This chapter contains sections titled: Classical Tradition Descartes: Minds as Captains, Bodies as Ships Rejecting Descartes: Ships Passing in the Night.

Speakers of different languages perceive time differently depending on various factors such as age, pace of life, religion, time of day, and even pregnancy. In recent years, studies have shown that...

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up (...) by therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 35-53 [Access article in PDF] "Truth Is What Works": Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism—A Conversation Francisco J. Varela Bernhard Poerksen Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft Universität Hamburg Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a dissertation on the (...) insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35]Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001.In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why?Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it... (shrink)

Critics of Western medicine have long heralded a “new paradigm” opposed to the reigning materialistic worldview of biomedical science and allopathy. This new paradigm has undergone several name changes (e.g., holistic, alternative, complementary, integrative) and presumably advances a radically new worldview. On closer inspection, it looks more like the opposite pole of the same dualistic worldview and not a radical break with the past. A truly new paradigm prepared to jettison tacit conceptual assumptions would have significant implications for medical (...) research, provided that institutional and professional constraints not inhibit the studies to follow. A research agenda is proposed comprising possible jumping-off points for investigators comfortable with working around the reigning assumptions both of current medical thinking and of a rapidly institutionalizing integrative-medicine worldview. These include proposed medical research on spirituality, alien abductions, hierophanies, thought forms, placebo pharmacology, radionics, arcane medical wisdom, prenatal ensoulment, and musical genetics. (shrink)

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As (...) potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations. (shrink)

Since John Locke, regnant conceptions of personhood in Western philosophy have focused on individual capabilities for complex forms of consciousness that involve cognition such as the capability to remember past events and one’s own past actions, to think about and identify oneself as oneself, and/or to reason. Conceptions of personhood such as Locke's qualify as cognition-oriented, and they often fail to acknowledge the role of embodiment for personhood. This article offers an alternative conception of personhood from within the tradition (...) of phenomenology of the body. The article presents a phenomenological analysis of joint musical activity in dementia care and outlines an intercorporeal conception of personhood based on this analysis. It also provides a philosophical basis for the idea that others can hold us in personhood, and it questions a strict one-body-one-person logic that has pertained in much personhood debate. (shrink)

In the past centuries, most Muslims have encountered modern science as a Western import. To avoid being overwhelmed by the military and commercial advantages enjoyed by technologically advanced nations, Middle Eastern Muslim societies had to begin adopting modern knowledge. As westernization started to shape social structures and institutions as well as technologies, conservative Muslim responses to modern science typically became conditioned by the demands of cultural defense. Many Muslim thinkers argued that upholding the religious character of Muslim civilization meant (...) borrowing technology but rejecting the perceived materialism pervading the conceptual frameworks of modern science. This defensive approach remains prominent in present Muslim thinking about science. Almost all religiously oriented Muslim thinkers take harmony between science and Islam for granted, but in practice, conservative Muslims often express deep reservations about the naturalistic perspectives dominating modern science. Especially in the popular literature, religiously motivated distortions of science are common. Darwinian evolution is a particular target of rejection. (shrink)

As activity, science has become a large-scale cultural phenomenon. As product, it is drawn on by industry, agriculture, and medicine, thus affecting not only the scene of its activity but all the rest of the world as well. Western philosophy has always harboured a tradition which regards scientific inquiry as a paradigm for rational inquiry in general. Yet almost every philosopher in that tradition has pointed to limits of this paradigm and its scope.

Complementary and alternative medicine is becoming increasingly popular in western countries, with estimates of CAM usage as high as 40%. This has prompted a change of attitude of the medical establishment: the initial dismissal of CAM is being replaced by a drive to integrate CAM into the mainstream. Two possible explanations for this integration thrust are considered. Firstly, integration could be motivated largely by cognitive interest in CAM. Secondly, integration could be mainly power-driven, aimed at controlling the alternative movement (...) and exploiting its capacity to make money. The second explanation seems more plausible, and is supported by data showing the paucity of research on CAM. The medical establishment does not sufficiently appreciate the challenge CAM poses, and does not consider its scientific appraisal to be a high priority. Instead, the allopathic community seems preoccupied with the opportunistic desire to protect its authority and social status. Such a discourse can become dogmatic, reluctant to revise critically the ‘accepted’ body of knowledge. Popper's critical rationalism could help to undercut dogmatism and encourage a critical, open-minded orientation of medical science. (shrink)

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In (...) this article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi’s sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi’s account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi’s ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation. (shrink)

The contemporary moment in rhetoric studies is complex, marked by a number of powerful currents pulling scholarship in new directions. One of those currents is the deepening engagement with science and technology studies through rhetorical investigations of medicine, environmental policy, and science. Another is the increasing experimentation with qualitative methodologies, often called “rhetorical ethnography.” A third is the rapidly developing encounter with interwoven philosophies of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism. If you are interested in any of these, you (...) should absolutely read Scott Graham’s The Politics of Pain Medicine. The title is overly... (shrink)

This unique anthology brings together readings from the works of the most significant post-Leninist Marxist thinkers. The selections reflect the diversity and high intellectual accomplishment of twentieth-century Marxism and show how these theorists have transformed traditional Marxism's general philosophical orientation, interpretation of historical materialism, models of socialist political practice, and conception of human liberation. The writings reveal the evolution of a sophisticated and democratic Marxism with a theoretical emphasis on class consciousness and subjectivity, a resistance to all forms of (...) domination--including sexism--and a belief in the political power of consciousness-raising. The selections include the work of forerunners Karl Korsch, George Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci; figures from the 1930s, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Wilhelm Reich; post-war and New Left thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Gorz, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas; and contemporary socialist-feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Juliet Mitchell, Barbara Ehrenreich, Heidi Hartmann, and Ann Ferguson. Gottlieb places the readings in historical and theoretical context, providing a clear and insightful account of the intellectual problems and historical events that gave rise to the Western Marxism, and describing how it both anticipated and influenced contemporary radical movements. Each selection is prefaced by a biographical sketch and the book concludes with a bibliography suggesting further research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAfter some introductory remarks on the work of the modern Chinese philosopher Feng Qi, I begin this article by providing some observations concerning the ambiguous notion of ‘wisdom’ in Orientalist representations of non-Western thought and in comparative philosophy, as well as on the peculiar form of subjectivity ascribed to the ‘wise’ subject. I then proceed by offering an account of Feng’s philosophical universalism and historical materialist outlook, outlining the identification of wisdom with metaphysics in his early work and (...) exploring the status and function of wisdom in his mature writings. In doing so, I analyze the tension in Feng’s work between the theoretical rationality and systematicity of ‘metaphysics’ on the one hand and the existential and transformative orientation of ‘wisdom’ on the other. (shrink)

How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and academic literatures, biophysical and political-economic factors are often cited as the reason for meat’s preeminent status. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive investigation of these claims by reviewing the available evidence on the political-economic and biophysical features of meat over the long arc of Western history. We specifically focus on nine critical epochs: the Paleolithic, early to late Neolithic, antiquity, ancient (...) Israel and early Christian societies, medieval Europe, early modern Europe, colonial America, the American frontier, and the modern industrial era. We find that except under conditions of environmental scarcity, the meaning and value of meat cannot be attributed to intrinsic biophysical value or to the political-economic actors who materially benefit from it. Rather, meat’s status reflects the myriad cultural contexts in which it is socially constructed in people’s everyday lives, particularly with respect to religious, gender, communal, racial, national, and class identity. By deconstructing the normalized/naturalized materialist assumptions circling around meat consumption, this paper clears a space for a more nuanced appreciation of the role that culture has played in the legitimation of meat, and by extension, the possibility of change. (shrink)

Design research has been positioned as an important methodological contribution of the learning sciences. Despite the publication of a handbook on the subject, the practice of design research in education remains an eclectic collection of specific approaches implemented by different researchers and research groups. In this paper, I examine the learning sciences as a design science to identify its fundamental goals, methods, affiliations, and assumptions. I argue that inherent tensions arise when attempting to practice design research as an analytic science. (...) Drawing inspiration and insight from Chinese philosophy and the practice of Chinese medicine, I propose that the learning sciences may better attain its claims to science through greater reliance on inductive synthesis rather than linear causal analysis. In so doing, I reposition the endeavor of science making within the metaphysics of process philosophy instead of classical Western philosophy. I suggest that theory building will be strengthened empirically and pragmatically by more careful observation and systematic generalization of the stability patterns of design related phenomena. It also needs to be more situated in its orientation. (shrink)

Since its inception in the early 1990s, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has become the dominant epistemic framework for Western medical practice. However, in light of powerful criticisms against EBM, alternatives such as casuistic medicine have been gaining support in both the medical and philosophical community. In the absence of empirical evidence in support of the claim that EBM improves patient outcomes, and in light of considerations that it is unlikely that such evidence will be forthcoming, another standard is needed to (...) assess EBM against its alternatives. In this paper, I propose a set of criteria for this purpose based on Helen Longino's criteria for assessing the objectivity of a knowledge productive community. I then apply these criteria to assess EBM against a casuistic framework for medical knowledge. I argue that EBM's strict adherence to a hierarchical organization of knowledge can reasonably be expected to block it from fulfilling a high level of objectivity. A casuistic framework, on the other hand, because it emphasizes critical evaluation in conjunction with the flexibility of a case-based approach, could be expected to better facilitate a more optimal epistemic community. (shrink)

A celebration of one of the most influential spiritual leaders of our time, Neem Karoli Baba, the enlightened guru who inspired a generation of seekers--including Ram Dass, Daniel Goleman, and Larry Brilliant--on life-altering journeys that helped change the world.In 1967, Ram Dass returned to the West from India and spread the teachings of his mysterious guru, Neem Karoli Baba, better known as Maharajji. Ram Dass's words about Maharajji's life-affirming wisdom resonated with a youth culture that had grown disillusioned with the (...) violence, civil discord, and crude materialism of modern civilization. Hundreds of Westerners travelled to India and experienced Maharajji's extraordinary presence directly until his death in 1973. His simple directives--love everyone, feed everyone, and remember God--opened their hearts and awakened their souls.What these followers brought back to the West has since changed the landscape of everyday life. Meditation is now mainstream; yoga studios are in every town; and mindfulness is practiced in elementary schools and boardrooms everywhere from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill. A stirring piece of history, Love Everyone brings these stories to life, sharing for the first time the inspiring tales of the men and woman who followed the siren call of the East to the foothills of the Himalayas, then returned to forever reshape the world.A compelling and inspiring tribute to Maharajji from the Western men and women who knew him best, Love Everyone is a profound teaching on the power of love, as lasting and transformative as the truth, wisdom, and bliss of Maharajji. Parvati Markus is a developmental editor and writer of spiritually oriented non-fiction books and memoirs. She has worked on books by various members of the satsang, from Ram Dass's classic Be Here Now (before she went to India) to those since her time in India with Maharajji (1971-72)--Dada Mukerjee's By His Grace and The Near and the Dear to Krishna Das's recent Chants of a Lifetime. She is a former President of the Board of the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram and Temple and a former development consultant for the Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders, held at the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland. She lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. (shrink)

High-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation is used to treat some advanced malignancies. It is a traumatic procedure, with a high complication rate and significant mortality. ASCT patients and their carers draw on many sources of information as they seek to understand the procedure and its consequences. Some seek information from beyond orthodox medicine. Alternative beliefs and practices may conflict with conventional understanding of the theory and practice of ASCT, and ‘contested understandings’ might interfere with patient adherence to the (...) strict and demanding protocols required for successful ASCT.The present study, conducted in Sydney, Australia, examines narrative-style interviews with 10 sequentially recruited ASCT patients and nine of their carers conducted at the time of transplant and three months later. Transcripts were read for instances of mention of alternative advice, and for instances of contested understanding of information relevant to the transplant.Patients and carer pairs expressed closely concordant views about alternative advice. Five pairs were consulting alternative practitioners. Contested understanding was expressed in four domains—understandings of the transplant itself and its underlying theory, of the relationship between the components of the ‘transplant’, of the nature and role of stem cells, and of beliefs about bodily function and life-style. Contested understandings of the transplant treatment were expressed as predominantly personal interpretations of orthodox informationPatients and carers seemed to recognise that alternative and conventional systems were discordant, yet they were able to separate the two, and adhere to each practice without prejudicing their medical treatment. A single case of late, post-transplant repudiation of Western medicine is discussed to emphasise some of the possible determinants of dissonance when it does occur. (shrink)

The basilica of the Faculty of Medicine plot at Knossos in Crete (beginning of 5th c.) and that of Antigoneia in Albania (end of 6th - beginning of 7th c.) constitute up to now two isolated examples in Eastern Illyricum, of churches whose sanctuary is in the form of a triconch added at the east of the naves. The study of these two edifices throws light on their differences and similarities, both architectural and functional; on the other hand a comparison (...) with other churches in the Mediterranean basin shows that they belong to a particular type, whose origin may be found in certain funerary monuments at Rome and the regions under its influence. We consider the choice of this particular type of sanctuary, the place above all where the mystery of the Eucharist is performed simulating the Last Supper celebrated in the "stage piece" at Jerusalem. If the trefoil plan is derived from the funerary edifices where funerary banquets and repasts in honour of the martyrs were performed, it is equally related to the triconch triclinia of the wealthy residences found particularly in the western part of the Roman Empire. Lastly, the mosaic paving in the Antigoneia church, whose decoration reflects a theological preoccupation that also occurs in the murals and the pavements of other trefoil sanctuaries, suggests that the lateral apses probably had functions similar to those described by Saint Paulin of Nola. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The Doctor Strange offers a unique opportunity to explore the question: how can people say that something exists if it can't be detected in the physical world. As a physician and a man of science, Doctor Stephen Strange has a strictly materialist worldview. Before Kamar‐Taj, Strange sought his cure through the only means he could understand: medicine and science. Medicine and science always push the boundaries of what people can know about the human body and the universe, constantly (...) discovering new methods and drugs through research and experimentation. The Doctor Strange provides an opportunity to consider the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard writes that “it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision” with the unknown. Kierkegaard describes two different kinds of teachers in the Philosophical Fragments: Socratic teacher and the god as teacher. The Ancient One seems to be a combination of the Socratic teacher and the god as teacher. (shrink)

The term “Idealism” has been used to characterize a variety of positions in the western philosophical tradition. Plato, the Neoplatonists, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, among others, have been interpreted as proponents of some version of philosophical idealism. Idealism is typically viewed as a response to theoretical problems generated by materialism and certain forms of realism. The difficulties involved with making sense of mind and values within a strictly materialist context, materialist explanations of causality, realist accounts (...) of knowledge, and the ontological status of matter itself have provided the grounds for idealist innovations. However, idealist solutions to these problems need not reject materialism or realism in toto. Idealists may incorporate philosophical claims which appear to be consistent with materialist or realist doctrines. For instance, Plato, the Neoplatonists, and Hegel often write about physical, material objects as if they exist as extramental entities—on some interpretations, at least. An idealist of the Berkeleyan sort would reject the notion of extra-mental material bodies as incoherent. Thus, the following questions emerge. (shrink)

The Gypsies (a misnomer, derived from an early legend about Egyptian origins) defy the conventional definition of a population: they have no nation-state, speak different languages, belong to many religions and comprise a mosaic of socially and culturally divergent groups separated by strict rules of endogamy. Referred to as “the invisible minority”, the Gypsies have for centuries been ignored by Western medicine, and their genetic heritage has only recently attracted attention. Common origins from a small group of ancestors characterise (...) the 8–10 million European Gypsies as an unusual trans-national founder population, whose exodus from India played the role of a profound demographic bottleneck. Social and economic pressures within Europe led to gradual fragmentation, generating multiple genetically differentiated subisolates. The string of population bottlenecks and founder effects have shaped a unique genetic profile, whose potential for genetic research can be met only by study designs that acknowledge cultural tradition and self-identity. BioEssays 27:1084–1094, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper is an investigation of the degree of incommensurability between Western scientific medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on the practice and theory of acupuncture. We describe the structure of traditional Chinese medicine, oriented around such concepts as yin, yang, qi, and xing, and discuss how the conceptual and explanatory differences between Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine generate impediments to their comparison and evaluation. We argue that the linguistic, conceptual, ontological, and explanatory impediments can to a (...) large extent be overcome, and conclude that the dramatic differences between Western and traditional Chinese medicine do not provide insurmountable barriers to rational evaluation of acupuncture. We conclude with a discussion of the intentional and emotional aspects of conceptual change. (shrink)

From the modern point of view, the Daoist regimen culture in China is actually a kind of oriental bionomy. Although it is less developed than the Western life sciences in terms of details and techniques, it has unique advantages in terms of its comprehensive grasp and dynamic observation of life, as well as its emphasis on the development of life potentiality and on the self adjustment and improvement of living bodies. Chen Yingning reestablished a Daoist bionomy through Xianxue 仙学 (...) (Philosophy of Immortals) which involves religious faith, philosophy and sciences, leaving us a valuable legacy. To establish a new bionomy system required by the modern society through learning from the Daoist bionomy, the academic circle has to seriously explore the four issues: (1) at the level of faith, to turn the Daoist faith in deities and gods into a pursuit of ideal personality; (2) with respect to the principles of regimen, to extend the dual cultivation into a kind of universal concept; (3) as with the way of regimen, to learn from the regimen thought of Daoism and combine the inner cultivation with the outer one, and static exercise with dynamic exercise; and (4) with regard to the ways of treatment of diseases, to combine the Daoist medicine with the Western medicine. (shrink)

The roots of much of Western medicine lie in the Christian monastic tradition and its commitment to nonstigmatizing compassionate care throughout the life cycle and to the ideal of empathic personal connection between physicians, patients, and the communities and relationships in which both of these are embedded. In the modern West, these Christianly informed aspects of medicine are increasingly being undercut as medical care becomes ever more specialized, technologized, and depersonalized. At the same time, there exist a variety of (...) efforts to counter these tendencies and to foster a practice of medicine that is more sensitive to the personal, relational, familial, and narrative dimensions of health, illness, and medical care. There are, in particular, considerable numbers of physicians, psychologists, and psychotherapists working at the intersections of biomedical and psychosocial care, of care for individuals and care for families, and of the body and the mind. Given the natural affinity that Christian bioethicists might be expected to have to communitarian, narrative, and family-oriented approaches to health care, it is thus remarkable that there appears to be no work of Christian bioethics that interacts in any discernible way with this psychotherapeutic literature concerning health, illness, families, and the mind-body interface. Instead, Christian bioethicists appear to endorse a narrowly reductionistic biomedical view of health and illness while either ignoring the psychosocial, integrative, and collaborative literature, or actively blaming and shaming those pastors or lay Christians who might have anything to do with psychotherapy or psychosocial care. This is unbecoming and unhelpful. In the fragmented, complex, and potentially dehumanizing world that is modern medical care, those who would think Christianly about the care of the sick cannot afford to despise psychology and psychosocial care. On the contrary, the church needs psychotherapy. In this article, I will thus consider, first, what the state of the conversation is where Christian bioethics and psychosocial and psychotherapeutic care are concerned. I will then turn to some of the principal landmarks in the professional literature concerning psychotherapeutic work with the sick, the disabled, the dying, and the bereaved, particularly as these are considered in contexts that include families and lay and professional caregivers. I will then identify a few opportunities for practical and theological reflection that present themselves in this literature, and will conclude with a few comments on the substance and relationship of salvation and health. (shrink)

In Korean culture, illness is frequently considered punishment for sin. In spite of the prevalence of Western medicine and advanced technologies, moral judgment is frequently confused with physical causality. There are certain religious dietary customs which people undertake in order to be healed. These customs are open to misinterpretation, and can become a basis for accusation, fear and guilt. Women and people of inferior social status are easily accused of being the cause of illness within families and society. The (...) persecution of witchcraft in the medieval age developed from a similar mechanism: it is easier to scapegoat an individual or a small group than to take responsibility as an entire community. A religion that creates guilt and fear is not oriented towards health. Rather than being a blessing, it is, in fact, a problem. I consider whether religion is death or life oriented. Life giving energy for the sake of individual, as well as community, is an important component. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews The Growth of Medical Thought. By Lester S. King. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Pp. ix + 254. $5.50.) The author of this book is "a pathologist with a background in history and philosophy," to quote from the jacket. This combination of interests is reflected in the Preface itself, where it is stated, "The history of medicine is part of the history of ideas." However, the (...) text itself, unfortunately, is too episodic in treatment and too homiletic in tone to do justice to the explicit goal the author sets for himself at the very outset, which is "to indicate the growth of medical science and the patterns of medical doctrine," by a consideration of a few key figures in the history of Western medicine who represent certain distinct trends in medical theory. In his previous book, The Medical World of the 18th Century (1958), the author likened the historian to the photographer, but he forgot to bring out that a good historian needs (to exploit his own analogy) a movie camera in order to exhibit adequately the growth of things. An ordinary camera will not do for historiography. The volume opens with ancient Greek medicine and ends with the pioneers in molecular pathology. In the present reviewer's opinion, the most effective chapters of the book are the ones dealing with two of the most controversial figures in the whole history of medicine, namely, Galen and Paracelsus. For there more than anywhere else in the book, we learn the sobering lesson that just because, say, Galen's "doctrine of faculties" in Roman medicine is "wrong" (that is, false in fact), from the standpoint of modern science, is no reason for calling it "foolish" (that is, false in theory) --Moli~re to the contrary notwithstanding (p. 77). While Galen's Aristotelian "modes of thought may seem somewhat strange to us," Dr. King insists, "we must preserve a judicious historical attitude" (p. 49) towards them just the same, if our objective is to understand their raison d'etre in the first place. He uses the same criterion with respect to Paracelsus, even though he spoils his case a bit by contradicting himself concerning that bombastic figure of Renaissance medicine, describing him on one page as "essentially a poet and not a scientist or philosopher" (p. 125), and then declaring on another that he "was at heart a philosopher" (p. 137). Now, no matter whether we agree with the author's interpretation of Paracelsus as a "Neo-Platonist" in medicine, he deserves credit for discussing [2s7] 238 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY that enigmatic Swiss iatrochemist sympathetically. In any event, Dr. King's sympathetic approach to Paracelsus manages to throw considerable light on the Paracelsian advice to all future physicians: Don't read books! Read the stars, but read them "in Neo-Platonic fashion" (p. 114)! While the author is "judicious" about Galen and Paracelsus in particular, he is far from being so when it comes to Friedrich Hoffmann, a medical materialist and "systematist" from Halle in the eighteenth century. Paradoxically enough, Dr. King has a marked antipathy for the doctor of "sympathy " himself (p. 173). Incidentally, the only other physician in the book who is not liked--apparently for his being polemical (p. 215)--is a famous fellow-pathologist of the last century, Rudolf Virchow. Still, it is only fair to add that the author acknowledges fully Virchow's important contributions to the field of cellular pathology. Finally, Dr. King not only has his likes and dislikes as to the medical men he actually selects from modern medicine to represent changes in theory of disease, but he seems also to have a definite bias in another and more serious sense. With the exception of the Epilogue and Chapter IV, which includes Vesalius and Harvey as well as Hoffmann, all the episodes of modern medicine deemed worthy of study derive from the Germanic world. Curiously enough, although there is no discussion of the germ theory of disease as such in the book, there is mention of Koch, but not of Pasteur. And French physiologist Claude Bernard, the great medical philosopher who tried to do in the nineteenth century for scientific medicine what... (shrink)

Western society today is less unified by a set of core values than ever before. Undoubtedly, the concept of moral consensus is a difficult one in a liberal, democratic and pluralistic society. But it is imperative to avoid a rigid majoritarianism where sensitive personal values are at stake, as in bioethics. Bioethics has become an influential part of public and professional discussions of health care. It has helped frame issues of moral values and medicine as part of a more (...) general effort to find consensus about some of the most perplexing questions of our time. But why is it thought that a moral consensus is important or that it deserves respect? How does moral consensus acquire legitimacy in a society that includes diverse value systems? How is moral consensus possible and how do small groups help create or distort consensus processes? Written by a medical school professor trained in philosophy, this timely work tackles these questions from philosophical, historical, and social scientific standpoints. It begins by describing the traditional ambivalence about consensus in Western culture as well as the uncertain relationship in modernity between consensus and expertise. After outlining the current bioethical consensus, the book gives philosophical and political analyses of the idea of consensus, then assesses the role of consensus in national ethics commissions and in the ethics committee movement. Moreno constructs an original, naturalistic philosophy of moral consensus, referred to as "bioethical naturalism", and then applies sociology and social psychology to actual consensus processes. The book concludes with an account of bioethics as a consensus-oriented social reform movement. This insightful volume will be essential reading for bioethicists, philosophers, physicians, members of ethics committees, and all those concerned with ethical and social issues in health care. (shrink)

This study is based on a critique of Western medicine derived from the proposition that any system of medicine must necessarily embody a mysterious quality. What is meant by mystery is an all encompassing element of indeterminancy and so of uncertainty in both the theory and practice of medicine.

It is argued that there are moral costs of our accepting ‘strict materialism’, the view that there is no such phenomenon as an irreducible first‐person point of view. If we accept strict materialism, then we have to give up some considered moral views, such as the principle of an agent‐relative morality and the hedonistic principle. The necessity involved is not logical, however, but pragmatic. Strict materialism does not imply that these moral views are false; it is our belief in them (...) that is undermined by pur belief in strict materialism. If there is no irreducible first‐person point of view these moral views simply do not seem to make any moral sense. Since these moral views are prima facie very plausible, the moral costs of our accepting strict materialism are considerable. (shrink)

The East/West divide seems to be as old as history itself, the roots of Orientalism and anti-Semitism lying far beyond the origins of modern Western imperialism. The very project of Western classical republicanism had its darker side: to purloin the legacy of the Greeks, distancing them from Eastern systems deemed 'despotic' and 'other'. Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince is a thoroughly revisionist book, challenging not only the comfortable view the West has of its own political evolution, (...) but the negative stereotypes of non-Western systems. Not only did these images serve to legitimate early modern European nation states struggling for an identity, but they also served to justify slavery and other forms of domination over subject peoples. Drawing upon archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Springborg discusses the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian contribution of political forms and cultic institutions to classical Graeco-Roman civilization, an Eastern legacy to the West long obscured for political reasons. A different reading of the foundation myths of Athens and Rome, certain texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the writings of Herodotus, Isocrates, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, permits us to restore possible lines of filtration. Renaissance thought, long believed to have ushered in the Western classical republican tradition, demonstrates a curious ambivalence towards powerful Eastern system, objects of fascination as much as fear. We do not yet find sedimented the divide between Western Democracy and oriental despotism, in which post-Reformation thought as been set in stone. This major new study will be of interest to students of political history, political theory, comparative politics and political archaeology. (shrink)

Western scholars read "dialectical materialism" in Chinese Marxism within a Western philosophical frame. Some hold that Chinese Marxism is Chinese in some important sense, but fail to see what is involved; others see nothing particularly Chinese about Chinese Marxism. Similarly, Chinese Marxists identify bianzhengfa with Marxian dialectic, without adequately realizing the difficulties attending that concept. ;The dissertation shows tongbian as a distinct but not necessarily unique style of Chinese "thought" , which was formulated in ancient philosophical literature such (...) as the Yijing. I argue that Chinese intellectuals understand Marxist thought in terms of tongbian. What tong-bian sees is a "world as such," or ziran ; with no transcendence, every element is relative to every other and all elements are thus "correlative." Each particular is both self-determinate and determined by every other. An explanation of relationships requires a contexualist interpretation of the world in which events are strictly interdependent. "Polarity" implies a relationship of two events, each constituting a necessary condition for the other. Yin always suggests becoming-yang, and vice versa. Any two events constantly alternate each another, change into each other, exchange with each other, displace each other, and so on. The salient feature of tongbian philosophy is that the complementary and contradictory interactions of the two basic elements of a polarity like yin-yang constitute the forces, and produce change. ;Chinese Marxism finds its roots in Engels but reads him in a distinctly different way and, by drawing on tongbian, develops into a strong and useful strand of thought. I examine this in the writings of Cai Yuanpei, Qu Qiubai, Ai Siqi, and Mao Zedong. I show that juxtaposing dialectics with bianzhenga is a misunderstanding. The version of Chinese Marxism that I recover seems close to Marx on certain points, especially In terms of "internal relations." However, it is rather a third way as developed from a culture and tradition that can not be understood in Western terms. (shrink)

This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves. “The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of (...) nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded. It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.… Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.” Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin. From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis. (shrink)

Experience and science, being the two sources of technology, have different focuses. In experiential technology, techniques and skills are emphasized while in scientific technology tool or equipment. Experiential technology is generally regarded as local knowledge, and scientific technology universal. Traditional Chinese medicine is an experiential technology. In contrast, Western medicine is set up as a scientific technology with great efforts. Through the comparison of these two medicines, this paper attempts to illustrate the difference between the two technologies and in (...) turn, the difference between these two medicines by defining these two technologies. Finally, this paper further investigates the special values of Chinese medicine. Making use of the SSK theory, this paper deconstructs the idea of universality of science, and argues that, the universality is the feature that science pursues, but not what it already has. With more historical evidence, experiential technology is more stable, while scientific technology is less stable because it updates quickly, and often changes reversely. (shrink)

In Western culture, human medicine has evolved as a healing profession, and as such, it is oriented toward curing sick people, caring for sick people, preventing maladies, and promoting health. This orientation is primarily centered around the healing relationship, a relationship that is usually thought of as a dyadic structure, comprising the physician and the patient. Venerable terms such as “the physician-patient relationship” and “the doctor-patient interaction” reflect this view. A closer look at the structure of a healing (...) relationship reveals, however, that it is more complex than a dyadic structure. For the doctor is not the only determinant of the healing relationship. There are additional components that shape it and its success or failure. Among these components are, for example, the physician’s assistants and the patient’s family members. This complex, polyadic healing structure with its function, effects, and defects will be the subject of our concern in the next chapter. It embraces the physician as one of its most important components. (shrink)

Tirana, immediately after it was declared the capital of Albania on 11 February 1920, has undergone many changes in its morphology and city context. The capital is located in the heart of the country. During its lifespan, Tirana has adopted four important regulatory plans starting from 1923. The Western ideologies of the time influenced drastically the city development. The influence of such ideologies was stopped immediately though the imposition of communist ideas, after the Second World War. Rational building forms (...) were created which could be standardized in order to reduce construction costs. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, this current was implemented during the 1920s, as a response to social problems. The communist regime established strict anti-urbanization policy that aims to foster the development of rural areas and the suburban industrial districts in order to control urban growth and demographic mobility. All the regulatory master plans of Tirana, climate data of the city, the actual situation of the specific neighborhood, its orientation toward north, are considered in order to gather information and to implement the correct bioclimatic eco-renovation in the area. A special attention will be given to the underground tunnels which were constructed during the communist regime all over the city (1945–1983) as a response to a hypothetic nuclear attack, in order to shelter the inhabitance against bombing. These reinforced concrete tunnels will serve not only as an area for water collection and recycling strategies but also for cooling with zero energy expenditure for the inhabitants as a consequence of differences in temperature and air pressure. This strategy benefits from the underground air temperature in both seasons (winter and summer). It envisages the handover of these tunnels by the community. Nowadays, such structures are abandoned and denigrated. The realization of these structures required large amounts of money from the state budget. Considering that fact they need to be vitalized and reused, using different methodologies and strategies as part of the city. After the communist regime in the city of Tirana, two other regulatory plans were implemented which observe the city from another perspective, determining and evaluating Tirana’s real values as a city of the future, but not defining yet Tirana as an Ecocity. The ecological potential of Tirana including its outskirts is to be considered. Its flora and fauna are very rich, containing a mixt of species and plants. Regardless, the city of Tirana is suffering from different kinds of pollution such as air and noise pollution which are above EU and WHO norms. Tirana benefits from a Temperate Mediterranean climate. Furthermore, the benefits of the solar radiation are enormous. Unfortunately, nowadays, the city of Tirana is not profiting much from it. This chapter is in search of an overall view of the city of Tirana, and its great potential discovering its underground and upper ground historical secrets. (shrink)

For historians of medicine, the professor Theodor Billroth of the University of Vienna was the leading European surgeon of the late nineteenth century and the personification of intervention by organ or body part removal. For social and political historians, he was a German nationalist whose book on medical education heralded the rise of anti-Semitism in the Austrian public sphere. This article brings together and critically reassesses these two hitherto separate accounts to show how, in a period of dramatic social and (...) political change, Viennese surgery split into two camps. One, headed by Billroth, was characterized by an alliance with the German educational model, German nationalism leading to racial anti-Semitism and an experimental approach to the construction of surgical procedure, which heavily relied on the methods of pathological physiology. The other, which followed a long Austrian tradition, stood for a clinically oriented and strictly organized medical education that catered to an ethnically and socially diverse population and, simultaneously, for an anatomically oriented surgery, largely of the locomotor apparatus. This study shows how, in a major centre of medical education and capital of a multiethnic empire, surgical and national identities were forged together. (shrink)

Within a given culture – whether industrialized or more tradition oriented – essentially the same fundamental medical theories, practices, and pharmacopoeia tend to be applied to human and non-human sickness and patients. In modern industrialized societies, however, healthcare services are sharply divided between human and veterinary medicine. There is likewise a sharp division between practitioners in these two health sectors: medical doctors and veterinarians. Yet in non-Western, traditional or indigenous medical systems, the same practitioners often treat both humans and (...) animals. There is a growing body of literature that attests to the efficacy of traditional health practices and herbal medicines for the prevention and treatment of both human and livestock ailments.The authors argue for an intersectoral approach to human and veterinary health services in poor countries, especially those targeted to rural people with LIMITED access to modern health services. Extension of conventional medical and veterinary services is particularly difficult and costly in Third World countries where the necessary infrastructure (roads, clinics, labs, cold chains, etc.) is poorly developed and where much of the populace and their livestock reside in remote, rural areas, or where people may be nomadic or transhumant. Consideration should therefore be given to the joint delivery of human and livestock healthcare and related services, as well as to linking informal, ethnoveterinary practices and practitioners with more formalized systems of veterinary AND medical practice. Several advantages of such an approach are identified and explored. (shrink)

Medical communication in Western-oriented countries is dominated by concepts of shared decision-making and patient autonomy. In interactions with Roma patients, these behavioral patterns rarely seem to be achieved because the culture and ethnicity have often been shown as barriers in establishing an effective and satisfying doctor–patient relationship. The study aims to explore the Roma’s beliefs and experiences related to autonomy and decision-making process in the case of a disease with poor prognosis. Forty-eight Roma people from two Romanian counties participated (...) in semi-structured interviews, conducted by a research team from the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Iasi. Participants were recruited among the chronically ill patients and caregivers. The Roma community opposes informing the terminal patients about their condition, the “silence conspiracy” being widely practiced. The family fully undertakes the right of decision making, thus minimizing the patient’s autonomy. We identified ethical dilemmas concerning autonomy, lack of patients’ real decision-making power, and paternalistic attitudes exerted firstly by the family and, on demand, by the physician. Instead, the Roma patient benefits from a very active support network, being accompanied at the hospital by numerous relatives. The patient’s right to make autonomous decisions promoted in the Western countries and stipulated by the Romanian law has diminished value in the Roma community. For the Roma, the understanding of dignity is not simply individual and personal, but it is closely related to their cultural particularities. Ignoring their cultural values could create conflicts between healthcare providers and community. (shrink)

_The first part called the Preamble tackles: (a) the issues of silence and speech, and life and disease; (b) whether we need to know some or all of the truth, and how are exact science and philosophical reason related; (c) the phenomenon of Why, How, and What; (d) how are mind and brain related; (e) what is robust eclecticism, empirical/scientific enquiry, replicability/refutability, and the role of diagnosis and medical model in psychiatry; (f) bioethics and the four principles of beneficence, non-malfeasance, (...) autonomy, and justice; (g) the four concepts of disease, illness, sickness, and disorder; how confusion is confounded by these concepts but clarity is imperative if we want to make sense out of them; and how psychiatry is an interim medical discipline. The second part called The Issues deals with: (a) the concepts of nature and nurture; the biological and the psychosocial; and psychiatric disease and brain pathophysiology; (b) biology, Freud and the reinvention of psychiatry; (c) critics of psychiatry, mind-body problem and paradigm shifts in psychiatry; (d) the biological, the psychoanalytic, the psychosocial and the cognitive; (e) the issues of clarity, reductionism, and integration; (f) what are the fool-proof criteria, which are false leads, and what is the need for questioning assumptions in psychiatry. The third part is called Psychiatric Disorder, Psychiatric Ethics, and Psychiatry Connected Disciplines. It includes topics like (a) psychiatric disorder, mental health, and mental phenomena; (b) issues in psychiatric ethics; (c) social psychiatry, liaison psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, forensic psychiatry, and neuropsychiatry. The fourth part is called Antipsychiatry, Blunting Creativity, etc. It includes topics like (a) antipsychiatry revisited; (b) basic arguments of antipsychiatry, Szasz, etc.; (c) psychiatric classification and value judgment; (d) conformity, labeling, and blunting creativity. The fifth part is called The Role of Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality in Psychiatry. It includes topics like (a) relevance of philosophy to psychiatry; (b) psychiatry, religion, spirituality, and culture; (c) ancient Indian concepts and contemporary psychiatry; (d) Indian holism and Western reductionism; (e) science, humanism, and the nomothetic-idiographic orientation. The last part, called Final Goal, talks of the need for a grand unified theory. The whole discussion is put in the form of refutable points._. (shrink)

Philosophy and ethics in medicine is an interesting and often fascinating topic of enquiry, however uptake amongst medical students is highly variable and it is often regarded as a nonessential component of the medical curriculum. Medical students themselves are often overwhelmed by the demands of medical study, and cite high rates of burnout. This paper describes a novel intervention provided at Western Sydney University as part of the Professional Development curriculum, which provided three broad tutorial interventions in their first (...) clinical year. The tutorials gave an overview regarding philosophy theory, but are specifically designed to encourage resilience amongst students. The tutorials were highly regarded and represent a novel way of engaging young doctors. It is suggested that orienting philosophy teaching towards issues immediately relevant to training doctors can greatly improve student acceptability. (shrink)