences. As a teacher, I subscribe to this belief and wanted to note how I could employ scaffolding practices to the aesthetic education learning experience for my undergraduate students. I aimed to accomplish this goal by scaffolding aesthetic experiences for students from their personal points of understanding, the university's classroom setting, and the context of museum exhibitions.Scaffolding instruction has a lengthy and persuasive history that provided the underpinning for my approach to the course.3 The intent of scaffolding is to help a learner undertake a task or goal that is beyond the learner's present level.4 Effective scaffolding encompasses a number of key features within cognitive and emotional domains.5 Cognitive elements include (1) selecting challenging activities for students; (2) monitoring their efforts; (3) using guiding questions to develop self-regulation; and (4) using indirect questioning strategies to extend and enhance the learning experience. Emotional support includes (1) structuring experiences to discourage frustration and encourage confidence; and (2) creating an atmosphere of comfort. While not all these features are applicable to scaffolding activities in an art education course of a university's teacher education program, I was mindful of their importance in structuring this course.Given that this course was my undergraduate students' initial exposure to aesthetic education, scaffolding served as an appropriate systematic pedagogical approach. In the words of Maxine Greene, aesthetic education is an intentional experience "designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts" by enabling the student to observe, analyze, and interpret meaning.6 In other words, it is the interactive study of the nature and expression of beauty. It seeks to enhance perception and affect, cognitive development, and personal growth by assuming that works of art provide an inexhaustible resource for exploration and reflection by the learner and an understanding based on the cultural context in which the artwork was created. Greene's philosophy, developed from the work of Dewey, posits that understanding a work of art is based on the active connection to and association with the piece. Therefore, the approach to its study is of the utmost importance.The experiential approach to learning is a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry by Joshua DiCaglioS. Scott GrahamScale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry. By Joshua DiCaglio. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 349 pp. Paperback: $30.00. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1207-9.Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no (...) less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick's account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic "allergy" to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory's attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, "Algorithms for a Theory of Scale," presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically [End Page 388] Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour's "Irreductions," (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio's theory of scale. Part 2, "Configurations for a Theory of Scale," returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, "Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale," reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio's theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader's consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the "'being' of phenomena" and "the one who is measuring" (8). He argues, therefore, that "scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things" (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that "science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups" (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues thatIn order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference.(51... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PrefaceMary Jacobus (bio)Trauma theory, considered as a branch of psychoanalysis, focuses on the lasting effects on the psyche of events that—whether because of their devastating nature or because the psyche is unprepared or too immature to deal with them—cannot be integrated into the onward movement of patient’s lives. The trauma can never be undone; but perhaps the patient may be helped to live with, even mourn, its aftereffects. (...) Some approaches to trauma emphasize the event itself, along with the difficulty, and the need, to relive or re-present it. Some emphasize the structural nature of a trauma which may even be constitutive of subjectivity (castration anxiety, for instance, or primitive anxieties about separation and object loss). Still other approaches point to the meaning of the trauma to the individual, arguing that only by exploring the preexisting constellation of object relations can the significance of the trauma to that particular individual be understood. Trauma may plunge the survivor into never completed mourning, or replace an ordinary guilt with an unresolvable one. Whatever the different inflection of trauma theory, it derives its contours from psychoanalysis, past and present, and, in particular, from the impact on Freud and his successors of some of the most devastating and momentous historical events of modern times, including modern warfare, the Holocaust, and industrialization. But trauma theory also takes account of events that happen (both chronically and diachronically, so to speak) in the intimacy of the family and in the ambiguously interpersonal and social dimensions of sexuality, where events intersect with issues involving gender, power, and powerlessness as well as with preexisting psychic structures.The essays in this collection arise not only from the continuing engagement with trauma theory on the part of psychoanalysts in their clinical and therapeutic work with patients, but from the surge of interest in trauma theory viewed as a way to invest the study of literature with urgent concerns, at once topical and timeless, and to understand literariness itself. A number of essays included in this special issue focus on the notion of the archive, whether viewed as a form of record which remains in abeyance (Jonathan Elmer’s starting point for considering Jefferson’s encounter with the Native American past) or as the place of a misunderstanding, even destructiveness (the point of departure for Herman Rapaport’s reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever). Appropriately, this issue also includes a photo-essay by Laurie Sieverts Snyder, which represents not only a family archive but a collection of memories that inscribe a larger historical displacement and relocation. The intertwined evolution of trauma theory and war neurosis, and the consequent unsexing of trauma, can give rise to a post-Freudian inquiry into the writing of anxiety (such as we see in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s reading of the war novels of Henry Green, where war “is” sex). At the same time, we can glimpse how the belatedness of trauma not only gets recoded as suspension or “falling” but gives rise to a philosophic discourse of trauma (see Eleanor Kaufman’s reading of Perec’s W together with Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience). Given its centrality to contemporary literary-critical readings of trauma, it is not surprising that a number of essays should address Cathy Caruth’s work directly (many of the essays included here also do so indirectly). Her writing remains central to current literary and theoretical discussions of trauma, whether viewed as a phenomenology of trauma (as it is, for instance, by Eleanor Kaufman) or as a vantage point from which to define the modern predicament of mutually entangled histories, communities, and writings (this is how Petar Ramadanovic links Freud’s diasporic movement to the history of slavery and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). [End Page 3]The final section of this special issue returns trauma to the consulting room. Essays on pain (Mary Jacobus on the place of psychoanalysis “between” therapy and hermeneutics as represented by the writings of Wifred Bion) and melancholia (Angelika Rauch’s Kristevan essay on post-traumatic hermeneutics and problems in contemporary trauma therapy) pay particular attention to the question of interpretation in psychoanalysis. They also shift the discussion in the direction of contemporary post... (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of (...) the themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of time, (...) describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry by Joshua DiCaglioS. Scott GrahamScale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry. By Joshua DiCaglio. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 349 pp. Paperback: $30.00. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1207-9.Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no (...) less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick's account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic "allergy" to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory's attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, "Algorithms for a Theory of Scale," presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically [End Page 388] Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour's "Irreductions," (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio's theory of scale. Part 2, "Configurations for a Theory of Scale," returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, "Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale," reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio's theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader's consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the "'being' of phenomena" and "the one who is measuring" (8). He argues, therefore, that "scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things" (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that "science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups" (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues thatIn order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference.(51... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Communities of Musical Practice by Ailbhe KennyFrank HeuserAilbhe Kenny Communities of Musical Practice ( New York: Routledge, 2016)When struggling in the confines of a practice room to overcome a technical difficulty on an instrument or explore different ways to shape a phrase, music learning can be a solitary and seemingly lonely enterprise. In such settings it is easy to assume that personal effort is the primary contributor to (...) an individual's musical expertise. Cognitive scientists steven sloman and Philip Fernbach1 argue against this view of human learning and suggest that much of what we know and accomplish results from working and living with others in a rich community of socially generated knowledge rather than by relying only on own efforts. This implies that the ability to develop sophisticated understandings in a discipline depends more on working collectively with others with whom we can share the labors of our cognitive efforts than on individual processes. This lends credence to the concept of learning in "communities of practice" that emerged during the 1990s.2Researchers have embraced this concept in music education and investigated the learning and relationships that develop in musical communities. June Countryman3 and N. Whitaker4 both examined how such communities impact learners in school-based music instructional settings. Deborah V. Blair developed [End Page 214] a professional development program for novice music educators that evolved into a community of practice.5 such communities offer members a place for identity formation and facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge in the discipline that is refined through active participation in meaningful learning experiences. In her book, Communities of Musical Practice, Ailbhe Kenny examines three music learning communities based in Limerick, Ireland and develops a model for community of practice that is specific to musical settings. This model can inform researchers investigating the fields of music education and community music. although it was not designed as a study in music education philosophy, the book is an example of excellent philosophical practices. as Wayne Bowman and ana Lucia Frega have suggested, if philosophy seeks to make "action more intelligent, more informed, more congruent with responsibly held beliefs,"6 Communities of Musical Practice offers a case study of the kind of reflective thinking that is central to philosophical practice. It is an example of how applying a reflective process to research data might provide the profession with both practical and philosophical insights.The book consists of seven chapters which are divided into three major sections. Part I, a Place for Communities of Musical Practice, defines communities of musical practice and describes the methodologies employed in the study. Part II, Illustrations of Communities of Musical Practices, offers case studies of three communities of musical practice that provide readers with examples of how the paradigm can be applied to investigate contrasting settings. Part III, Insights from Communities of Musical Practice, which summarizes the communities of musical practice framework, presents a model of how collective knowledge through common experiences contributes to senses of belonging, identity, and meaning-making and offers suggestions for nurturing these communities and developing policies that might contribute to increasing group music-making opportunities in communities. Following a review of these chapters, examples are given of how philosophical insights might be derived from this type of research.The central research question informing the work presented in the book is: How are communities of musical practice developed and sustained in practice?"7 This fundamental issue is refined through a series of sub-questions relating to the actual practices taking place within these communities of musical practices, the variety of relationships, actions, behaviors and experiences that are present within them, and the ways musical identities are created within and informed through participation in them. In Part I, Kenny develops a theoretical framework for examining communities of music practice by drawing from philosophy of practice, socio-cultural studies, and research in both education and music education which is based primarily on the writings of Bourdieu, Blacking, and Wenger. In particular, she employs etienne Wenger's framework of mutual engagement, [End Page 215] joint enterprise, and shared repertoire (or practices)8 as a scaffold to analyze and interpret "'situated' and collaborative musical... (shrink)

Berkeley is best known for his immaterialism and the texts that extol it—the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. He made his case by treatise, then by dialogue, and this tendency towards stylistic experimentation did not end there; this paper explores an early speculative fiction project that pursued his theological and philosophical agendas. Berkeley used satire to challenge his “freethinking” philosophical opponents in “The Pineal Gland” story published in The Guardian in 1713. Echoing the grand (...) tours Berkeley undertook in subsequent years, Part 1 offers a “gland tour” of some literary motivations, influences and legacies of these essays. Berkeley pursues heroic themes from Homer and Alexander Pope, while lampooning the philosophies of both Descartes and the freethinkers. Armed with the device of a magic snuff that transports him to the pineal glands of his adversaries, Berkeley's protagonist uses it “to distinguish the real from the professed sentiments of all persons of eminence in court, city, town, and country”. (Guardian, p. 187) Part 1 examines ‘The Pineal Gland’ in the context of Berkeley's broader philosophical legacy and the text's significant engagement with the literature of Homer and Pope, concluding that “The Pineal Gland” is an important but overlooked source in the history of early speculative fiction. Part 2 continues this analysis by exploring Berkeley's relationship with an expansive London literary circle, interrogating a line of influence beginning with the writing of Margaret Cavendish. In doing so, Part 2 also examines Berkeley's complex attitudes towards women. (shrink)

A volume in the International Library of the Philosophy of Education under the general editorship of R. S. Peters, which will both interest and repay close study by epistemologists and philosophers of language, as well as philosophers of education. The book concerns concept formation and the growth of knowledge, i.e., as the general editor of the series writes, "the genesis of knowledge and not just the logical properties of its outcome." The book is divided into two parts: in the (...) first, Hamlyn, employing a Piagetian framework and terminology, examines first the classical empiricist account of the genesis of knowledge, which, after Piaget, he strictures as "genesis without structure." This account fails to explain the existence of intersubjective agreement. Then Hamlyn goes on to examine the rival rationalist account, which he strictures as "structure without genesis." Here, the failure is that there is no good account of how knowledge even gets started. Finally, Hamlyn examines an account of the growth of knowledge to which he is more sympathetic; that of the French psychologist, Piaget: "structure with genesis." Hamlyn finds striking similarities between the Piagetian theory and that of Kant, but, in the end, this account has a fatal flaw as well. Indeed, according to Hamlyn, all three accounts really fail for the same basic cause, viz., their account of knowledge is too egocentric, and "they all start from the same starting point, the individual set against his environment." In the second part of the book, Hamlyn sets out his own view, the object of which is to correct the egocentric view of knowledge which undermines the traditional theories and even their more modern versions, in Chomsky as the representative of Rationalism, and Piaget, as the Kantian representative. Here Hamlyn argues that knowledge would be impossible without what Wittgenstein called "agreement in judgments" and then argues that this implies common reactions, attitudes, wants, and interests, in relation to the world. Finally, Hamlyn proceeds to apply this "social view" of knowledge and understanding to the acquisition of both in the case of the child. In the course of doing so, he relates the acquisition of knowledge and understanding in the child to the child’s acquisition of language. In the course of his discussion, Hamlyn has interesting things to say about a wide variety of topics such as "non-epistemic seeing" and the relations between knowledge and understanding. In addition he provides illuminatingly critical discussions of the main ideas of Piaget and Chomsky; and although most philosophers are persuaded that they should become familiar with the ideas of the latter, Hamlyn makes out a good case that philosophers ought to start to think about the work of the former as well. All of this is done in a pleasingly straightforward way, devoid of any tiresome literary conceits. (shrink)

In this essay I revisit the two most famous thought experiments in the cognitive sciences of the twentieth century: the Turing test and the Chinese Room scenario. Dealing a series of death blows to the latter, I argue that Turing’s famous test has been largely misunderstood by generations of analysts. Rather than an analytical definition of machine thinking, it is an inductive protocol for generating inferential evidence about machine thinking. In the second part of the essay I take an evolutionary (...) route to inquire into machines’ potential for being creative, leading me to several conclusions about the nature of human and machine art. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

This book, formed as a series of essays in honour of Professor Carl Baudenbacher, addresses the very art of judicial reasoning, and features contributions from many of the foremost current or former national, supranational, or international judges. This unique volume is intended first and foremost for legal scholars, but its approachable style makes it readily accessible for students and for those with a general interest in the application of the law and justice in today's multi-layered world. The collection of essays (...) is rather more philosophical and reflective as opposed to doctrinal. Each contribution focuses on the nature and operation of justice, the independence of the judiciary, and on judicial style primarily from the perspective of the judges themselves. The book provides perspectives on what it means to be accountable and independent as a judge, the role of language and languages in the quest for justice, while other contributions acquaint readers with the some of the structures of courts themselves, or indeed question for whom judgments are written. Each chapter has been written by a presiding judge, or head of an institution and the book is divided into three parts: - Part I Art and Method - Part II Justice and the Judiciary - Part III Reasoning and Language(s). (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none of us (...) in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to rethink the interconnectedness between discourse and subjective agency and to highlight methodological approaches to studies of gendering processes as a central part of it. The notions of desire, subjectification and biography are understood as mediated by narratives and metaphors, as a movement between the individual and her contexts. The transformative methodological project suggests conceptual retoolings as new analytic approaches to empirical analysis of the kind that aims to provide complex understanding of subjectification processes in (...) lived life. The empirical field brought into the article as a means of explication deals with university cultures, and more specifically with a case of an assistant professor caught in conflicts between official academic discourses and more subtle political and gendered discourses. The author takes the concepts of desire trajectories, discursive authority, multifaceted discursive realities and past experiences into an analysis of the enacting forces involved in the processes of exclusion that finally ejects the protagonist in the empirical case from the university field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of Compassion: Visualizing (...) Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

What are the primary characteristics that define what it means to be human? And what happens to those characteristics in the face of technology past, present, and future? The three essays in Image, by leading philosophers of religion Mark Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas Carlson, play at this intersection of the human and the technological, building out from Heidegger's notion that humans master the world by picturing or representing the real.Taylor's essay traces a history of capitalism, dwelling on the lack (...) of humility, particularly in the face of our own mortality, that is the persistent failure of humans, before turning to art as a possible way to bring us back to earth and recover humility before it is too late. Rubenstein zeroes in on the delusions of imaginative conquest associated with space travel. Through a genealogy of the modern "view from space" from the iconic Earth rise photo of 1968 up to the new privatized American space race, Rubenstein provides an analysis of the perils of the one-world and the false unity it projects. In his essay, Carlson takes as his starting point the surveillance capitalism of facial recognition technology. He dives deep into Heidegger to meditate on the elimination of individuals through totalizing gestures and the relationship between such elimination and our encounters with mortality. Each of these essays, in its own way, reflects on the nature of imagination, the character of technological vision in contemporary culture, and the implications of these for the kinds of sociality and love that condition our human experience. (shrink)

During the mid 1980s, the renowned American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman produced a four-part series of films that sought to record the operations of institutions in Talladega, Alabama, devoted to the care and training of people with disabilities. These films—designated as the Multi-handicapped Series—have received much less attention than Wiseman's earlier work, as if films about disability mark a drastic departure from his previous award-winning productions, such as Titicut Follies (1965) and Hospital (1970). The Multi-handicapped Series takes up general (...) categories of disabled populations as discrete documentary topics, Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986) and Adjustment & Work (1986) as opposed to a specific location as in his earlier films. As a result, the latter series of films identify social and interpersonal structures developed in the name of specific conditions. Like Foucault's research on disciplinary tactics, Wiseman's films seek out many of the segregated social spaces typically occupied by persons classified as deviant: prisons, hospitals, charity networks, sheltered workshops, resident facilities, and vocational training structures. The Multi-handicapped Series focuses on the activities of professions and practitioners in education, administration, and therapy, as well as the institutional roles designed for bodies marked as disabled. Unlike its 19th century predecessor classification, feebleminded, the latter twentieth century U.S. policy answer has been waged as a matter of dividing disabilities into a binary structure of orthopedic or cognitive categories. Such a development has left many crossover bodies in a diagnostic no-body's-land. To analyze the history of these developments, this essay recognizes the formation of today's disability category as an effect of new regimes of power; a form of domination based upon the application of particularized diagnostic pathologies that provide the basis for cordoning off bodies which fail to fit neatly within the cognitive/orthopedic binary. As documents of the social spaces that are occupied by disabled people, Wiseman's films offer a rare contemplation of institutional practices and their application to populations viewed as nonnormative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Incorporating Religion into Psychiatry:Evidenced–Based Practice, Not a Bioethical DilemmaMary D. MollerFor over sixteen years I was the owner and clinical director of an advanced practice nurse–managed outpatient rural psychiatric clinic staffed by APNs, a social worker, a licensed counselor and several graduate students. Many of our patients were victims of severe and often brutal trauma and abuse suffered at the hands of family, friends, and various professionals including (...) spiritual leaders. We also uncovered sources of abuse suffered from those involved in occult practices ranging from seemingly innocent white witchcraft (Wicca, Paganism, New Age) that includes such activities as astral projection and remote viewing to the darkest possible black witchcraft (perpetrating evil, incanting evil spirits, casting spells and hexes, creating dissociative identities) such as occurs in ritual abuse and satanic rites. Both types of witchcraft also typically involved family, friends, various professionals, and spiritual leaders. Recognizing the controversy surrounding the reality of witchcraft I am sharing a story that I hope will help break down the barriers that prevent many patients from receiving the treatment that would provide the most benefit to recovery.Seeking services for these patients led me on an intense personal and professional journey that included a profound Christian born–again experience at almost 50 years of age. My professional career grew in nearly indescribable terms as a result of the incorporation of prayer and deliverance ministry as part of the services we selectively provided. Today I always include assessment of spiritual experiences a patient has as well as spiritual supports that are available with every new patient intake. For patients who indicate that prayer is one of their supports, I ask if they would like prayer at the conclusion of the session. The gratitude that is expressed by individuals who appreciate being able to pray with a psychiatric provider is often profound.In the field of psychiatry there has been a long–standing and distinct taboo regarding incorporating religious and spiritual aspects of life experience into treatment unless it is to frame most of these discussions within the context of psychosis. This stems from the advent of psychoanalysis in which religion was deemed a neurosis and atheism became the goal. Some still hold to that belief and there certainly remains controversy regarding the incorporation of prayer into routine outpatient or inpatient care. The essential starting point is the determination of accurate differential diagnosis, which can often be a lengthy process. The clinician must be careful about distinguishing between religious experiences and religious delusions, and often this takes time to sort out. The determination of the etiology of hearing the voice of God or the devil or demons must be carefully parsed and framed within the context of the situation and culture the patient describes. If the clinician denies the existence of God or the devil or demons or the practice of witchcraft, the patient’s descriptions of such experiences will be quickly [End Page 206] labeled psychotic. The patient may then experience a lengthy hospitalization and treatment with psychotropic medications that can have an extremely negative effect on the possibility of recovery. Once I witnessed the level of healing that occurs with carefully administered spiritual interventions that are related to specific spiritual experiences that are based on the patient’s belief system, there was no going back to using only allopathic medication and non–spiritual psychosocial interventions, even in spite of the criticisms from others. The key is to understand and respect the patient’s belief system, if this is not congruent with the practitioner’s belief system, then practitioner must refer out.In the United States, an increasing persecution of Christianity and a devaluing of the Judeo–Christian heritage of our Constitution are creating a climate of intolerance to the expression of religious values resulting in an expectation that Christians should compromise their beliefs for the sake of political correctness. As a doctorally prepared psychiatric–mental health advanced practice nurse I experienced a profound born–again Christian experience that ultimately led to study of the Hebrew roots of Christianity and I now worship in a Messianic Jewish synagogue. It is impossible for me to not include the concept of spirituality into... (shrink)

Barely seventeen years into the twenty-first century, our world continues to be plagued by endless wars and violence. Africa is not immune from these crises. As many countries in Africa celebrate more than fifty years of independence from colonial rule, Africa is still the poorest continent in the world. Religious wars, genocides, ethnic and tribal cleansings have come to define the continent’s contemporary history. Corruption, nepotism, dictatorship, disregard for human life, tribalism, and many social vices are normalized realities in (...) many parts of the continent. Rather than despair, a radical refocusing on Africa’s rich history of hospitality that affirms the flourishing of all life ought to be embraced. This article aims to do exactly this by exploring Africa’s role and place in the history of three Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While celebrating Africa’s unique role as the gateway for the realization of divine hospitality, this article aims to serve as a witness to an ethic of life that is relevant for the global church’s vision and mission to a pluralistic world and for the mission of the churches of Africa to addressing the social, cultural, and political crises faced by the continent. To achieve these, this work appropriates a comparative theological method that sheds light on the centrality of Africa in these three Abrahamic religions with a bias for the flourishing of life. Keywords: Africa, Hospitality, Life, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. (shrink)

We’d like to do a little hypnosis on you. Imagine that you’re ensconced in your own family room, your study, or your queen-sized bed. Settling back, you pick up the remote, flick on the TV, and naturally you turn to PBS. This is what you hear:Host 1: Good evening. Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre. Because Alistair Cooke is away on assignment in Alaska, we’ve agreed to host the show tonight, and that’s both a pleasure and a privilege because our program this (...) evening marks the beginning of a fascinating new series, a first on television: Masterpiece Theatre will present you with a docudrama entitled “Masterpiece Theatre.”Host 2: Like “The First Churchills,” this show analyzes the situation of real-life people—tonight, people in the academy. Names have not been changed to protect either the innocent or the guilty, but all the situations are fictive and at times words that may never have been spoken are put into the mouths of people who did not speak them. Other lines, however, are direct quotations from various written sources, although none of the characters, as we depict them, should be confused with any “actual” persons, whether or not those persons would scribe to the idea of their own reality. Like “Upstairs/Downstairs,” this program will introduce you to a spectrum of characters from many walks of life. What’s different about tonight’s episode, though, is that all these characters have passionate opinions about the show itself. Why, the very idea of Masterpiece Theatre drives some of them to Guerrilla Theatre, others to Theatre of the Absurd. Yes, you’ve always already guessed it: we focus tonight on a drama involving what we used to call humanists—now for some a dirty word—and most of our characters are in deep trouble. Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and Susan Gubar, professor of English at Indiana University, are coauthors of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words and Volume II: Sexchanges , the first installments of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 17-29 [Access article in PDF] Intersections Form, Feeling, and Isomorphism Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette These three concepts hold meanings that differ among musicians and aestheticians. In this essay I shall explore them in the writings of Susanne Langer. Contemporary musicians and aestheticians continue today to engage Langer albeit some favorably and others with disdain. Whatever their reasons, she (...) remains a dominant force in the philosophy of music.1 My purpose is not to defend her against her detractors, but rather to examine and to elucidate various aspects of these three concepts in her writing, as they are fundamental to an understanding of her aesthetic theory and to the construction of a philosophy of music and music education.First, I consider the broad and complex notion of form and the various ways Langer employs it in her aesthetic theory. Next, the rather all-encompassing idea of feeling as Langer conceives it is studied in relation to the form of the musical work. The intersection of form and feeling in the concept of isomorphism concludes the discussion. [End Page 17] Form In her various writings Langer uses several adjectives associated with the word "form" which seem to organize well into three groups. The first concerns the dynamic, living, organic, and vital qualities of form; the second speaks to its logical and abstract nature; and the last relates to the emotional or feeling aspect of form including expressive and significant characteristics.2 These groupings overlap and intertwine, but focusing on each specifically rather than all as a totality offers important insights.Form as dynamic, living, organic, and vital suggests metaphorical reference. Obviously the form is not physically, biologically, alive; reference is to the apparent movement, growth, and aliveness of the musical form as it is heard or performed. Thus this idea of form implies an actual performance to be realized or perceived. Langer is sometimes criticized for giving little attention to the actual making of music, that is, performance, yet her theory assumes music as heard. Essential to perceiving a dynamic form or hearing a feeling is a processual event, namely, performance or listening to a performance. Rarely a professional musician or gifted amateur might be able to engage this concept of form by reading through a score and hearing the music in imagination.Dynamic form parallels Eduard Hanslick's notion of tonend bewegte Formen. One might object that Hanslick and Langer are in conflict as Hanslick opposes while Langer supports the conviction that form is expressive of feeling, but that is moving beyond the matter at hand and suggests a superficial reading of both Hanslick and Langer. Hanslick asserts emphatically that music's meaning is not the arousal of emotion but does not deny feeling in music; Langer holds the same view. But Hanslick allows that "the words content and form are used not in the purely logical, but in an artistic sense." To me this suggests that he recognizes a nonliteral or metaphorical interpretation. He writes about the relationship of musical tones as "fraught with significance... congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and subsiding-this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner contemplation and pleases us as beautiful." Certainly this parallels Langer's description of dynamic form.3 What is significant is that both philosophers are addressing the fluid, processual, active, movement-of-notes-through-time nature of musical form.The premise that forms are created by motion, are dynamic, is easily grasped by offering some examples. Fast cameras are able to take a series of photos of the movements of a pianist's hands giving still pictures of the moving forms created while performing a given passage.4 Alternately, forms are created by the movements of clouds or fog through the mist and early light; they are, in effect, quite literally moving forms. Cartoon characters generate moving forms through the [End Page 18] use of many drawings or more recently by means of computer animation. Time is a dynamic or moving form which we divide into hours... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics ed. by Christian Scharen and Anna Marie VigenJohn KiessEthnography as Christian Theology and Ethics Edited by Christian Scharen and Anna Marie Vigen New York: Continuum, 2011. 304 pp. $29.95Over the past decade, an increasing number of Christian theologians and ethicists have turned to ethnographic methodologies in order to attend more closely to the complexities of lived faith and the bodily character of (...) theological knowledge. For those wishing to get a glimpse of what this looks like in practice, what its implications might be for theology and ethics, and how one might set off and do it oneself, this book is an excellent introduction.Editors Christian Scharen and Aana Marie Vigen organize the book into three parts. The first part orients readers to the use of ethnography in cultural anthropology and reviews the recent “ethnographic turn” in Christian theology and ethics. This is followed by a brief survey of theological critiques of social science and a defense of ethnography against these critiques. Scharen and Vigen argue that the use of ethnography, far from compromising the integrity of theology, has the potential to renew and enrich the discipline through the incorporation of long-overlooked forms of local wisdom. As a method attuned to practical, often noncognitive forms of knowledge, ethnography can help scholars move away from an exclusive focus on texts to a deeper consideration of the theological and ethical claims “embedded and embodied” in the lives and practices of everyday communities (xxii). [End Page 190]Naturally, the best argument for such an approach is exemplification. The second part of the book presents an impressive collection of ethnographic work from contexts as diverse as Chicago, Atlanta, Oregon, Chiapas, Nairobi, and Gulu. Contributors employ ethnography to compare pastoral leadership in two African American churches, track grassroots dissent on the issue of contraception among women living with HIV/AIDS, and reimagine the debate on physician-assisted suicide from the perspective of the poor and disabled. Particularly effective are Vicini’s exploration of the liturgical response of local churches to the legacy of violence in Chiapas and Whitmore’s critical examination of his own place as a white researcher in Northern Uganda, which makes hauntingly transparent the ethical complexities of the research process itself.The final part of the book offers a more practical how-to guide for those looking to do ethnography, covering such issues as institutional review board approval, interview methodology, and accountability to research subjects. This part, like the rest of the book, will be a gift for graduate students facing down a dissertation proposal or scholars contemplating the use of ethnography in their work. Admirably reflexive, vigilantly attentive to issues of power and privilege, and articulate about the ways that research can be a form of discipleship, one can only hope this book will succeed in its aim of encouraging other scholars to “go and do likewise.”Those who have already incorporated ethnographic techniques in their scholarship or who are looking for a fuller articulation of the relation between ethnography, ethics, and theology may find themselves less satisfied with the book. Its treatment of existing options (virtue ethics, Catholic social ethics) and thinkers (David Ford, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank) is thin, and a number of key figures in the broader story of the ethnographic turn in theology (Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans Frei) are conspicuously missing. Their absence is felt particularly strongly in the unanswered questions the volume provokes, including how to account for God’s difference when appeals to experience become primary (Barth), and how to avoid positivism when appeals to the “reality” of the church become the point of departure for ecclesiology (Bonhoeffer).Such provocations, however, are reminders that we are still at the very early stages of the ethnographic turn in Christian theology and ethics. If this volume is any indication, the future of this exciting intersection of thought and practice looks very promising indeed. [End Page 191]John KiessLoyola University MarylandCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Emotions are an everyday occurrence. Much work has been done into what the point of emotion is and what part emotions might play in our lives. The great impact emotions have on our lives means it’s not surprising that great philosophers have studied them over the centuries. Anger is an emotion that we encounter every day and most of us are very familiar with. Anger is a response to some ‘wrongfully’ inflicted damage to someone or something that one cares (...) about. When this happens, it is natural for us to feel the need for ‘payback. It is generally agreed by most philosophers that this wish for retribution is a key part of feeling anger. If there is no wish for retribution in your mind when you think you experience anger then perhaps you are experiencing grief or some other emotion. Nussbaum states that anger is a central threat to decent human interactions and posits that a necessary component of anger is the wish for retribution. She states that a wish for retribution can occur independently of anger but anger cannot occur independently of a wish for retribution. In this case – we would be feeling different emotion. This paper has two sections; In section One I will discuss in detail Nussbaum’s view, the two concepts of anger she presents: ‘Payback Anger’ and ‘Status Anger’. The former being anger with a retributive element and the latter being where one would react to an insult or wrong with anger in order to ‘put someone back in their place’ so to speak. This is followed by a brief word on why Nussbaum thinks anger might be beneficial in some circumstances. Section Two discusses cases of anger without the retributive element and how Nussbaum might respond to these cases. We will see how we can be angry at something within our circle of concern but simply want an end to the issue such as a war. This may not involve retribution but still generates anger. I discuss how we can be angry at a flatmate or family member but not want retribution. “Self-Retributive anger” comes up as another case where there does not seem to be retribution involved in anger towards the self. I also discuss here what retribution might consist of and how Nussbaum’s view is unclear on this. The conclusion will summarise the objections to Nussbaum’s view and the objections to that view culminating in a request for further empirical research to determine if we can establish the nature of the feeling of anger in humans. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Human beings pass through a series of life stages since birth. These stages beginning at the infancy even in the mother’s womb are accompanied with a period extending to the senescence and the last stages of the life. Creation of human beings and various stages of the life are mentioned in the Qurʾān. Besides, it is referred to the senescence. In addition to the expressions sheikh, shayb, ʽajūz and kibar indicating to the senescence, ardhal al-ʿumur is also pointed out in (...) the Qurʾān in this regard. This article aims to identify in which context and meaning the wording regarding ardhal al-ʿumur and senescence are used in the Qurʾān and to reveal the relation between these terms. Since, the term ardhal al-ʿumur and senile dementia are directly correlated in the commentaries usually and the interpretations build the perception that these two expressions are almost synonyms. Are ardhal al-ʿumur and dementia closely associated with each other? Are the other terms in the Qurʾān indicating to the senescence correlated with the dementia? Our study aims to explain the expression ardhal al-ʿumur in the Qurʾān in this regard. Furthermore, the other terms regarding the senescence expressed in the Qurʾān are reviewed in this respect. SUMMARY The Qurʾān tells the creation of human beings and refers to the various stages of their lives as well. The explanations beginning with the creation state the prenatal period, infancy and childhood, adolescence and adulthood of human beings. The Qurʾān refers to the senescence as well, the last stage of the life. In this regard, ardhal al-ʿumur, sheikh, shayb, ʽajūz and kibar are the terms in the Qurʾān associated with the senescence. Especially nowadays, the senescence is a considerable focus of the science, besides being mentioned in the Qurʾān. This article discusses the subject scientifically as well. The senescence is defined with various aspects since it expresses a period having physical, psychological and social dimensions. Furthermore, certain classifications regarding the senescence are made and physiological changes associated with the chronological age are more emphasized. It has been indicated that the senescence is divided into two: biological and chronological aging. According to this chronological aging is the same for everyone while biological aging varies from individual to individual. The senescence is acknowledged as the last development stage of the human life in terms of social sciences and considered as an on-going universal process between birth and death. Therefore, the senescence is interpreted relatively while the aging is interpreted universally. So, everyone gets old; however, the senescence means a life period varying from individual to individual. The senescence affects the individual both health-wise and psychologically, sociologically and economically. In other words; the senescence, a tough period, is a phenomenon which deeply affects the human beings and all their characteristics making them exist. The senescence is addressed in the Qurʾān with various expressions. Ardhal al-ʿumur, foremost among these, is mentioned twice in the Qurʾān (al-Nakhl 16/70, al-Ḥac 22/5). The exegetes generally consider ardhal al-ʿumur as the physiological exhaustion of an individual due to aging and as the period when dementia is experienced. The characteristics of the stage called as ardhal al-ʿumur in the Qurʾān are explained with the following statement: turning into a person who does not know anything from the person who used to know many things. Just because of this sentence, ardhal al-ʿumur is construed with dementia. Are arzali’l-ʽumur and dementia directly interrelated? This article also reviews the other terms stated in the Qurʾān regarding the senescence from this aspect. Sheikh, another expression stated in the Qurʾān regarding the senescence, is mentioned four times (Hūd 11/72, Yūsuf 12/78, al-Qaṣaṣ 28/23, al-Muʼmin 40/67) and it is described with the word kabīr in two of them. The lexical meaning of sheikh is an old person in terms of age and appearance. Moreover, sheikh is used as an adjective to describe the individuals who have wisdom in customs. So, the word sheikh both means an individual who is well on in life and is the expression of supremacy in terms of knowledge and experience. Shayb, another expression stated in the Qurʾān regarding the senescence, is mentioned three times (Maryam 19/4, al-Rūm 30/54, al-Muzzammil 73/17) and means hair greying and describes a physiological change in the senescence. ʽAjūz stated in the Qurʾān for the senescence is mentioned in four different chapters (Hūd 11/72, al-Shuʽarā’ 26/171, al-Ṣāffāt 37/135, al-Dhāriyāt 51/29) and expresses incapacity of performing many actions. ʽAjūz is another expression in the Qurʾān meaning elderliness. The senescence is implied with this expression too; however, the dementia is not mentioned. Kibar, the last wording associated with the senescence, is mentioned in six verses (al-Baqara 2/266; Āl-i-ʽImrān 3/40, Ibrāhim 14/39, al-Hicr 15/54, al-Isrā 17/23, Maryam 19/8). The word kibar means the senescence and physical power loss; nevertheless, is not interpreted as dementia. To our knowledge, the explanations regarding the senescence and dementia in most of the commentaries cannot be corresponded in the Qurʾān as if they are synonyms. This perception can be generated due to the statements pointing out the dementia in the lexical meaning of ardhal al-ʿumur. It is understood in the light of the data acquired by today’s science that the dementia is not a natural result of the senescence but rather one of its risks, which is already proved by the fact that the science discusses the dementia separately from normal aging process. Therefore, there is not a general picture of dementia including all elders. Thus, it is possible to define ardhal al-ʿumur as a later part of life which includes some elders and affects them physiologically, psychologically, sociologically, etc., in addition, they lose their mental faculties in that period. Each expression regarding the senescence in the Qurʾān reveals the picture of the senescence pursuant to the integrity of the Qurʾān. The senescence in the Qurʾān is an ineluctable reality. The fact that this period is clearly expressed in the verses aims that this reality can be perceived by human beings and they can be prepared for this period. Some problems that elders experience are also mentioned in the Qurʾān. When the other terms in the Qurʾān associated with the senescence apart from ardhal al-ʿumur are reviewed, it is seen that the aforementioned problems that may be observed at later ages are hair greying, bone diseases, incapability and weakness in doing some actions. Today, there are various disciplines concerning the elders and the information obtained from these disciplines shows that these problems are a lot more than the ones mentioned in the Qurʾān. However, it is not expected that the Qurʾān discusses the facts as a science book since it is a holy book. When ardhal al-ʿumur is evaluated in the light of scientific data, it appears as a sickness period when some elders experience mental problems such as dementia/blackout. On the one hand, there will be elders who experience these problems; on the other hand, there will be some who do not. All expressions regarding the senescence in the Qurʾān do not lead to the fact that the aging leads to the dementia directly. Ardhal al-ʿumur within the integrity of the Qurʾān expresses that senile dementia affects some individuals while it has not any impact on the others. Therefore, ardhal al-ʿumur is one of the life stages affecting not every elder but some of them. The fact that different terms are stated in the Qurʾān regarding the elders points out various aspects of the aging process creating different effects. The second important reason why the aging is mentioned in the Qurʾān is to emphasize the value of the elders and the respect that should be showed to them. Besides, it is also underlined in the Qurʾān that the elders are so precious that they cannot be left alone socially and psychologically. Furthermore, the elders are the individuals worthy of love and being valued. Thus, it is suggested in the Qurʾān to love, respect and honour the elders and to live with them regardless of whether they will experience ardhal al-ʿumur or not. Therefore, the human beings are reminded to look after the elders, esteem them materially and morally, as they deserve, and to act considering the characteristics of this period. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate how we may include investigations of actual context in the investigation of moral problems in philosophy. The article has three main parts. The focus of the first is a survey of the dominant view of how to incorporate context into moral philosophy and to exemplify this view, I investigate examples from influential introductions to moral philosophy, identifying what I call the assumption of abstraction. In the second part I present three traditions which attribute a (...) more prominent place to context in philosophical work and which therefore offer resources for thinking about context: moral contextualism, particularism and contextualism in political philosophy. Unconvinced that these resources are sufficient for an understanding of how actual context may be of importance in philosophy, I in the third part turn to a systematic investigation of three suggestions for how to incorporate actual context onto philosophy: the application approach, the bottom-up approach and the contextual approach. Furthermore, I argue that the third and most radical approach develops a superior understanding of how to include context in moral philosophy, reflecting the impossibility of making normatively neutral investigations of context in moral philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Asura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist PathKenneth K. TanakaAsura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist Path. By Dennis Hirota. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006. 156 pp.In Asura’s Harp, Hirota focuses on the Pure Land Buddhist thought of Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of Jōdo Shinshō school and one of the major figures of Japanese Buddhism. I believe Hirota’s main argument of the book is succinctly expressed on its back cover (...) blurb: “Unlike monastic traditions that seek the eradication of delusional attachments through transcendence of ordinary thought and speech, Shinran teaches that human existence is inevitably characterized by linguisticality and that the genuinely practicable path to realization lies in engagement with language.” For Hirota, language plays a central role in the religious transformative experience called Shinjin, considered a genuine awareness of the self and the world. This way of understanding religious language goes against the dominant view, especially that of Zen with its proverbial “beyond words” approach 1 and contemporary Buddhist discussions on language as being limited and even false.In the prologue of the book, Hirota points out the growing convergence in the Buddhist outlook and the current interest in Western thought. Both traditions see that “persons are not autonomous agents making judgments and initiating actions independently of others, their past, and their location in society and history” (p. 2). Instead, humans are now seen to be situated in particular temporal and spatial circumstances, with its attendant limitations, prejudices, and finitude. In terms of language, this realization has led to a shift in Western thought from metaphysical to hermeneutical concerns, thus resonating with Buddhism’s view of ordinary language [End Page 182] as “inevitably warped by attachments and informed by falsely reifying conceptualization” (p. 2).At the same time both traditions recognize the adaptive use of language, as seen especially in the Buddhist conception of “skillful means,” to provide guidance to self-realization and awareness. This, Hirota believes, offers an opportunity for a dialogue between contemporary Western thought and Buddhism.With this as the backdrop, Hirota sets out to clarify the nature and significance of language in Shin Pure Land thought with an intent to contribute to this broader discussion of religious language across religious and cultural boundaries, a formidable task for any scholar. However, there is no one, in my opinion, more qualified to carry out this task than Hirota, for he served as the chief translator of the twenty-year project that culminated in the Collected Works of Shinran (CWS)2 and has been publishing insightful and provocative writings in the study of language from Shin Buddhist perspective in both English and Japanese.3 There are very few, if any, scholars in Japan dealing with this subject with the ability to talk about it in a cross-religious and disciplinary context. In more recent years, he has taken his findings to gatherings outside Japan, particularly to Europe. In fact, this book is, in large part, an outcome of the talks he delivered several years ago in the Fürst Franz-Josef and Fürstin Gina Memorial Philosophy Lecture Series at the Internationale Akademie für Philosophie in Liechtenstein.Before I focus in on some of the central points in this book, it would be helpful to get a bird’s eye view of this book, Asura’s Harp by listing the chapter titles. The book comprises four parts: “Buddhist View of Language,” “Engagement with the Pure Land Teaching,” “Truth as Transformative Event,” and “Language and Religious Awareness.” Part 1 contains three chapters: “Shinran’s Buddhist Critique of Language,” “Reality as Language,” and “The Dialogical Structure of True Language.” Part 2 also includes three chapters: “Modes of Engagement with the Teaching,” “The Encounter with Truth,” and “The Context of Encounter.” Part 3 contains two chapters: “Shinran Face to Face” and “Hearing the Vow.” In part 4, we find two chapters: “Language and Realization of Shinjin” and “Living from the Name of Buddha.” The postscript, “Shinran and Hermeneutical Thought,” is a helpful aid in getting a little more insight into Hirota’s view on language.As is evident by the chapter titles, there is much to comprehend and digest, particularly... (shrink)

While Wallace disagreed with Darwin that domesticates provided a great deal of useful information on wild populations,71 Darwin continued to draw on his domesticated animals and plants to inform him on the workings of his theory. Unlike Wallace, his exposure to natural populations was extremely limited after his return from the Beagle voyage. By the 1850s, he had settled into a life at Down House and was becoming more and more withdrawn from London scientific circles. He turned to his (...) network of informants, visits from colleagues such as Hooker and T. H. Huxley, subscriptions to various journals, and his own experimental studies at Down.This work on domesticates was clearly related to other natural history studies conducted by Darwin and others during the same period. For example, during the 1850s when Darwin worked on domesticates, he was also engaged in questions of geographic distribution. To study the dispersal and subsequent viability of introduced seeds, he soaked various seeds in a tub filled with seawater and counted which of the seeds floated after a given period; later he planted the seeds in the yard at Down to look for potential viability. There was no attempt at controlled, replicated experiments in these studies, or in his work with domesticates, nor should there have been. To Darwin the results of one experiment represented a potential truth of nature, and he was quick to seize upon these results as supporting evidence for his theory.I have suggested in this paper that his work on domesticates was not simply meant to provide an analogy for natural selection but rather became a research program to investigate other aspects of his natural selection theory, especially inheritance and variability; these subjects were integral parts of his theory of natural selection, but by 1859 he had not found a mechanism to account for them. The experiments brought home the difficult problems of inheritance, and Darwin specifically formulated pangenesis to account for these problems. Pangenesis was not an afterthought but an integration of several decades of thinking on inheritance. It was a unified theory to explain the complicated results he witnessed in his own experiments.Much of the Darwin scholarship has focused on Darwin's path toward the discovery of natural selection. Natural selection per se was a major interest, but not the only area of interest to Darwin. Inheritance was an area of serious concern for him both before and after he had formulated natural selection. His experimentation with domesticates was an attempt to look beyond natural selection and to concentrate on the difficult subject of inheritance. He found inheritance especially troublesome, requiring a “provisional hypothesis” to account for it. To see domesticates, as they are described in the Origin, as merely an analogy for natural selection, does not account for the importance Darwin placed on them. For him they were not man's monstrous productions, but worthy experimental subjects providing him with crucial information on inheritance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 323 Person and Religion: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. By ZOFIA J. ZDYBICKA, U.C.J.A. Translated by Theresa Sandok. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. xix+ 397 (cloth). Zdybicka's volume is the third in Peter Lang's series, "Catholic Thought from Lublin." A convenient way to display the contents of Person and Religion is to elaborate the meaning of " philosophy of religion " and its comprising (...) terms. Philosophy of religion designates the attempt to arrive at an ultimate explanation of the empirically given and existentially apprehended fact of religion (p. 96). In other words, why does religion exist at all and what are its subjective and objective grounds? This endeavor Zdybicka understands to be a recent one. Despite a wealth of reflection on religion over the centuries (See her historical survey, pp. 1-49), only since the 19th century have there been separate disciplines with the phenomenon of religion as their object. Zdybicka also emphasizes that not any kind of philosophy is equal to the task of carrying out the above mentioned attempt. Since the ultimate explanation of religion as truth or fantasy will entail determining whether God exists, only philosophies capable of grasping the real can serve the interests of philosophy of religion. Forms of Kantianism and phenomenology are not equal to the task (p. 97). Only a realistic philosophy connected with a theory of being stands a chance of offering an ultimate explanation of religion. In particular, the metaphysics borne in mind here is that of Krapiec. Peter Lang has recently published an English translation of it under the title, Metaphysics: An Outline of the History of Being (see my review in the January issue of The Thomist.) This work is indispensable background reading for Part III of Zdybicka's volume. Though this metaphysics is existential Thomist, its employment in a philosophy of religion will not resolve the question of which religion is true, though some religions will be ruled out as unsuitable for the human being (p. 97). What is understood as "religion"? In its basic meaning the religious fact is the reference or orientation of the human being toward a transcendent reality (p. 109). Considered more closely, the religious fact is actually multiphasic. First, there is the experience of our own ontic insufficiency and the consciousness of our transcendence and search for a value capable of preserving us in being and giving us complete existential meaning. Second, there is the religious experience in its strict sense. This second phase is itself divided into three phases. First is some kind of revelation from the religious object. Zdybicka stresses that this revelation occurs through signs to which we respond in faith; there is no direct cognitive contact with the religious object. 324 BOOK REVIEWS Second, there is the active response of the one struck by this revelation. The response consists in pursuing union with the deity. This second phase involves purification. Finally, there is the realization of the bond with the sacrum. What is achieved in the human person is holiness. The book concludes (pp. 315-22) with an extended discussion of this value. In sum, the phases of the religious experience properly speaking are: encounter, dialogue, and union. Zdybicka regards religious cults and rites as simply the externalization of religious acts (p. 129). They complete the description of the religious fact. Zdybicka also takes some time to distinguish religious experience from cognitive, moral, and aesthetic experience. Finally, pp. 157-59 contain an interesting inductive argument that the object of religious experience has always been understood as personal. In Part III Zdybicka performs a philosophical assessment of the religious fact. Specifically, the assessment is of the above mentioned introductory phase. Also as mentioned, Zdybicka takes advantage of Krapiec's Gilsonian existential Thomism which has denominated "classical philosophy." This philosophy's analysis of the human person and of reality critically validates both the subjective and objective grounds for the fact of religion properly speaking. The philosophically established subjective grounds include the contingent ontic status of the human person as this is evinced in the presence of the essence/existence composition. They also include an analysis of the person's ability to know and... (shrink)

Two continents. Three countries. Mountains, archipelago, a little red dot & more to come. BERIT SOLI-HOLT (Editor): When I think of introductory material, I think of that Derrida documentary when he is asked about what he would like to know about other philosophers. He simply states: their love life. APRIL VANNINI (Editor): And as far as introductions go, I think Derrida brought forth a fruitful discussion on philosophy and thinking with this statement. First, he allows philosophy to open up (...) the personal and second, the ability to conjure the notion of thinking in relation. After all, love lives are spawned from relations, and such are philosophical encounters—the co-emergence of thought and affect. This brings us to discuss the concept of the special issue of continent. called drift . From the Statement of Intent : The discussion that has become drift , a special issue of continent. began in the glow of a bonfire beside a lake near the Thousand Islands of Ontario when co-founders April and Berit came across a conception of a journal that would decline to follow traditional models of invitation and editorship, instead following a generated discourse through relational means. Shedding preemptive articulation of expected outcome and cohesion, we hope to light a fuse of chain interactions with each contributor active in authorial, editorial, and curatorial roles. drift seeks to allow the framing mechanism to choose itself, to find where something can flow or emerge in relation to a series of participants. By setting out a thread of thought to work its own way through writers and artists of various locations, drift operates through links, breaks, pauses, new directions, unintended consequences, twists, holes, bridges. We are attempting to give the scene for an emergence and what can become conceivable when given the opportunity to create chains of thought—linking, welding, fusing, looping, stitching. We hope to explore what is attainable when scholarly/artistic relationships transverse on their own terms instead of articulated by an institutional environment. JEREMY FERNANDO (Guest Editor): I think he was actually more interested in their sex lives. Though at the same time completely refusing to discuss, disclose, his own: I found it rather touching that he blushes whenever speaking of his life with Marguerite. So perhaps in this sense it is very apt to speak of it in terms of love; and the secret that is in each love: that even though it is a relationality between, there are parts of it that remain hidden, not just from everyone else, but even those in that relation itself. What the editors intend to ^do^ to impart this conceptualization is to provide a framework through the choice of a theme and by minimal standardization of form and content guidelines. As initial instigator, each editor will send their contribution to the issue to a fellow colleague, thinker, artist, friend with the invitation to send (via post) the accruing materials to another possible contributor. In this, we hope to engage with many individuals on ideas surrounding a specific theme determined but not limited by the editors of the drift . The end result will take the form of whatever is at hand (as materials can only stay with each contributor for two weeks) and whomever is at hand (the availability of interested and capable parties) through a course of five months. We are curious. What are the ways in which thought can emerge between individuals and places? What occurs when our fundamental mode of inquiry is between each other? How are ethical, social, spacious, political, aesthetic practices created between a chain of contributors. BSH: To introduce what to look forward to in June with the publication of drift isn't quite possible yet. It is in the stages of preparation, barely started, but already begun. I have been thinking about drift as an insect that goes through life cycles, chrysalises, pupas, larva. Each moment of the production and publication of this issue of continent. is its own life. A bug under a pin is not as interesting as one in flight or crawling up your leg. JF: Though the one crawling up your leg is also more likely to bite you. There is always already a danger in letting be, thinking …. Then again, there is also a potential rupture in attempting to seize, pin down, capture. BSH: I think a word we haven't thought about enough yet is capture. I think we are perhaps trying to capture something, or to allow for the moments of this capture along the way, the resulting material being the ripples left in the sand when the water waves away. AV: This question comes to mind when speaking about captures, waves, ripples: How can we activate a ripple? What I find interesting about a wave is the difference in frequencies, movements, forms, style that are activated in between intervals. What is interesting about a wave is that it is activated in relation to what came before. What remains in the sand is a ripple that forms in relation between multiple intervals of stylistic waves. As Deleuze and Parnet have taught us, "We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being 'author'. And these 'between-the-twos' referred back to other people, who were different on one side from the other. The desert expanded, but in so doing became more populous." 1 Drift is activation for thinking-with and possibly much more—who knows? There is the intent to subvert the relational qualities between people in journal publishing, but also important to the editors is the subversion of materials. The editors do not shy away from use of contemporary technology and, in fact, have relied and will continue to rely on the wonders of internet connectivity to midwife the drift. The connective infrastructure chosen to relay the developing issue is simply one of bodies, of postal workers and the varying postal systems. Some may find it to be merely be a call of an already dying form, but the editors believe that the conversation exchanged from hand to hand is of explicit difference in quality of engagement due to the complexity of peripheral information transported by physical matter. Different hospitalities and responsibilities are at play in keeping hold of one-of-a-kind materials for a time and entrusting various postal systems to bear the message forward. To have work physically transported through space and time through this kind of infrastructure that is reliant on individuals to literally carry a message is crucial in incorporating traces of bodily presence. AV: Thought is contingent and emergent process that folds, twists, pulls, shifts in multiple directions and we are interested in these multiple directions. JF: And even as thought is contingent on, hinged around, its place, time, venue—on its continents, as it were (we still tend to speak of gestures of thinking as Continental, British, American, European, Asian, etc.)—we might also attempt to respond to the landscape within each thought: its folds, unfoldings, rolls, manoeuvres, geography. BSH: How different is this than Morelli's screw that Julio Cortazar or Horacio Oliveira recounts in Hopscotch? The fable recalls a man who regarded a screw everyday on his stoop. When he perishes, the screw disappears, perhaps into a fellow neighbor's pocket for secret contemplation. Whoever is writing the passage remarks that "Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw." JF: Perhaps even more intriguing is the notion that we do not quite know who is inscribing these remarks on Morelli. That even as someone says that it is a screw, perhaps because it is shaped like a screw, the one who names it “screw”—the one whom we are in a relation with in relation to the screw—remains veiled from us. But even as this is so, the notion of the object as “screw” is marked, etched, onto us. BSH: A periodical, marking a period of time, but where? An issue, a magazine, a storehouse of information. To show the remainders of thinkers connecting and surfing. With all this stated, we, as editors of the drift are aware of the active fault, quaking potential, and ethical catastrophe of such a proposed project — the inheritance or the gifting of a project without consent. We are certain that there may be possible oversight on the process of such a project. If such is the case, we hope that oversight and misdirection will not leave this project dormant but rather open up promising new directions, questions, and potential considerations. We are very excited about the accidental propositions that can occur in between. In sum, we'll see what happens. JF: Perhaps, all we can know of the screw is that we are screwed ... NOTE Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet. Dialogues II . Revised edition. (New York: Columbia University Press). 2007: 17. (shrink)

Table of contentsI1 Proceedings of the 4th World Conference on Research IntegrityConcurrent Sessions:1. Countries' systems and policies to foster research integrityCS01.1 Second time around: Implementing and embedding a review of responsible conduct of research policy and practice in an Australian research-intensive universitySusan Patricia O'BrienCS01.2 Measures to promote research integrity in a university: the case of an Asian universityDanny Chan, Frederick Leung2. Examples of research integrity education programmes in different countriesCS02.1 Development of a state-run “cyber education program of research ethics” in (...) KoreaEun Jung Ko, Jin Sun Kwak, TaeHwan Gwon, Ji Min Lee, Min-Ho LeeCS02.3 Responsible conduct of research teachers’ training courses in Germany: keeping on drilling through hard boards for more RCR teachersHelga Nolte, Michael Gommel, Gerlinde Sponholz3. The research environment and policies to encourage research integrityCS03.1 Challenges and best practices in research integrity: bridging the gap between policy and practiceYordanka Krastev, Yamini Sandiran, Julia Connell, Nicky SolomonCS03.2 The Slovenian initiative for better research: from national activities to global reflectionsUrsa Opara Krasovec, Renata SribarCS03.3 Organizational climate assessments to support research integrity: background of the Survey of Organizational Research Climate and the experience with its use at Michigan State UniversityBrian C. Martinson, Carol R. Thrush, C.K. Gunsalus4. Expressions of concern and retractionsCS04.1 Proposed guidelines for retraction notices and their disseminationIvan Oransky, Adam MarcusCS04.2 Watching retractions: analysis of process and practice, with data from the Wiley retraction archivesChris Graf, Verity Warne, Edward Wates, Sue JoshuaCS04.3 An exploratory content analysis of Expressions of ConcernMiguel RoigCS04.4 An ethics researcher in the retraction processMichael Mumford5. Funders' role in fostering research integrityCS05.1 The Fonds de Recherche du Québec’s institutional rules on the responsible conduct of research: introspection in the funding agency activitiesMylène Deschênes, Catherine Olivier, Raphaëlle Dupras-LeducCS05.2 U.S. Public Health Service funds in an international setting: research integrity and complianceZoë Hammatt, Raju Tamot, Robin Parker, Cynthia Ricard, Loc Nguyen-Khoa, Sandra TitusCS05.3 Analyzing decision making of funders of public research as a case of information asymmetryKarsten Klint JensenCS05.4 Research integrity management: Empirical investigation of academia versus industrySimon Godecharle, Ben Nemery, Kris Dierickx5A: Education: For whom, how, and what?CS05A.1 Research integrity or responsible conduct of research? What do we aim for?Mickey Gjerris, Maud Marion Laird Eriksen, Jeppe Berggren HoejCS05A.2 Teaching and learning about RCR at the same time: a report on Epigeum’s RCR poll questions and other assessment activitiesNicholas H. SteneckCS05A.4 Minding the gap in research ethics education: strategies to assess and improve research competencies in community health workers/promoteresCamille Nebeker, Michael Kalichman, Elizabeth Mejia Booen, Blanca Azucena Pacheco, Rebeca Espinosa Giacinto, Sheila Castaneda6. Country examples of research reward systems and integrityCS06.1 Improving systems to promote responsible research in the Chinese Academy of SciencesDing Li, Qiong Chen, Guoli Zhu, Zhonghe SunCS06.4 Exploring the perception of research integrity amongst public health researchers in IndiaParthasarathi Ganguly, Barna Ganguly7. Education and guidance on research integrity: country differencesCS07.1 From integrity to unity: how research integrity guidance differs across universities in Europe.Noémie Aubert Bonn, Kris Dierickx, Simon GodecharleCS07.2 Can education and training develop research integrity? The spirit of the UNESCO 1974 recommendation and its updatingDaniele Bourcier, Jacques Bordé, Michèle LeducCS07.3 The education and implementation mechanisms of research ethics in Taiwan's higher education: an experience in Chinese web-based curriculum development for responsible conduct of researchChien Chou, Sophia Jui-An PanCS07.4 Educating principal investigators in Swiss research institutions: present and future perspectivesLouis Xaver Tiefenauer8. Measuring and rewarding research productivityCS08.1 Altimpact: how research integrity underpins research impactDaniel Barr, Paul TaylorCS08.2 Publication incentives: just reward or misdirection of funds?Lyn Margaret HornCS08.3 Why Socrates never charged a fee: factors contributing to challenges for research integrity and publication ethicsDeborah Poff9. Plagiarism and falsification: Behaviour and detectionCS09.1 Personality traits predict attitude towards plagiarism of self and others in biomedicine: plagiarism, yes we can?Martina Mavrinac, Gordana Brumini, Mladen PetrovečkiCS09.2 Investigating the concept of and attitudes toward plagiarism for science teachers in Brazil: any challenges for research integrity and policy?Christiane Coelho Santos, Sonia VasconcelosCS09.3 What have we learnt?: The CrossCheck Service from CrossRefRachael LammeyCS09.4 High p-values as a sign of data fabrication/falsificationChris Hartgerink, Marcel van Assen, Jelte Wicherts10. Codes for research integrity and collaborationsCS10.1 Research integrity in cross-border cooperation: a Nordic exampleHanne Silje HaugeCS10.3 Research integrity, research misconduct, and the National Science Foundation's requirement for the responsible conduct of researchAaron MankaCS10.4 A code of conduct for international scientific cooperation: human rights and research integrity in scientific collaborations with international academic and industry partnersRaffael Iturrizaga11. Countries' efforts to establish mentoring and networksCS11.1 ENRIO : a network facilitating common approaches on research integrity in EuropeNicole FoegerCS11.2 Helping junior investigators develop in a resource-limited country: a mentoring program in PeruA. Roxana Lescano, Claudio Lanata, Gissella Vasquez, Leguia Mariana, Marita Silva, Mathew Kasper, Claudia Montero, Daniel Bausch, Andres G LescanoCS11.3 Netherlands Research Integrity Network: the first six monthsFenneke Blom, Lex BouterCS11.4 A South African framework for research ethics and integrity for researchers, postgraduate students, research managers and administratorsLaetus OK Lategan12. Training and education in research integrity at an early career stageCS12.1 Research integrity in curricula for medical studentsGustavo Fitas ManaiaCS12.2 Team-based learning for training in the responsible conduct of research supports ethical decision-makingWayne T. McCormack, William L. Allen, Shane Connelly, Joshua Crites, Jeffrey Engler, Victoria Freedman, Cynthia W. Garvan, Paul Haidet, Joel Hockensmith, William McElroy, Erik Sander, Rebecca Volpe, Michael F. VerderameCS12.4 Research integrity and career prospects of junior researchersSnezana Krstic13. Systems and research environments in institutionsCS13.1 Implementing systems in research institutions to improve quality and reduce riskLouise HandyCS13.2 Creating an institutional environment that supports research integrityDebra Schaller-DemersCS13.3 Ethics and Integrity Development Grants: a mechanism to foster cultures of ethics and integrityPaul Taylor, Daniel BarrCS13.4 A culture of integrity at KU LeuvenInge Lerouge, Gerard Cielen, Liliane Schoofs14. Peer review and its role in research integrityCS14.1 Peer review research across disciplines: transdomain action in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology “New Frontiers of Peer Review ”Ana Marusic, Flaminio SquazzoniCS14.2 Using blinding to reduce bias in peer reviewDavid VauxCS14.3 How to intensify the role of reviewers to promote research integrityKhalid Al-Wazzan, Ibrahim AlorainyCS14.4 Credit where credit’s due: professionalizing and rewarding the role of peer reviewerChris Graf, Verity Warne15. Research ethics and oversight for research integrity: Does it work?CS15.1 The psychology of decision-making in research ethics governance structures: a theory of bounded rationalityNolan O'Brien, Suzanne Guerin, Philip DoddCS15.2 Investigator irregularities: iniquity, ignorance or incompetence?Frank Wells, Catherine BlewettCS15.3 Academic plagiarismFredric M. Litto16. Research integrity in EuropeCS16.1 Whose responsibility is it anyway?: A comparative analysis of core concepts and practice at European research-intensive universities to identify and develop good practices in research integrityItziar De Lecuona, Erika Löfstrom, Katrien MaesCS16.2 Research integrity guidance in European research universitiesKris Dierickx, Noémie Bonn, Simon GodecharleCS16.3 Research Integrity: processes and initiatives in Science Europe member organisationsTony Peatfield, Olivier Boehme, Science Europe Working Group on Research IntegrityCS16.4 Promoting research integrity in Italy: the experience of the Research Ethics and Bioethics Advisory Committee of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Cinzia Caporale, Daniele Fanelli17. Training programs for research integrity at different levels of experience and seniorityCS17.1 Meaningful ways to incorporate research integrity and the responsible conduct of research into undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral and faculty training programsJohn Carfora, Eric Strauss, William LynnCS17.2 "Recognize, respond, champion": Developing a one-day interactive workshop to increase confidence in research integrity issuesDieter De Bruyn, Bracke Nele, Katrien De Gelder, Stefanie Van der BurghtCS17.4 “Train the trainer” on cultural challenges imposed by international research integrity conversations: lessons from a projectJosé Roberto Lapa e Silva, Sonia M. R. Vasconcelos18. Research and societal responsibilityCS18.1 Promoting the societal responsibility of research as an integral part of research integrityHelene IngierdCS18.2 Social responsibility as an ethical imperative for scientists: research, education and service to societyMark FrankelCS18.3 The intertwined nature of social responsibility and hope in scienceDaniel Vasgird, Stephanie BirdCS18.4 Common barriers that impede our ability to create a culture of trustworthiness in the research communityMark Yarborough19. Publication ethicsCS19.1 The authors' forum: A proposed tool to improve practices of journal editors and promote a responsible research environmentIbrahim Alorainy, Khalid Al-WazzanCS19.2 Quantifying research integrity and its impact with text analyticsHarold GarnerCS19.3 A closer look at authorship and publication ethics of multi- and interdisciplinary teamsLisa Campo-Engelstein, Zubin Master, Elise Smith, David Resnik, Bryn Williams-JonesCS19.4 Invisibility of duplicate publications in biomedicineMario Malicki, Ana Utrobicic, Ana Marusic20. The causes of bad and wasteful research: What can we do?CS20.1 From countries to individuals: unravelling the causes of bias and misconduct with multilevel meta-meta-analysisDaniele Fanelli, John PA IoannidisCS20.2 Reducing research waste by integrating systems of oversight and regulationGerben ter Riet, Tom Walley, Lex Marius BouterCS20.3 What are the determinants of selective reporting?: The example of palliative care for non-cancer conditionsJenny van der Steen, Lex BouterCS20.4 Perceptions of plagiarism, self-plagiarism and redundancy in research: preliminary results from a national survey of Brazilian PhDsSonia Vasconcelos, Martha Sorenson, Francisco Prosdocimi, Hatisaburo Masuda, Edson Watanabe, José Carlos Pinto, Marisa Palácios, José Lapa e Silva, Jacqueline Leta, Adalberto Vieyra, André Pinto, Mauricio Sant’Ana, Rosemary Shinkai21. Are there country-specific elements of misconduct?CS21.1 The battle with plagiarism in Russian science: latest developmentsBoris YudinCS21.2 Researchers between ethics and misconduct: A French survey on social representations of misconduct and ethical standards within the scientific communityEtienne Vergès, Anne-Sophie Brun-Wauthier, Géraldine VialCS21.3 Experience from different ways of dealing with research misconduct and promoting research integrity in some Nordic countriesTorkild VintherCS21.4 Are there specifics in German research misconduct and the ways to cope with it?Volker Bähr, Charité22. Research integrity teaching programmes and their challengesCS22.1 Faculty mentors and research integrityMichael Kalichman, Dena PlemmonsCS22.2 Training the next generation of scientists to use principles of research quality assurance to improve data integrity and reliabilityRebecca Lynn Davies, Katrina LaubeCS22.3 Fostering research integrity in a culturally-diverse environmentCynthia Scheopner, John GallandCS22.4 Towards a standard retraction formHervé Maisonneuve, Evelyne Decullier23. Commercial research and integrityCS23.1 The will to commercialize: matters of concern in the cultural economy of return-on-investment researchBrian NobleCS23.2 Quality in drug discovery data reporting: a mission impossible?Anja Gilis, David J. Gallacher, Tom Lavrijssen, Malwitz David, Malini Dasgupta, Hans MolsCS23.3 Instituting a research integrity policy in the context of semi-private-sector funding: an example in the field of occupational health and safetyPaul-Emile Boileau24. The interface of publication ethics and institutional policiesCS24.1 The open access ethical paradox in an open government effortTony SavardCS24.2 How journals and institutions can work together to promote responsible conductEric MahCS24.3 Improving cooperation between journals and research institutions in research integrity casesElizabeth Wager, Sabine Kleinert25. Reproducibility of research and retractionsCS25.1 Promoting transparency in publications to reduce irreproducibilityVeronique Kiermer, Andrew Hufton, Melanie ClyneCS25.2 Retraction notices issued for publications by Latin American authors: what lessons can we learn?Sonia Vasconcelos, Renan Moritz Almeida, Aldo Fontes-Pereira, Fernanda Catelani, Karina RochaCS25.3 A preliminary report of the findings from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer biologyElizabeth Iorns, William Gunn26. Research integrity and specific country initiativesCS26.1 Promoting research integrity at CNRS, FranceMichèle Leduc, Lucienne LetellierCS26.2 In pursuit of compliance: is the tail wagging the dog?Cornelia MalherbeCS26.3 Newly established research integrity policies and practices: oversight systems of Japanese research universitiesTakehito Kamata27. Responsible conduct of research and country guidelinesCS27.1 Incentives or guidelines? Promoting responsible research communication through economic incentives or ethical guidelines?Vidar EnebakkCS27.3 Responsible conduct of research: a view from CanadaLynn PenrodCS27.4 The Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity: a national initiative to promote research integrity in DenmarkThomas Nørgaard, Charlotte Elverdam28. Behaviour, trust and honestyCS28.1 The reasons behind non-ethical behaviour in academiaYves FassinCS28.2 The psychological profile of the dishonest scholarCynthia FekkenCS28.3 Considering the implications of Dan Ariely’s keynote speech at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity in MontréalJamal Adam, Melissa S. AndersonCS28.4 Two large surveys on psychologists’ views on peer review and replicationJelte WichertsBrett Buttliere29. Reporting and publication bias and how to overcome itCS29.1 Data sharing: Experience at two open-access general medical journalsTrish GrovesCS29.2 Overcoming publication bias and selective reporting: completing the published recordDaniel ShanahanCS29.3 The EQUATOR Network: promoting responsible reporting of health research studiesIveta Simera, Shona Kirtley, Eleana Villanueva, Caroline Struthers, Angela MacCarthy, Douglas Altman30. The research environment and its implications for integrityCS30.1 Ranking of scientists: the Russian experienceElena GrebenshchikovaCS30.4 From cradle to grave: research integrity, research misconduct and cultural shiftsBronwyn Greene, Ted RohrPARTNER SYMPOSIAPartner Symposium AOrganized by EQUATOR Network, Enhancing the Quality and Transparency of Health ResearchP1 Can we trust the medical research literature?: Poor reporting and its consequencesIveta SimeraP2 What can BioMed Central do to improve published research?Daniel Shanahan, Stephanie HarrimanP3 What can a "traditional" journal do to improve published research?Trish GrovesP4 Promoting good reporting practice for reliable and usable research papers: EQUATOR Network, reporting guidelines and other initiativesCaroline StruthersPartner Symposium COrganized by ENRIO, the European Network of Research Integrity OfficersP5 Transparency and independence in research integrity investigations in EuropeKrista Varantola, Helga Nolte, Ursa Opara, Torkild Vinther, Elizabeth Wager, Thomas NørgaardPartner Symposium DOrganized by IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersRe-educating our author community: IEEE's approach to bibliometric manipulation, plagiarism, and other inappropriate practicesP6 Dealing with plagiarism in the connected world: An Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers perspectiveJon RokneP7 Should evaluation of raises, promotion, and research proposals be tied to bibliometric indictors? What the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is doing to answer this questionGianluca SettiP8 Recommended practices to ensure conference content qualityGordon MacPhersonPartner Symposium EOrganized by the Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science of ICSU, the International Council for ScienceResearch assessment and quality in science: perspectives from international science and policy organisationsP9 Challenges for science and the problems of assessing researchEllen HazelkornP10 Research assessment and science policy developmentCarthage SmithP11 Research integrity in South Africa: the value of procedures and processes to global positioningRobert H. McLaughlinP12 Rewards, careers and integrity: perspectives of young scientists from around the worldTatiana Duque MartinsPartner Symposium FOrganized by the Online Resource Center for Ethics Education in Engineering and Science / Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society of the National Academy of EngineeringP13 Research misconduct: conceptions and policy solutionsTetsuya Tanimoto, Nicholas Steneck, Daniele Fanelli, Ragnvald Kalleberg, Tajammul HusseinPartner Symposium HOrganized by ORI, the Office of Research Integrity; Universitas 21; and the Asia Pacific Research Integrity NetworkP14 International integrity networks: working together to ensure research integrityPing Sun, Ovid Tzeng, Krista Varantola, Susan ZimmermanPartner Symposium IOrganized by COPE, the Committee on Publication EthicsPublication without borders: Ethical challenges in a globalized worldP15 Authorship: credit and responsibility, including issues in large and interdisciplinary studiesRosemary ShinkaiPartner Symposium JOrganized by CITI, the Cooperative Institutional Training InitiativeExperiences on research integrity educational programs in Colombia, Costa Rica and PeruP16 Experiences in PeruRoxana LescanoP17 Experiences in Costa RicaElizabeth HeitmanP18 Experiences in ColumbiaMaria Andrea Rocio del Pilar Contreras NietoPoster Session B: Education, training, promotion and policyPT.01 The missing role of journal editors in promoting responsible researchIbrahim Alorainy, Khalid Al-WazzanPT.02 Honorary authorship in Taiwan: why and who should be in charge?Chien Chou, Sophia Jui-An PanPT.03 Authorship and citation manipulation in academic researchEric Fong, Al WilhitePT.04 Open peer review of research submission at medical journals: experience at BMJ Open and The BMJTrish GrovesPT.05 Exercising authorship: claiming rewards, practicing integrityDésirée Motta-RothPT.07 Medical scientists' views on publication culture: a focus group studyJoeri Tijdink, Yvo SmuldersPoster Session B: Education, training, promotion and policyPT.09 Ethical challenges in post-graduate supervisionLaetus OK LateganPT.10 The effects of viable ethics instruction on international studentsMichael Mumford, Logan Steele, Logan Watts, James Johnson, Shane Connelly, Lee WilliamsPT.11 Does language reflect the quality of research?Gerben ter Riet, Sufia Amini, Lotty Hooft, Halil KilicogluPT.12 Integrity complaints as a strategic tool in policy decision conflictsJanneke van Seters, Herman Eijsackers, Fons Voragen, Akke van der Zijpp and Frans BromPoster Session C: Ethics and integrity intersectionsPT.14 Regulations of informed consent: university-supported research processes and pitfalls in implementationBadaruddin Abbasi, Naif Nasser AlmasoudPT.15 A review of equipoise as a requirement in clinical trialsAdri LabuschagnePT.16 The Research Ethics Library: online resource for research ethics educationJohanne Severinsen, Espen EnghPT.17 Research integrity: the view from King Abdulaziz City for Science and TechnologyDaham Ismail AlaniPT. 18 Meeting global challenges in high-impact publications and research integrity: the case of the Malaysian Palm Oil BoardHJ. Kamaruzaman JusoffPT.19 University faculty perceptions of research practices and misconductAnita Gordon, Helen C. HartonPoster Session D: International perspectivesPT.21 The Commission for Scientific Integrity as a response to research fraudDieter De Bruyn, Stefanie Van der BurghtPT. 22 Are notions of the responsible conduct of research associated with compliance with requirements for research on humans in different disciplinary traditions in Brazil?Karina de Albuquerque Rocha, Sonia Maria Ramos de VasconcelosPT.23 Creating an environment that promotes research integrity: an institutional model of Malawi Liverpool Welcome TrustLimbanazo MatandikaPT.24 How do science policies in Brazil influence user-engaged ecological research?Aline Carolina de Oliveira Machado Prata, Mark William NeffPoster Session E: Perspectives on misconductPT.26 What “causes” scientific misconduct?: Testing major hypotheses by comparing corrected and retracted papersDaniele Fanelli, Rodrigo Costas, Vincent LarivièrePT.27 Perception of academic plagiarism among dentistry studentsDouglas Leonardo Gomes Filho, Diego Oliveira GuedesPT. 28 a few bad apples?: Prevalence, patterns and attitudes towards scientific misconduct among doctoral students at a German university hospitalVolker Bähr, Niklas Keller, Markus Feufel, Nikolas OffenhauserPT. 29 Analysis of retraction notices published by BioMed CentralMaria K. Kowalczuk, Elizabeth C. MoylanPT.31 "He did it" doesn't work: data security, incidents and partnersKatie SpeanburgPoster Session F: Views from the disciplinesPT.32 Robust procedures: a key to generating quality results in drug discoveryMalini Dasgupta, Mariusz Lubomirski, Tom Lavrijssen, David Malwitz, David Gallacher, Anja GillisPT.33 Health promotion: criteria for the design and the integrity of a research projectMaria Betânia de Freitas Marques, Laressa Lima Amâncio, Raphaela Dias Fernandes, Oliveira Patrocínio, and Cláudia Maria Correia Borges RechPT.34 Integrity of academic work from the perspective of students graduating in pharmacy: a brief research studyMaria Betânia de Freitas Marques, Cláudia Maria Correia Borges Rech, Adriana Nascimento SousaPT.35 Research integrity promotion in the Epidemiology and Health Services, the journal of the Brazilian Unified Health SystemLeila Posenato GarciaPT.36 When are clinical trials registered? An analysis of prospective versus retrospective registration of clinical trials published in the BioMed Central series, UKStephanie Harriman, Jigisha PatelPT.37 Maximizing welfare while promoting innovation in drug developmentFarida LadaOther posters that will be displayed but not presented orally:PT.38 Geoethics and the debate on research integrity in geosciencesGiuseppe Di Capua, Silvia PeppoloniPT.39 Introducing the Professionalism and Integrity in Research Program James M. DuBois, John Chibnall, Jillon Van der WallPT.40 Validation of the professional decision-making in research measureJames M. DuBois, John Chibnall, Jillon Van der Wall, Raymond TaitPT.41 General guidelines for research ethicsJacob HolenPT. 42 A national forum for research ethicsAdele Flakke Johannessen, Torunn EllefsenPT.43 Evaluation of integrity in coursework: an approach from the perspective of the higher education professorClaudia Rech, Adriana Sousa, Maria Betânia de Freitas MarquesPT.44 Principles of geoethics and research integrity applied to the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory, a large-scale European environmental research infrastructureSilvia Peppoloni, Giuseppe Di Capua, Laura BeranzoliF1 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of fundersPaulo S.L. Beirão, Susan ZimmermanF2 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of countriesSabine Kleinert, Ana MarusicF3 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of institutionsMelissa S. Anderson, Lex Bouter. (shrink)

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which (...) consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term "diaries." By far the greater part of Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects--philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure--but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Volume 5 of this 11-volume series includes five of Kierkegaard's important "NB" journals, covering the months from summer 1848 through early May 1849. This was a turbulent period both in the history of Denmark--which was experiencing the immediate aftermath of revolution and the fall of absolutism, a continuing war with the German states, and the replacement of the State Church with the Danish People's Church--and for Kierkegaard personally. The journals in the present volume include Kierkegaard's reactions to the political upheaval, a retrospective account of his audiences with King Christian VIII, deliberations about publishing an autobiographical explanation of his writings, and an increasingly harsh critique of the Danish Church. These journals also reflect Kierkegaard's deep concern over his collision with the satirical journal Corsair, an experience that helped radicalize his view of "essential Christianity" and caused him to ponder the meaning of martyrdom. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. (shrink)

In his 1939 essay, “Some Questions on Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Stephen Pepper gave the following assessment of Dewey’s Art as Experience of 1934: “We are deprived of a pragmatic theory of ugliness” because Dewey “was reverting to Hegelianism in his later years.” By ‘Hegelianism’ Pepper meant the Second Oxford Hegelianism of Bernard Bosanquet. Similarly, Dale Jacquette wrote in 1984 that “nothing is ugly” in Bosanquet’s Three Lectures on Aesthetics, a work that Jacquette sees as bearing the influence of Hegel. But neither (...) critic has taken into account the following: Hegel and Bosanquet both employ an aesthetic-technical as well as a conventional concept of ‘beauty.’ In order to call an artwork ‘aesthetically excellent,’ both thinkers refer to artwork in an aesthetic-technical sense as ‘beautiful artwork.’ However, artworks that are beautiful in the aesthetic-technical sense can be ugly in the conventional sense. In order to evaluate the potential of a Hegelian aesthetic of the ugly, a distinction must be made between the aesthetic-technical and the conventional use of the terms ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ in both Hegel and Bosanquet. And this the early Bosanquet — i.e., the Bosanquet of the 1892 A History of Aesthetic — did not see in Hegel. (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching Ethics in the Health Care Setting Part I:Survey of the LiteratureMary Carrington Coutts (bio)The last twenty years have brought important changes to health care and health care education. Educators and students alike face an enormous number of new fields of study and new medical technologies. Health care professionals and institutions are also facing new challenges in the form of shrinking economic resources, and the AIDS epidemic. They must (...) also respond to increased patient participation in health care decisions, and public concern about abortion and euthanasia. These challenges to the health care professional have compelled educators to accommodate ethics within their already overcrowded curriculum. Those same dilemmas have influenced health care institutions to become active in health care ethics education.Medical ethics education gained a foothold in the United States during the late 1960s, when the medical schools of Pennsylvania State University, the University of Florida, and the State University of New York at Stonybrook established programs in the humanities (Pellegrino 1982). In 1978 Robert Veatch noted that formal teaching in medical ethics was rare; most institutions that taught medical ethics used "informal instruction in the apprenticeship mode" (Veatch 1978). However, by 1982 a survey by the American Medical Association (AMA) revealed that all but one of the 127 medical schools had courses that included medical ethics. Thirty eight of these had medical ethics as a required course (Pellegrino 1985). And by 1989, 43 of the 127 medical schools had separate courses in medical ethics, while 100 covered medical ethics within required courses. Medical ethics is now an accepted part of medical curriculum, though it is not fully mature, and its future remains somewhat unclear (Miles 1989).The evolution of ethics in the nursing curriculum has essentially mirrored that of the medical curriculum. A 1977 survey of baccalaureate nursing programs revealed that only 7 percent of nursing programs required courses in ethics [End Page 171] (Aroskar 1977). A decade later a second survey of undergraduate programs identified 85 percent of responding nursing schools as teaching nursing ethics either in separate ethics courses or within other required courses (Cassells and Redman 1989).Though the precise future of health care ethics may be unpredictable, there is little thought that the role of ethics will diminish in importance as the 21st century approaches. Ethics is seen as part of a larger plan to develop and enhance the health professional's human values, social conscience, and interpersonal skills. "This broader effort derives from concerns about the personal attributes and humanistic sensitivity of physicians, the recent overly 'scientized' trend in premedical education, the selection of medical students, and the socialization and cynicism engendered by medical education" (Miles 1989, p. 705).While nearly every medical and nursing school in the United States now teaches ethics in one form or another, the degree to which ethics is integrated into the curriculum varies from school to school. Some ethics courses are required elements of the students' education; some institutions require attendance at seminars and ethics grand rounds. Other schools offer an array of elective courses in topics that relate to ethics in medicine and nursing (including medical humanities, medicine and the law, literature and medicine, history of medicine, patient advocacy, and human values in nursing.) "Brown bag" seminars and journal clubs are also common.There is much debate over how health care ethics should be taught. Some argue that medical professionals should be conversant with theories of ethics and principles of biomedical ethics. Others think that a theoretical approach will alienate already over-worked medical or nursing students, and that instruction in ethical theory should be kept to a minimum. Case studies are frequently cited as a way to involve students in medical decision making, forcing them to analyze problems that they can relate to their own experiences.Additional concerns center around who should teach health care ethics. Frequently, physicians and nurses interested in ethics teach courses. Some commentators see this as the most desirable arrangement, asserting that practicing health care professionals best understand the conflicts faced by physicians and nurses-in-training. However, there is a growing pool of professionals who are undergoing training as medical ethicists. These individuals study ethical theory and bioethical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wisdom Calls: The Moral Story of the Hebrew Bible by Paul LewisTherese LysaughtWisdom Calls: The Moral Story of the Hebrew Bible Paul Lewis MACON, GA: NURTURING FAITH, 2017. 99 pp. $18.00Paul Lewis invites us into a thought experiment: What can we discern about moral development from a "naive" reading of the Hebrew Scriptures as narrative, starting at Genesis and working our way through to Chronicles? If (...) we remove our presuppositions and eisegesis, ossified through centuries of familiarity, and read the stories at face value, what can we discern about character, virtue, and moral development via the human protagonists as well as God? In this book aimed at undergraduates and faith-seeking adults, Lewis provides an accessible introduction to both scripture and ethics, as well as a creative endeavor at the interface.Using an eclectic hermeneutical approach, Lewis offers a fresh reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. Fundamental to his thesis are two points. First, even though the Hebrew Scriptures are made up of a variety of texts in different genres written by different authors over almost a millennium, at some point, they were collated into the canonical, three-part sequence (Law, Prophets, and Writings—the Tanakh, TNK) by redactors who shaped the collection with a particular directionality. Pivotal to this process was the Babylonian Exile, which Lewis considers a crucial lens for reading a narrative arc across the collection. Second, he reminds Christian readers that the structure and sequence of texts in the Christian "Old Testament" differs from that of the Jewish TNK. As a result, "TNK and Old Testament, by the way they order the documents that make them up, thus tell different stories" (9).Lewis walks the reader through a series of ordered reflections on the three main sections of the Hebrew Scriptures. From Genesis to Chronicles, he charts a shift toward increasing moral complexity, finding in this narrative "a story of moral development" that begins with the need for and establishment of rules or laws (Torah—chap. 2), moves to the discernment of principles at the heart of the laws (Prophets—chap. 3), and culminates with a vision of wisdom captured in the multifaceted and sometimes conflicting texts in the Writings (chap. 4), complete with a controversial yet intriguing interpretation of Job. Wisdom, in his reading of these texts, is the practical skill needed to interpret the laws, rules, and principles of the tradition with the nuance necessary for the ever-changing sociocultural context of the "hard, cruel world" in which the Jews of ancient Palestine found themselves. [End Page 204]The book culminates with chapter 5, titled "Wisdom Calls," where he brings the multilayered Wisdom tradition (chochmah, in Hebrew) into conversation with the Aristotelian tradition of virtue and practical wisdom (phronesis), finding the analog for Aristotle's endpoint of eudaimonia in the Hebraic vision of shalom. Shalom is "the goal toward which wisdom strives and the good that it seeks to achieve" (p. 73). In a short appendix, he also brings chochmah into conversation with contemporary developments in the moral psychology of wisdom, drawing on the work of Darcia Narvaez and scholars at the Max Planck Institute, among others.Lewis's reading brings the Hebrew Scriptures alive, reminding us how wonderfully messy, interesting, and complicated its characters and stories are. By way of critique, one might ask: Can one read a scriptural text too naively? At points, this reader wished for a bit more historical-critical interpretation as a way of enhancing the conclusions being drawn. Integration of the material on the moral psychology of wisdom into the final chapter, rather than as an appendix, would also have been welcome. In the end, Wisdom Calls provides an engaging starting point for students and congregations.Therese LysaughtLoyola University ChicagoCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a foreclosed (...) home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

Most forms of virtue ethics are characterized by two attractive features. The first is that proponents of virtue ethics acknowledge the need to describe how moral agents acquire or develop the traits and abilities necessary to become morally able agents. The second attractive feature of most forms of virtue ethics is that they are forms of moral realism. The two features come together in the attempt to describe virtue as a personal ability to distinguish morally good reasons for action. It (...) follows from the general picture of virtue ethics presented here that we cannot evaluate ethical judgment independently of the viewpoint of the ideal of a virtuous person. We will examine how this ideal unfolds in the realistic form of virtue ethics advanced by John McDowell. McDowell offers a compelling description of virtue as a natural ability grounded in human nature, while at the same time insisting that we cannot understand the judgment resulting from virtue without drawing on that very perspective. However, McDowell’s focus on the passive taking in of reasons in ethical experience and his idea of the silencing of wrong reasons lead us to three related problems. The first is that he cannot account for certain features of the phenomenology of such experience; the second is that he cannot provide any relevant epistemological criteria for correct moral judgment; and the third is that he gives a morally objectionable characterization of the ideal of being a virtuous person. All of these problems arise because McDowell does not take into account the particular nature of ethical experience. If we try to resolve this problem by dropping McDowell’s idea of silencing, we then have to offer another substantial description of our ideal of a virtuous person that includes active and interpersonal ways of evaluating concrete judgments. Proponents of virtue ethics still have to lift this task and develop a position that does not limit ethical experience to the passive intake of reasons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 299-309 [Access article in PDF] Conscious Fiction Mary Clayton Coleman Bard College Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, by David Lodge; 320 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, $24.95 boards, $16.95 paper. Fictional Minds, by Alan Palmer; 275 pp. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, $45.00. Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness, by Dan Lloyd; 357 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The (...) MIT Press, 2004, $24.95 boards, $14.95 paper. What contributions can fiction make to the representation and investigation of conscious experience? Might fiction help us to develop and advance new theories about the nature of consciousness? And might such theories, in turn, inform our understanding of the process of reading fiction? Three recent volumes—one by English critic and novelist, David Lodge; another by literary theorist, Alan Palmer; and a third by philosopher and (now) novelist, Dan Lloyd—raise these important, genre-bending questions, and they offer challenging if not always convincing answers to them. More generally, these volumes make valuable contributions to the fruitful cross-pollination that has developed between philosophers, scientists, literary theorists, and novelists who are interested in the nature of consciousness.Lodge's new collection of essays is called Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, and like all of the criticism he has written since the late eighties, this volume is intended for a general audience, not for [End Page 299] literary theorists. The title essay, "Consciousness and the Novel," is a revised version of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature that Lodge gave at Emory University in 2001, and the other nine essays, all previously published, cover such topics as Howards End; the novels of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis's memoir, Experience; and the relationship between literature and criticism. I will focus on "Consciousness and the Novel."Lodge's thesis in this essay is that novels play an essential role in our exploration of the nature of human consciousness. This thesis is certainly true, but it is also entirely banal. Much more interesting is what Lodge says in support of it. He argues that because of the unique representative possibilities of the novel, conscious experiences can be represented more effectively in novels than they can be in scientific writing. Taken literally, as an assertion about the relative representational power of novels and scientific discourse, this is extremely implausible. However, taken more loosely—as an invitation to those of us interested in consciousness to take a closer look at the ways conscious experiences are represented in novels—Lodge's claim is sensible and appealing. I will consider the literal reading of Lodge's claim first and then turn to the looser one.It is undoubtedly true that, as a whole, novelists devote more energy to representing conscious experiences than writers of scientific discourse do. However, science writers can use whatever techniques best serve their aims, including the aim of describing conscious experiences, so there is no reason to think that conscious experiences can, in principle, be represented more effectively in novels than in broadly scientific discourse. Given that Lodge discusses such creative science writers as Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker in the course of his essay, it is surprising and disappointing to find him caricature scientific writing in the following way: "science... is a third-person discourse. The first-person pronoun is not used in scientific papers. If there were any hint of qualia in a scientific paper... it would be edited out" (p. 11). Qualia are the supposedly subjective qualitative aspects of conscious experiences. How the plucked string of a cello sounds to you; how the rotting fish in the garbage smells to you; and how it feels for you to inch down into the smooth, almost-too-hot water of a perfect bubble bath—these are all (supposedly) examples of qualia. Lodge is simply mistaken when he says that there is no hint of qualia in scientific writing. There is no consensus about whether qualia can be explained scientifically. In fact, there is no consensus about whether they exist. [End Page... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century, volume two of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. By BERNARD MCGINN. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Pp. xv + 630. $49.50. This second volume of the History of Western Mysticism covers the period from the sixth through the twelfth century, from Gregory the Great to the Victorines. It fully lives up to (...) the high expectations raised by the first part and displays the same skill in presenting the fruit of enormous learning in a clear, comprehensible manner. The compact section of notes, occupying onethird of the volume, shows how well the author has succeeded in mastering the abundance of sources, primary and secondary, the current Renaissance of medieval studies has rendered available. Undaunted by the mass of recent literature McGinn's established and constantly renewed acquaintance with the original texts enables him judiciously and critically to compare interpretations and judgments. Method and balance mark this work as much as learning and erudition. Its unadorned but easy style, the language of the lectern, renders his work accessible to a wider public, even if the casual tone does not always reflect the intensity of its subject. The author has structured his study around four major figures: Gregory the Great (sixth century), Scottus Eriugena (ninth), Bernard and William of Saint-Thierry (twelfth). They form the centers of three spiritual epochs of the early Middle Ages. Each one of these periods is introduced by informative chapters on the general conditions of spiritual life. The study concludes with a chapter on visionaries who belong to none of the schools represented by the key figures and a chapter on Victorine writers that already prepares for the next volume on the high season of Christian mysticism. The simple structure allows each of the great ones to be given a full chapter. Rather than drowning his survey in an abundance of forgettable names as encyclopedic histories tend to do, McGinn has accommodated the minor figures in his transition chapters where general headings dominate individual characteristics. By devoting so much space to the great ones, the author has transformed much of what could have remained a mere survey into a series of monographs. It enabled him to highlight the unique significance of at least two previously neglected figures in the rather arid span of time that separates the patristic period from the flowering of the twelfth century: Scottus Eriugena and William of Saint-Thierry. Eriugena's intellectual importance has been established for some time, yet mainly with historians of philosophy and Neoplatonist thinkers. Here he appears as the key thinker who transmits 475 476 BOOK REVIEWS Dionysius's negative theology to the Latin West and who prepares the new mysticism of the divine image that was to culminate in Eckhart and Ruusbroec. Was Eriugena a mystic? The question returns us to the provisional definition given in the general Introduction and consistently maintained throughout volume one and most of volume two. There we learned that "mystical" refers to any belief, system, or practice conducive to the experience of God's presence (vol. I, p. xvii). This definition happily replaces the one adopted through much of the modem period of exclusively private, mostly exceptional, experiences and the unusual expressions (visions, raptures, etc.) that often accompany them. Professor McGinn presents a more objective and more controllable criterion. He extends the mystical to a more or less direct consciousness of the divine presence as evident in texts that witness of, or are conducive to, such a consciousness. This sensible change enables him to include a great many theological texts of the first millennium without having to worry about the degree of their authors' subjective awareness of God's presence and to avoid the predicament to which all attempts to ascertain another person's private experience lead. Before the twelfth century almost no reports of private experiences exist and the ones that do exist, such as Augustine's "vision" of Ostia, so closely follow an established Neoplatonic pattern that they leave us wondering about their private nature. His more objective approach also dispensed the author from having to be overly concerned about the fine, in the early... (shrink)

The second half of the twentieth century inaugurated another historically contextualized shift in theological anthropology, which can be characterized by four interconnected turns to historical consciousness, to socially contextualized ethical norms and decisions, to human subjectivity, and to the inclusion of foundational faith convictions. Feminist ethicists have participated in and advanced this current re-formulation of theological anthropologies both by their critique and by their reconstruction of theological anthropologies inclusive of women’s experience. In these feminist contributions, five recurring dimensions emerge: relationality, (...) human embodiment, social location, difference, and subjectivity. Taken together these elements provide the building blocks toward an adequate anthropology. In part, this author’s conviction is supported by the integral connection of these elements to the essential dimensions of the human person in the personalist anthropology of Louis Janssens. Consequently, this inquiry will use these five elements as a lens through which to examine the theological anthropologies present in the documents of Catholic Social Teachings for points of intersection with developing feminist anthropologies. This research into Catholic Social Teachings concludes that the anthropologies in the documents both provide: 1) a foundationally different approach to authentic human living and 2) some points of intersection with a feminist perspective of authentic human living inclusive of women. This reading of Catholic Social Teachings argues that what is said particularly about the constitutive dimensions of social bodies sheds light on the constitutive dimensions of authentic human living; as such it contains a dynamic potential for future development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mystery on the Move:Aquinas’s Theological Method as Transforming WisdomGilles Mongeau, S.J.CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES to the thought of Thomas Aquinas have begun to recover its character as a “wisdom practice” aimed at the transformation of persons and sociocultural situations.1 The wise person helps others move along a path through the mysteries of faith toward a wisely ordered life for themselves in a justly ordered society. The starting point of this essay (...) is the supposition that Aquinas’s theological method in the Summa theologiae, rooted in the practice of the three arts of language (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) is itself a wisdom practice that proposes an ordered series of exercises that must be performed by the student, leading him or her to a greater participation in divine wisdom. I will show that Aquinas’s use of the tools of rhetoric, particularly the enthymemes known as arguments of fittingness, are a set of practical instructions that facilitate an affective response to divine mystery in order to enable a judgment by connaturality. [End Page 285] Thus, we can learn from Aquinas how fruitfully to order affect and reason in the exercise of the theological craft.The essay proceeds in three parts. First, a thought experiment will help us understand (a) how a medieval text works as a guide to performance, and (b) how intellect and affect interact in both artistic performance and aesthetic appreciation. Second, I will trace the role of affect and reason in knowledge for Aquinas, specifically in knowledge of the beautiful, of the good, and of divine mysteries. Third, I will show how Aquinas’s use of rhetorical enthymemes, specifically the argument of fittingness, promotes an affectively founded judgment whose fruit is true knowledge of the divine mysteries.I. A Thought ExperimentThe image below reproduces the sheet music for “O nuit d’amour,” a duet for tenor and soprano between Faust and Marguerite in Gounod’s opera Faust. A person with absolutely no training in music, looking at this page, will be able to glean only a small amount of information from it: the content of the text itself; the fact—indicated by the names “Faust” and “Marg.” listed above the score—that there are two singers; possibly, if he or she is enterprising and looks up a translation of “andante,” the fact that this piece of music is sung at a walking pace, moderately slow and mellow. But he or she is unlikely to be able to sing the duet without memorizing it from a performance he or she hears.Now, someone with singing experience in a choir, though without training in solfège, will be able to get a bit more information from the page: he or she will likely be able to recognize the time signature and the sequence and value of the notes and rests, as well as the ascending and descending patterns of the melody, so that given solid accompaniment and competent direction, and enough practice time, he or she could sing the duet. But this performance will not rely so much on the sheet music as it will rely on the external supports, and the nuances of the performance will be minimal. [End Page 286] Click for larger view View full resolutionFinally, two singers with training in solfège will be able to notice a number of things about the duet: first, that it is in D flat major, but that Faust’s part shades at bars five and six into B flat minor, adding a mysteriously ambiguous quality to his declaration of love; second, that Marguerite’s part remains always in a major key, though it shifts between D flat major and G flat major, adding a kind of temporary “lift” at key points in [End Page 287] her melody; that some of the chords in the accompaniment, at key points in the duet, are not played in their root positions, but in their second or third inversions, thus transforming the quality of the sound; they will also note instructions for holding notes. All of this information will allow a well-trained singer to sight-sing the duet and supply the necessary nuances from the... (shrink)

SUMMARY1 The rational soul becomes the constant and dimensionless Euclidean point in all experience - defining the situations in which it finds itself, but itself undefined and undefinable in any situation. It is in nature but not of nature. Just as the dimensionless Euclidean point can occupy infinite positions on a line and yet remain unaltered, so the immortal, active intellect remains unaffected by the world in which it finds itself. It is not influenced by age, sense data, sickness or (...) death. It is the knower whose nature is pure knowing or reason. This is in great part the basic assumption that runs through the history of Aristotelean and modern symbolic logics24.The rational soul grasps identity, reasons consistently, and knows objectively for though it is in the world it is not of the world. Thus it is unnecessary and impossible to relate its truth to time or place or condition. As the source of understanding it need not be understood. It understands in that it knows. It is this which places the objective knower and observer outside of all systems of knowledge that it creates in philosophy, science and theology, and frees it from subjective interpretation. It is the absolute observer beyond self-observation.252 Language, values, and meanings reflect the absolute viewpoint of the dimensionless observer beyond the necessity of observation. The task of this observer is to know trie world just as the task of the animal and plant soul is motion and reproduction. The rational soul performs its task beyond nature as surely as animals and plants perform their tasks in nature. This is why it is possible to discuss the necessary evolution of living organisms in nature, but unnecessary to discuss the necessary or unnecessary nature of the evolution of this discussion. This is one of the reasons why determinism or predestination which seem so clearly applicable to nature, need not be applied to theories of determinism and predestination. These are principles grasped in reality beyond nature and totally inapplicable to the non-natural spirit that comprehends their essences. Thus self-reflexive questions about the questioner are as irrelevant as would be questions historically of “in what sense might the definition of dimensionless point itself be dimensioned or dimension-less?”26 Questions, on the other hand, that relate to the observed world are important for they can be truly answered (where questions as to the nature of the questioner cannot). In this view reality is not nature, but rather it is from reality that the objective observer, philosopher, scientist, and theologian understands and controls nature.3 Logic, the science of reason, is the science of all sciences. It reflects the pure and innate rational nature of the knowing intellect or soul. It is pure form beyond nature. Its realm is that of first principles or axioms. These too are in the world but not of it, as with Plato's eidos and Aristotle's universals. They are clear, true and self-evident. This explains the on going use of axiomatized revelations in studies in the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. In symbolic logics, natural languages are in and of the world, but meta-languages are the constructs of pure intellectual activity and thus not natural. The abstract tends to become the more real, the less it can be found in nature. Rational souls, however, share a common reality that is as universal for Frege as it was for Aristotle.274 The occidental object tradition in general breaks out of the nature continuum by withdrawing into reality where the intellect knows and manipulates the world in philosophy, science, and theology from its position in and understanding of reality. Nature is a sub-set of reality and not vice versa. Axioms are the laws and determinants of nature and logic, but they are not nature.28 This means that at the basis of the occidental continuum of nature there is a qualitative and irreducible dichotomy of reality vs. nature. This has been most useful in the history of occidental science, but it produces a world view in which nature may lose the race with reality. SUMMARY IIIn the first portion of my paper, I discussed the implications of the Euclidean egg for philosophy and science as nature is understood and manipulated from reality. I shall now turn to what I see as the implications of the three-legged chicken view that the human intellect is in and of nature and that reality is a perspective in nature and is not simply the other of an irreducible qualitative dichotomy. Although there are an endless number of such implications that I could explore, the following, it seems to me are the most important:1 In the natural continuum there is no “dimensionless real” which can serve either as the locus of an external observer or a fixed position in nature. There is no perspective which is not an aspect of that upon which it is a perspective. The Chinese sage, for example, is one who sees himself/herself as one with or within natural process. This is expressed in a number of ways. Fung Yu-lan speaks of the difference between having no knowledge and having no-knowledge.34 Within such a continuum there can be no abstracting out of the absolute and unchanging. The nameless is the source of the named. First principles are the process itself and these principles are the alternation of opposites:“The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;The Named is the mother of all things.Therefore let there always be non-being so we may see their subtlety, And let there always be being so we may see their outcome. The two are the same.“352 An empty mind is not a blank mind. Where Aristotle viewed the mind as a blank tablet at birth to be filled by sense experience, Hsun Tzu speaks of its emptiness. It is the emptiness of the Tao itself:“The mind is constantly storing up things, and yet it is said to be empty. The mind is constantly marked by diversity, and yet it is said to be unified. The mind is constantly moving, and yet it is said to be still. Inevitably it will see things for itself. And although the objects it perceives may be many and diverse, if its acuity is of the highest level, it cannot become divided within itself.”36The nature in which and of which the mind is both perspective and aspect remains a totality. Being a totality, it is empty of itself just as any part of a whole, while a part of the whole, is empty of the whole. My ideas of myself are both of myself and empty of myself. This point can be illustrated with the simple example of knowing and speaking about two hands – one of which is mine, and the second of which belongs to someone else. 1 can objectify the second hand and fill my blank mind with information and observations about it, but I continue to remain outside of it –the arbiter in my statements of its nature and reality. However, in knowing my own hand, the hand known is also the knower and what I know represents a perspective upon an aspective of a totality of which “I–my–hand” are aspects. Being an aspect of the whole is being empty of the whole. If mind is in and of nature, any perspective on nature is an aspect of the whole. A blank mind is an unnatural mind outside of nature, filling up with impressions of nature. An empty mind is nature viewing nature as aspect and perspective. The occidental would be ashamed to reach old age and still have a blank mind. The Chinese sage would be ashamed to reach old age and still not recognize that the mind is empty.3 If mind is in nature and like nature, then language too reflects natural flow and change and process. It is one thing for me to talk about myself and another for me to talk about someone else. In the case of the latter, I may insist that objectively this other subject fits into this or that category and even administer tests to determine that it does do indeed so. But when I talk about myself, the speaker and the object of speech are one and the same. The terms I select do represent a dichotomy of sorts, but it is one of aspect and perspective and not subject and object. When I say “this is my hand” for example, the words create distinctions which are aspects of awareness but do not create an / that is or is not my hand. Language does not model or even represent reality as opposed to nature. It makes reality possible as something that nature says or thinks. Reality through language is an aspect of nature and thus a perspective upon itself as aspect. This is an important distinction that translators often miss.4 Logic in this natural continuum is concerned with distinctions in a very different sense. As a consequence of the unity of nature and mind, three kinds of distinction in experience are manifested: (a) Those distinctions which come into being as aspects of the changing world.The 10,000 things are in this sense aspects and not separate “identities” as some philosophers and scientists presuppose.37 (b) Those distinctions which come into being as aspects of the human mind. These are impressions of and thoughts about the infinite distinctions of which the restless mind is capable, (c) Those distinctions which come into being by way of the mind's use of symbols. These are the distinctions which permit us to stabilize and store our experiences, preserve the answers to our questions, and name the world into compartments and relationships.Implicit in these three assumptions which connect the distinguishing mind to the unity of a nature of'10,000‘ aspects, is an inferential process of aspect to perspective to knowledge to understanding to attitude to action/response. The reasoning mind synthesizes some aspect of experience in nature with a perspective upon this aspect. This synthesis, in turn, is an aspect of mind and the reasoning process proceeds from it to a perspective upon it which is knowledge and understanding. Knowledge and understanding in turn are aspects of thinking and the reasoning process proceeds from them to a perspective upon them which is an attitude. Attitude in turn is an aspect of thinking and the reasoning process proceeds from it to a perspective upon it which is reflected in the reasoning individual's actions and responses. This inferential process is a continuum which proceeds from aspects of experience to perspectives in thought to action and response. In this sequence an aspect is always connected by a perspective which becomes an aspect, until action/non-action, response occurs. This is as applicable to the details of life as it is to mastering life as a whole. When this inference process is incomplete many problems may result, ranging from action without understanding to the confusion of aspect and perspective with one another or to “obsession with distinctions.”38In practice this is a logic of paradox. The human being is aware that he or she is a living-dying aspect of nature, but an aspect which is also a perspective upon nature's aspects of living and dying. This paradox is the process around which a profound logic of aspect/perspective is developed by the sage. This view of logic within a continuum does not mean that there is no principle of identity, contradiction or excluded middle present – as some Chinese and European philosophers assume.These principles are also implicit in the knowing of my hand versus the knowing of the hand of another. However, the content, meaning, and application of these principles may vary just as when I say propriety, I mean propriety, and when the Chinese says li he means li but the context, meaning and application of the term may differ in each case.5 Aspect logic as it relates mind to nature in a cosmological totality is a series of syntheses in a cyclic continuum organizing thinking in phases. Each phase is an aspect/perspective synthesis which becomes an aspect of a further aspect/perspective synthesis. This progression might be described thusly: The synthesis of nature/human which is Tao (non-being) translates into the aspects of being (the 10,000 things), and as such is a synthesis of aspect and perspective. This synthesis of aspect and perspective translates into an aspect of ideas and as such is a synthesis of perception and conception. This synthesis of perception and conception translates into an aspect of knowledge, and as such is a synthesis of knowledge and understanding (understanding is a perspective upon knowledge) i.e., no-knowledge. This synthesis of knowledge and understanding translates into an aspect of purpose, and as such is a synthesis of purpose and action. The perspective here on action is aesthetic and/or moral. This synthesis of purpose and actions translates again into an aspect of nature and as such is a synthesis beyond individual aspects and perspective, i.e. Tao. Thus there is a cyclic dynamic in the system which remains open to further development.Tai Chen in his Inquiry Into Goodness connects this cycle of syntheses with wisdom and benevolence:Because there are mind and intelligence, the superior man knows that the perfection of the Way of Man depends completely upon nature. When he looks at the signs of the natural (Cheng), he knows the beginning of things; when he cherishes the virtue of supreme illumination, (Shen-ming), he knows the end of things. Proceeding from mind and intelligence to the attainment of the virtue of supreme intelligence, [the superior man] in his treatment of things in the world will cause the world to return to [the principles of] benevolence; and in his treatment of the capability inherent in things, he will cause the world to follow wisdom (Chih).39. (shrink)

Volume 19 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ turns to the ever-intriguing relationship between "Psychoanalysis and Art." This introductory section begins with Donald Kuspit's scholarly reflections on the role of analysis in visual art and art criticism, and then proceeds to a series of topical studies on Freud and art introduced by Harry Trosman. Egyptologist Lorelei Corcoran explores the Egypt of Freud's imagination, thereby illuminating our understanding of the archaeological metaphor. Marion Tolpin offers new insights into Freud's analysis of the (...) American writer Hilda Doolittle by focusing on the meaning of the Goddess Athene - whose statue rested on Freud's desk - to both analyst and analysand. Stephen Toulmin examines Freud's artistic sensibility - and places the historical significance of Freud's art collection in bold relief - by looking at the many contemporary art objects Freud chose _not_ to collect. Danielle Knafo identifies key events in the early life of Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele that were "primary determinants" of the content and form of his self-portraits. And Barbara Almond examines the spontaneous healing process depicted in Margaret Drabble's novel _The Needle's Eye _as an analogue to the kind of growth and development mobilized by the psychoanalytic process. Section II, "Psychoanalysis and Development," begins with Barbara Fajardo's appreciation of the contribution of biology to analyzability; she reviews findings from both infant research and biogenetic research that tend toward an understanding of "constitution" as resilience in development and, subsequently, in treatment. Benjamin Garber adds to the psychoanalytic understanding of childhood learning disabilities by presenting the three-and-a-half-year analysis of a learning-disabled child. In a fascinating two-part contribution, "Bridging the Chasm Between Developmental Theory and Clinical Theory," Joseph Palombo sheds light on some of the knottiest problems in contemporary analysis, including the relationship between childhood events and the reconstruction of those events in treatment. In Section III, "Psychoanalysis and Empathy," Mary Newsome presents case material in support of her claim that the analyst's empathic understanding catalyzes the coalescence of the patient's affect and aim, that is, the patient's capacity to believe in and then realize his ambitions. The acquisition of the capacity, she contends, not only betokens a specific kind of structure formation, but is the bedrock of emerging self-cohesion. Her challenging paper is thoughtfully discussed by David Terman and Jerome Winer. Section IV of _The Annual_ offers Jerome Kavka's appreciation of the work of N. Lionel Blitzsten. Blitzsten, the first Chicago psychoanalyst and one of America's most gifted clinicians and teachers, anticipated modern concepts of narcissism in identifying "narcissistic neuroses" with special treatment requirements. Morris Sklansky furthers our understanding of Blitzsten in his discussion of Kavka's essay. Ranging across the analytic canvas with presentations as edifying as they are provocative, volume 19 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ challenges readers to wrestle with issues at the cutting edge of the discipline. It takes a well-deserved place in the preeminent continuing series in the field. (shrink)

: Traditional mind-body identity theories maintain that consciousness is identical with neural activity. Consider an alternative identity theory – namely, a mind-object identity theory of consciousness. I suggest to take into consideration whether one’s consciousness might be identical with the external object. The hypothesis is that, when I perceive a yellow banana, the thing that is one and the same with my consciousness of the yellow banana is the very yellow banana one can grab and eat, rather than the (...) neural processes triggered by the banana. The bottom line is that one’s conscious experience of an object is the object one experiences. First, I outline the main hypothesis and the relation between mind, body, and object. Eventually, I address a series of traditional obstacles such as hallucinations, illusions, and commonsensical assumptions. Keywords: Identity Theory; Mind/Body Problem; Consciousness; Hallucinations; Illusions Le esperienze sono oggetti. Verso una teoria dell’identità della mente in quanto oggetto Riassunto: Le teorie dell’identità tra mente e corpo di tipo tradizionale hanno affermato una relazione di identità tra coscienza e attività neurale. Si consideri una teoria dell’identità di carattere alternativo – propriamente una teoria dell’identità che intenda la coscienza come un oggetto. Suggerisco di considerare la possibilità che la coscienza di qualcuno possa essere trattata come identica a un oggetto del mondo esterno. Sulla base di questa ipotesi, quando percepisco una banana gialla, ciò che coincide con la mia coscienza della banana gialla è proprio la banana gialla che si può prendere e mangiare, piuttosto che il processo neurale innescato dalla banana. In definitiva l’esperienza cosciente di un oggetto che ciascuno ha è l’oggetto che si esperisce. In una prima parte, procederò con il delineare l’ipotesi principale e la relazione tra mente, corpo e oggetto. Successivamente cercherò di risolvere alcuni problemi di tipo tradizionale, quali le allucinazioni, le illusioni e gli assunti di senso comune. Parole chiave: Teoria dell’identità; Problema mente/corpo; Coscienza; Allucinazioni; Illusioni. (shrink)