American history has been rife with human subjects research scandals, particularly those that involve “vulnerable” populations. State and federal laws and regulations often do not provide any special oversight mechanisms or protections to ensure the ethical and safe inclusion of cognitively impaired adults in research. At the New York State level, repeated efforts have been made to regulate research involving individuals who lack consent capacity. In January 2014, the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law released (...) its Report and Recommendations for Research with Human Subjects Who Lack Consent Capacity, which represents the most recent step in a decades-long process in the state to develop oversight mechanisms that are appropriately sensitive to the fine line between protecting a vulnerable population and impeding the advancement of research. These recommendations may serve as a model for research policy in other states and at the federal level, particularly in light of shifting societal concerns and changing political winds. (shrink)

Despite existing federal and state law and regulation, new human subjects research scandals involving “vulnerable” populations continue to surface. Although existing oversight mechanisms were enacted to ensure voluntary informed consent for participants and institutional review board oversight of HSR, these laws and regulations do not provide any special oversight mechanisms or protections to ensure the ethical and safe inclusion of cognitively impaired adults. The absence of rules to ensure consistently ethical conduct of research involving adults who lack consent capacity (...) may either lead to exploitation of this vulnerable population or the dearth of important research into the broad range of diseases that impair cognition. In other words, while some institutions and investigators are conducting research with this group without guidance, others are taking an extremely conservative approach and are excluding these individuals from research. Without safeguards that are adequate and robust but not overly burdensome, conducting research involving this population is ethically and legally challenging. (shrink)

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and (...) twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general. (shrink)

Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history and (...) the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well. (shrink)

Does thinking have a history? If there are no necessarily changeless structures to be found in things and in our inquiry into them, then what knowledge of the world and ourselves is possible? In this boldly original and elegantly written study, Joseph Margolis argues for a radically historicized view of history that treats it as both a real process and a narrative account, each a product of continual change. Developing his argument through discussions of such influential philosophers of history and (...) the natural sciences as Vico, Danto, Collingwood, Habermas, Hempel, Popper, Putnam, and Gadamer, he provides a coherent theory of flux and invariance that resolves several deep puzzles regarding human nature and understanding. While maintaining a thorough command of Anglo-American philosophy, Margolis challenges many of its most cherished assumptions and demonstrates the sense in which history and interpretation are one and the same. Exploring one of the master themes of this century, his book offers a novel theory of the human condition whose conclusions and concerns seem certain to inform philosophy in the next century as well. (shrink)

Language, either oral or written, is meant both to convey and to preserve meaning. Semiotics is thediscipline which permits the extraction of a meaning from systems of linguistic signs. Written texts arestatic, while the world is about them is in flux. Meaning is thus intimately connected to this marriageof flux and stasis in texts.Here, three views on semiotics are examined:First, Plato’s treatment of signs and flux in the dialogue Kratylos is dissected. The conventional andmimetic aspects of signs (...) are contrasted, and a connection between inquiry and stasis is intimated.Next, the Augustinian theory of signs, as delineated in De Doctrina Christiana, is presented. Thediversity of signs and several principles of hermeneutics are considered. In addition, the existence ofthe some Post-Modern notions of polysemy, trace, and fore-structures of understanding in Augustine’sthought is indicated. Also, the concepts of ineffability and of res summa in De Doctrina Christiana areexamined as starting points for a deconstructive critique of Augustinian semiotics.Third, Derrida's treatment of signifiers in Of Grammatology is analyzed as a turn to a semiotics ofthe flux. Finally, the oral concept of memory reveals a connection between flux and stasis. Thememory plays a role in the system of signs in creating a "generative reconstruction". According toAugustine, sign-making is also "incarnational." Humans retain something of the signs in memory;memory preserves the basis of the sign. This mnemic fundament may be constantly adjusted to thepresent reality, i.e. the flux; the epistemological and semiotic data base in oral cultures is generative orfluid.Memory ameliorates the semiotic tension between the flux of the world and the stasis of information in the system of signs. (shrink)

Language, either oral or written, is meant both to convey and to preserve meaning. Semiotics is the discipline which permits the extraction of a meaning from systems of linguistic signs. Written texts are static, while the world is about them is in flux. Meaning is thus intimately connected to this marriage of flux and stasis in texts. Here, three views on semiotics are examined: First, Plato's treatment of signs and flux in the dialogue Kratylos is dissected. The (...) conventional and mimetic aspects of signs are contrasted, and a connection between inquiry and stasis is intimated. Next, the Augustinian theory of signs, as delineated in De Doctrina Christiana, is presented. The diversity of signs and several principles of hermeneutics are considered. In addition, the existence of the some Post-Modern notions of polysemy, trace, and fore-structures of understanding in Augustine's thought is indicated. Also, the concepts of ineffability and of res summa in De Doctrina Christiana are examined as starting points for a deconstructive critique of Augustinian semiotics. Third, Derrida's treatment of signifiers in Of Grammatology is analyzed as a turn to a semiotics of the flux. Finally, the oral concept of memory reveals a connection between flux and stasis. The memory plays a role in the system of signs in creating a "generative reconstruction". According to Augustine, sign-making is also "incarnational." Humans retain something of the signs in memory; memory preserves the basis of the sign. This mnemic fundament may be constantly adjusted to the present reality, i.e. the flux; the epistemological and semiotic data base in oral cultures is generative or fluid. Memory ameliorates the semiotic tension between the flux of the world and the stasis of information in the system of signs. (shrink)

Reality exists independently of human observers, but does the same apply to its structure? Realist ontologies usually assume so: according to them, the world consists of objects, these have properties and enter into relations with each other, more or less as we are accustomed to think of them. Against this view, Rein Raud develops a radical process ontology that does not credit any vantage point, any scale or speed of being, any range of cognitive faculties with the privilege to (...) judge how the world ‘really’ is. In his view, what we think of as objects are recast as fields of constitutive tensions, cross-sections of processes, never in complete balance but always striving for it and always reconfiguring themselves accordingly. The human self is also understood as a fluctuating field, not limited to the mind but distributed all over the body and reaching out into its environment, with different constituents of the process constantly vying for control. The need for such a process philosophy has often been voiced, but rarely has there been an effort to develop it in a systematic and rigourous manner that leads to original accounts of identity, continuity, time, change, causality, agency and other topics. Throughout his new book, Raud engages with an unusually broad range of philosophical schools and debates, from New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology to both phenomenological and analytical philosophy of mind, from feminist philosophy of science to neurophilosophy and social ontology. Being in Flux will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone interested in current debates about realism, materialism and ontology. (shrink)

Paradigms in philosophy and cognitive science until recently have treated perception in typical human beings as relatively fixed and unchanging. Recent research instead supports the claim that perception can be altered over time by training, deliberate practice or mere exposure. If so, we do not all bring to a scene the same stock of perceptual capacities, and our differences are not just deficits or superpowers. This paper describes six questions an account of perceptual learning ought to address, which pose (...) difficult challenges to Kevin Connolly’s (2019) groundbreaking Offloading View of perceptual learning. In light of these questions, it sketches an alternative simple view according to which perceptual learning is acquiring a new or enhanced perceptual capacity in a particular way. The relevant capacity is a capacity perceptually to detect and differentiate a feature, where doing so constitutively if not wholly implicates perception. The relevant way is by means of an independently characterized learning process, rather than by adaptation, pure development, or mere accident. The perceptual change thus results from a smart process – one that is flexible, resilient, and responsive to feedback, rather than rigid, fragile and brute. Such a process can yield perceptual know-how. Thanks to perceptual learning, one comes to know how to perceive, in a sense that means being able to do so. Some specialists hone this to develop perceptual skills that are implicated in expert performance. (shrink)

Research on human-animal interaction has skyrocketed in the last decade. Rapid urbanization has led scientists to investigate its impact on several species living in the vicinity of humans. Domesticated dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) are one such species that interact with humans and are also called man’s best friend. However, when it comes to the free-ranging population of dogs, interactions become quite complicated. Unfortunately, studies regarding free-ranging dog-human interactions are limited even though the majority of the world’s dog population (...) is free-ranging. In this study, we observed twelve groups of free-ranging dogs in their natural habitat, the streets. We divided the study areas into two zones, namely – intermediate and high flux, based on human activity or movement. Six groups from each of the zones were observed mostly during daytime. We used social network analysis (SNA) to explore the dog-dog (intraspecific) and dog-human (interspecific) interactions. It was surprising to observe higher instances of interspecific interactions than the intraspecific ones, irrespective of the zones. Humans, in significantly higher occasions, initiated both positive and negative interactions in comparison to dogs. Our findings conclude that humans are a crucial part of the interaction network of Indian free-ranging dogs. (shrink)

Renewed interest in the Presocratics of the last few decades has not ignored Heraclitus, and some new and fruitful lines of inquiry are now being pursued. This article on Heraclitus presents a unified Heraclitus who is a thoughtful critic of his predecessors, and keenly interested in the possibility of human understanding. This Heraclitus rejects the Milesian account of a single substance with systematic changes and transformations that guarantee the stability of the whole. He recognizes that his new views will (...) be difficult to understand, but provides hints and lessons to allow his hearer or reader to grasp his philosophical account. Parmenides of Elea, too, has not been ignored by the scholarly community—a number of new interpretations of Parmenides have appeared in the last decade. (shrink)

Continuous poleward motion of microtubules in metazoan mitotic spindles has been fascinating generations of cell biologists over the last several decades. In human cells, this so‐called poleward flux was recently shown to be driven by the coordinated action of four mitotic kinesins. The sliding activities of kinesin‐5/EG5 and kinesin‐12/KIF15 are sequentially supported by kinesin‐7/CENP‐E at kinetochores and kinesin‐4/KIF4A on chromosome arms, with the individual contributions peaking during prometaphase and metaphase, respectively. Although recent data elucidate the molecular mechanism underlying (...) this cellular phenomenon, the functional roles of microtubule poleward flux during cell division remain largely elusive. Here, we discuss potential contribution of microtubule flux engine to various essential processes at different stages of mitosis. (shrink)

It is common for social theorists to utilize the metaphors of ‘flow’, ‘fluidity’, and ‘liquidity’ in order to substantiate the ways in which speed and mobility form the basis for a new kind of information or network society. Yet rarely have these concepts been sufficiently theorized in order to establish their relevance or appropriateness. This article contends that the notion of flow as utilized in social theory is profoundly metaphysical in nature, and needs to be judged as such. Beginning with (...) a discussion of the accelerating timescape that characterizes the network society, it will then move on to examine three main issues with this ‘metaphysics of flux’. First, that the concept of flows unjustly privileges the process of becoming and, as a result, is unable to account for the materiality, substantiality, and agency of the objects being mobilized, and the contingency of their mediation. Second, that it posits the accelerating tendencies of capital as an ontological inevitability, thus discounting resistance to such forces. Finally, that it ignores the human faculty for reason and speculative thought in developing alternative means of political praxis. The solution, it will be argued, is not to abandon metaphysical accounts of the network society, but rather to challenge those accounts that, in exhibiting a crude empiricism, work to justify the status quo. (shrink)

PurposeIn Western society, the measurement of weight is prioritized over a person’s bodily experience. Hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer warned against the emphasis on measurement, rather than experience, in the medical sciences. An examination of the complexity of the experience of weight provides the opportunity to shift focus from quantifying the connection between health and weight to the experience of the person being weighed.MethodsThis qualitative hermeneutic study aims to understand people’s experiences of weight from the interviews of professionals and lay experts. Interviews (...) were analyzed using an interpretive hermeneutic method.ResultsThe interviews revealed that weight was experienced as a number imbued with meaning and bias, as a number that could be manipulated, and as a constant and anticipated bodily change. Weight change was expected and often unwelcomed, despite weight being a quality of the body that is always in flux. External measures of weight meant to monitor wellness and health inadvertently became an unhealthy fixation that prevented some participants from fully participating in life events and appreciating the stages their bodies were in.ConclusionWeight change is a necessary condition of being human, and bodies are and will be constantly changing. To achieve health and harmony, one must fit together the acceptance of change and their bodily experience of weight. It is often the preoccupation with weight, not weight itself, that gets in the way of living. (shrink)

An account is provided of the historical context of the work one of the best-known figures in British psychology in the 20th century, Hans Eysenck. Recently some of this has come under critical scrutiny, especially in relation to claims of data rigging in his model of smoking and morbidity, produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article places that controversy, and others associated with Eysenck, in the longer context of the shifting forms of epistemological and political legitimacy within British (...) psychology in the past hundred years. Eysenck was both lionised and disparaged during his life and after his death. This account explores that ambiguity in order to discern the challenge for British psychology to maintain disciplinary coherence. An understanding of this fluxing historical picture is guided by the meta-theoretical resource of critical realism. (shrink)

The paper applies phenomenological method to the analysis of perception of landscapes and other spatial formations. A spatial formation is seen as a region of space, or a territory, with its specific meaning that is experienced by the subject who views it. Husserl’s theory of meaning-formation is used to clarify how spatial formations obtain meanings that define them as landscape, home, or country. It is suggested that besides the subject’s position and the series of perceptions of objects, the decisive element (...) that determines the meaning of the specific spatial formation is what Husserl calls a “grasping sense” . It defines the gaze specific to a particular spatiality. When the “grasping sense” becomes intersubjectively valid and institutionalized, it obtains the status of a cultural form which functions as a meaning-bestowing automaton for interpreting the world for entire societies. Finally it is argued that the spatiality specific to human Umwelten serves the purpose of creating and maintaining meanings that would otherwise disappear in the flux of time.Keywords: perception of landscapes, spatial formations, phenomenological method, grasping sense, cultural form. (shrink)

On the Origin of Objects is, at heart, an extended search for a non-circular and nonreductive characterization of two key notions: intentionality and computation. Only a non-circular and non-reductive account of these key notions can, Smith believes, provide a secure platform for a proper understanding of the mind. The project has both a negative and a positive aspect. Negatively, Smith rejects views that attempt to identify the key notions with lower-level physical properties, arguing instead for a more abstract and systemic (...) understanding. This negative effort occupies Part I of the book. In Part II, we encounter the positive side of Smith's proposal: an attempt to develop a non-reductive analysis of computation and meaning able to meet the requirements laid out in Part I. One purpose of this critical review is to lay out this project in fairly simple terms. This is necessary since Smith's own treatment and prose sometimes obscures the flow of the argument. I suggest that, properly understood, Smith's proposal bears a clear affinity to ideas emerging from the dynamical systems movement within Cognitive Science, and that this tie-in can help put flesh on several of the more metaphorical characterizations in the book. My main criticism is that the book ultimately fails to provide an account able to meet Smith's own requirements for a truly non-reductive account of intentionality. This is especially the case regarding Smith's commitment to licensing a partition of the world based on no a priori assumptions whatsoever. The exercise is a valuable one, however, since it forces us to look harder at some foundational assumptions and at least hints at a new and refreshing perspective: one in which the key explanatory relations are grounded in facts about human practice and pragmatically established social norms. (shrink)

There are growing discontinuities between the research practices of data science and established tools of research ethics regulation. Some of the core commitments of existing research ethics regulations, such as the distinction between research and practice, cannot be cleanly exported from biomedical research to data science research. Such discontinuities have led some data science practitioners and researchers to move toward rejecting ethics regulations outright. These shifts occur at the same time as a proposal for major revisions to the Common Rule—the (...) primary regulation governing human-subjects research in the USA—is under consideration for the first time in decades. We contextualize these revisions in long-running complaints about regulation of social science research and argue data science should be understood as continuous with social sciences in this regard. The proposed regulations are more flexible and scalable to the methods of non-biomedical research, yet problematically largely exclude data science methods from human-subjects regulation, particularly uses of public datasets. The ethical frameworks for Big Data research are highly contested and in flux, and the potential harms of data science research are unpredictable. We examine several contentious cases of research harms in data science, including the 2014 Facebook emotional contagion study and the 2016 use of geographical data techniques to identify the pseudonymous artist Banksy. To address disputes about application of human-subjects research ethics in data science, critical data studies should offer a historically nuanced theory of “data subjectivity” responsive to the epistemic methods, harms and benefits of data science and commerce. (shrink)

This article offers an original, intellectual portrait of G. H. Mead. My reassessment of Mead’s thinking is founded, in methodological terms, upon a historically minded yet theoretically oriented strategy. Mead’s system of thought is submitted to a historical reconstruction in order to grasp the evolution of his ideas over time, and to a thematic reconstruction organized around three major research areas or pillars: science, social psychology and politics. If one re-examines the entirety of Mead’s published and unpublished writings from the (...) point of view of contemporary social and political theory, one can see that his contributions transcend the field of social psychology. Mead’s innovative insights on the communicative aspects of social life and individual conscience are yet to be fully explored by current social and political theorists. This is partly due to the fact that his was a system in a state of flux, ever escaping the final written form. (shrink)

Thinking, the process of considering or reasoning about something, is one of the most distinctive qualities that set humans apart from other species. Philosophers around the world, such as Socrates...

Ontologies that privilege being over becoming fragment what is real by privileging completeness, finality, and stability over motion, change, flow, and flux. This, in turn, results in a conception of truth that tends toward dogmatism and absolutism. This essay sketches an alternative ontology rooted in the rheomodic character of all that is real. Such an ontology underwrites an alternative to the ego-centered form of reasoning. This essay compares and contrasts ego-centred reasoning and doing with a de-centred form of reasoning (...) and doing. This alternative “de-centered” or rheomodic form of reasoning and doing allows us to retain the virtues and values of humanity, sociality, and universality without reducing all questions of humanity, sociality, or universality to dogmatic discourses and thereby promises to be a better alternative to the quest for human relations that promote equality, peace, and justice than the prevailing ego-centered reasoningand doing. (shrink)

This paper outlines three broad conceptual schemes currently in play in the sciences concerned with explaining cognitive abilities. One is the anthropocentric scheme – human cognition – that dominated our thinking about cognition until very recently. Another is the cybernetic-computational scheme – cybernetic cognition – rooted in cognitive science and flourishing in such fields as artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, and biocybernetics. The third is an evolutionary biological scheme – phylogenetic cognition – that conceptualizes cognition in terms of the phylogeny-based (...) approach we take to all other traits of evolved organisms. It shows how these conceptions ground different research questions and methods, and how their relationship is still in flux. (shrink)

Vampires are portrayed opposite to humans, depicted as the dichotomy between predator and prey. Being ever so near to their prey, vampires develop a proclivity for imbibing or emulating characteristics that are considered to be in the sole charge of humans. This text employed is The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas. The article will analyse Edward Weyland as a post-human symbol, positing himself as an ever-evolving entity that is both human as well as a threshold to gauge (...) humanity of the other characters involved. The article underlines the ways in which Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Anthropological Machine and Katherine Hayles’s concept of Technogenesis will be used to examine Weyland and other characters as being participants in mutual evolution, tacitly affecting each other through performative actions. The article will inspect the term ‘human’ as more than just a reified concept, as a term that is constantly in flux and how bio-politics is immanent to the very concept of human. (shrink)

In The Decline of the West Spengler puts forward a type of philosophical anthropology, an account of the structures of human experiential consciousness and a method of “physiognomic” analysis, which I argue has dimensions that can be understood as akin to existential phenomenology. Humanity, for Spengler, is witness to the creative flux of “Becoming” and constructs a world of phenomena bounded by death, underpinned by the two prime feelings of dread and longing and structured by the two forms (...) of Destiny (Time) and Direction (Space). Human existence, Spengler argues, is future-directed and open in the sense that there is a certain degree of freedom in the ways in which humanity can actualize its existential possibilities. In the course of elaborating the existential implications of this future-orientation, Spengler introduces the concept of care (Sorge), the fundamental experiential structure. (shrink)

In response to climate change and collapse, this essay explores both the necessity of and impossibility to witness disasters that are unending and unrelenting. Such disaster is understood generally as the Anthropocene but, for the purpose of this project, includes a more particular inflection, Late Humanity. This inflection is an attempt to hone in on a confluence of critical discussions found in environmental, economic, cultural, and biological disciplines to better attend to dynamics wherein modes of existence are in flux. (...) In response to this era, the essay proposes that witnesses are positioned as both observer and creator and, as such, turns to aesthetics as a way to understand those dual practices. Building on the aesthetic philosophy of Étienne Souriau, the essay considers witnessing as a multi-modal and multi-temporal practice through what Souriau calls instauration (the process of rendering the work-to-be-made). To demonstrate this practice, the project pursues a sleuth of bears (spotlighting the bears of astral mythology, disaster tourism, animal-cam live streams, interactive documentary, monstrous fiction, and, finally, a fantastical take on micro-organisms) to craft an aesthetic for witnessing amidst climate collapse that establishes realities through a process characterized as both conditional and conditioning. (shrink)

In a recent summary of his views, Margolis describes himself as rejecting most of the principle doctrines that have dominated twentieth century English-language philosophy, in preparation for a “very large transformation of philosophical vision”—an event that is in any case overtaking us, no matter how much we try to cling to old ways. At the very least, he says, this transformation will render obsolete the still widely held convictions that an epistemic view from Nowhere is possible, that there are de (...) re necessities, that reason has a transhistorical and normatively invariant structure, that strictly “human” phenomena are ontologically suspect and may even be reducible in physicalistic terms, and finally that “mind” can somehow be adequately interpreted “solipsistically, merely biologically, or subjectively, or in [some other] way disjoined from our cognizing and legitimative powers.” To anticipate the coming transformation, Margolis suggests that we learn to view the world as a flux, all thinking as historicized, and selves as socially constructed and thus as having or being “histories rather than natures.”. (shrink)

This book surveys the distinctions that underlie the unbound potential and existential risks of life expansion and radical modifications posed by a transhuman world. Humanness is in flux as human bodies are being hacked and altered in their quest for super wellness, super intelligence and super longevity. Now is the time to discuss how best to think about dealing with bodies that have been hacked to exceed natural physical limits or more technically, species typical functioning. Enter the advent (...) of transhumanism to take uncertainty by the horns. According to transhumanists, death is unnecessary and medical conventions undermine the possibility to radically evolve. To biohackers, there is no need to wait to explore the risks that conventional medicine dares not. This book is of interest to anyone interested in tapping into this growing movement of modifying the human body as it is right now. (shrink)

Through an examination of the official teaching of the Church I show how the increased mobility of large masses of Catholics since World War II has led to continuing efforts by the Holy See to follow and, to a certain extent, to control these fluxes of people. In turn, global human mobility has had an influence on institutional structures and on the self-understanding of the Church. While this evolution has contributed to the globalization of the Catholic Church, the trend (...) towards centralization of power in Rome has hindered the development of more inclusive and democratic reforms and the participation of local churches in the decision-making process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God. By NICHOLAS LASH. Oharlottesville, Virginia: Uni· versity Press of Virginia, 1988. Pp. 313. $29.95 (hardbound). Nicholas Lash sets out "to construct an argument in favor of one way of construing or interpreting human experience as experience of the mystery of God " (p. 3), and to show that this awareness of God has (...) nothing to do with analyses of " religious experience " or of theism. Recent attention to religious experience, such as that of the philosopher Riohard Swinburne or of the research unit established by the zoologist Alister Hardy at Oxford, relies on a conception of that experience as individualistic rather than communal and as a matter of feeling or sensation in contrast to thought. Lash aMrihutes ·this view of religious experience to the legacy of William James, and contrasts it with that of Frederick Schleiermacher. According to Lash, James identifies the personal wi~h the individual, contrasts thought with feeling, and regards religious experience as private in contrast to public, or " naked " with respect to language, institutions, and other cultural forms. Schleiermacher avoids these errors by focusing not on discrete, datable experiences that one can identify as religious, hut on a moment that pervades all human experience, to the source or object of which the grammar of Christian doctrine gives the name "God." Lash acknowledges that Schleiermacher can he read in support of either of these two different ways of construing religious experience (pp. 112, 129), hut he does not realize that James can also he read in a way that blurs the dichotomy he sets up. Both James and Schleier· maoher provide uncommonly sophisticated accounts of the social character of the self and of the role of language and thought in shaping perception and feeling. In his Ethik, Schleiermacher locates the individual in social and cultural institutions, and elaborates the anthropology that informs his influential lectures on hermeneutics. Three of many notable contributions of James' Principles of Psychology are a chapter on the self that is the source of conceptions of the social self in American sociology and social psychology, a critique of classical empiricism showing that the distinction between sense impressions and ideas is an artifact of an erroneous psychological theory, and a famous chapter on the stream of thought in which he argues human experi505 506 BOOK REVIEWS enoe is not divided into ideas, sensations, and feelings, but is a continuous flow of consciousness. Toward the end of his career, he gave up the concept of consciousness as too closely associated with the mental in contrast to the physical, and spoke instead of the flux of experience. Lash accuses James of Cartesi1an dualism, and attributes to him the view that there is a "little person," a Cartesian self imprisoned in the body. He admi,ts that the Principles contains no such view, hut sug· gests that Jaines becomes mo't'e and more Cartesian as he develops, his radical empiricism. In fact, there is very little in James that could accurately be called Cartesian, and nothing ei,ther in the Principles or in the late Essays in Radical Empiricism that would condone any such picture of an homunculus inside the body. Contrary to Lash's view, the idea of "pure experience" in the latter work does not refer to experience that is independent of language, culture, or institutions, but is rather a reminder that such distinctions as that between objec· tive and subjective, feeling and thought, or perception and fantasy, are not girven in experience, but are products of our interpretations. Despite their social views of the self, both Sohleiermacher and James focus on the consciousness of the individual when they come to ex· amine religious experience or piety. James says.that he will stress the more extreme or devdoped reports of religious experience in order to examine the " ripe fruits " of,tJhe religious life. Both share a Protes· tant bias toward personal piety as the heart of religion, and regard ritual and institutional forms as the communal context for that piety, and an insufficient appreciation for the value of the routine and conventional. But this is not to be identified in either... (shrink)

The human quest for the meaning of life is an unending one marked by undulating landscapes. In order to confront the flux of experience generated by this quest for meaning, the human embraces science, morality, politics and religion. Religion is said to provide the basis for transcendental values which give humans succour after the physical and material struggles have ended. At the same time, religion also uses the observable social world as the starting point for the embrace (...) of transcendental values. In this essay, an attempt is made to examine the interconnectedness of modernity, Islam and an African culture. The essay is basically an exercise in analysis whereby the readers are made to draw some compelling inferences. Keywords : Modernity, Islam, African culture, Values, Human happiness. (shrink)

For Tamsin Lorraine, the works of Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze open up new ways of thinking about subjectivity. Focusing on the affinities between the theorists' views—while addressing weaknesses of each—she offers both a cogent analysis of their often challenging writings on this topic and an accessible introduction to their philosophical projects. Through her readings she articulates an approach to subjectivity as an embodied, dynamic process, one that speaks to beliefs about personal identity as well as to the practical problems (...) people face in their relations with one another.Lorraine begins by distinguishing between "conceptual" and "corporeal" considerations of subjectivity and by reviewing recent interdisciplinary efforts to theorize the body. She then turns to Irigaray and Deleuze, finding in the former's notion of the "feminine other" and in the latter's, unique conceptions of nomadic thinking inspiration for a model designed to overcome mind/body dualisms. Her analysis of Irigaray and Deleuze suggests a conception of humanity which amounts to a visceral philosophy—a way of thinking that is receptive to the fluxes of dynamic life forces. (shrink)

The human visual system allows a number of molar activities, among them straightforward seeing and reflective seeing. Both of these activities include, as product and part of them, a stream of first-order, visual perceptual consciousness of the ecological environment and of the perceiver himself or herself as inhabiting the environment and acting or moving within it. The two respective component streams of first-order consciousness both proceed at certain brain centers and, in Gibson's sense, they are resonatings to the stimulus (...) energy flux at the photoreceptors. But the two streams differ in that only the one that proceeds during reflective seeing involves inner consciousness of the component first-order, visual perceptual consciousness . In this sense, perceptual consciousness proceeds entirely nonconsciously during straightforward seeing. This is because inner consciousness is not a kind of response to first-order consciousness, but is an intrinsic dimension of the latter when it is proceeding consciously as opposed to nonconsciously. The content of first-order, visual perceptual consciousness during reflective seeing is importantly different from the content during straightforward seeing, notwithstanding their both being kinds of seeing in the literal, nonmetaphorical sense as characterized by Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception. (shrink)

According to Chomsky, creativity is a critical property of human language, particularly the aspect of ?the creative use of language? concerning the appropriateness to a situation. How language can be creative but appropriate to a situation is an unsolvable mystery from the Chomskyan point of view. We propose that language appropriateness can be explained by considering the role of the human capacity for Mental Time Travel at its foundation, together with social and ecological intelligences within a triadic language-grounding (...) system. Our proposal is based on the change of perspective from the analysis of individual sentences to the flux of speech in which the temporal dimension of language is much more relevant. (shrink)

Nature, as Spinoza conceives of it, contains individual things or finite modes, each with its own essence. Although we humans classify individuals into kinds, Spinoza is adamant that the resulting types or species “are nothing”. Despite Spinoza's nominalism, his mature works posit differences between animal kinds that are discoverable by reasoning and available to philosophical understanding. Spinoza's world is fluid in the sense that the powers of individuals are in flux, changing as they interact with one another. In Spinoza's (...) view, changes in an individual's power are typically the effects of its interactions with external things. Spinoza contrasts the affective dynamics between human natures with a lack of affective commonality between humans and other kinds of animals. In his political works Spinoza translates his account of natures or essences into juridical terms. The claim that mutual sociability is what makes an animal kind is of a piece with the rest of Spinoza's philosophy. (shrink)

Trust is often an assumed outcome of participation in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as they directly connect producers with consumers. It is based on this potential for trust “between producers and consumers” that AFNs have emerged as a significant field of food studies analysis as it also suggests a capacity for AFNs to foster associated embedded qualities, like ‘morality’, ‘social justice’, ‘ecology’ and ‘equity’. These positive benefits of AFNs, however, cannot be taken for granted as trust is not necessarily an (...) outcome of AFN participation. Using Chinese case studies of AFNs, which are characterised by a distinct form of trust pressure—consumers who are particularly cynical about small scale farmers, food safety and the organic credentials of producers—this paper highlights how the dynamics of trust are in constant flux between producers and consumers. I suggest that it is the careful construction of the aesthetic and multi-sensory qualities of food, which is often celebrated via social media, that human centred relations in Chinese AFNs are mediated. This leads to two key conclusions: first, that the key variable for establishing trust is satisfying the consumer's desire for safe (i.e. "fresh") food; and second, the materiality of the food and the perception of foods materiality (especially through social media), must both be actively constructed by the farmer to fit the consumer's ideal of freshness. (shrink)

Along with Turkey’s changing refugee policy from the Eurocentric, secular nation-state ideology to the neo-Ottomanist one on the state level, there also exist main handicaps on the micro power level concerning the successful coordination of the refugee issue with full respect of the human rights. Economic, cultural and especially political factors play a role in the relationship between Syrians and Turkish residents. Fragmentation within the Syrian community living in Turkey is also evident. On the other hand, different from the (...) state policy, Turkish people implicitly show their reluctance towards this migration wave without creating a social turmoil. In this line, it is suggested here that Neo-Ottomanism, as a rising trend, helps a considerable majority of the society to take a moderate stance towards the immigration flux. (shrink)

Body, Soul and Cyberspace explores how recent science-fiction cinema addresses questions about the connections between body and soul, virtuality, and the ways in which we engage with spirituality in the digital age. The book investigates notions of love, life and death, taking an interdisciplinary approach by combining cinematic themes with religious, philosophical and ethical ideas. Magerstädt argues how even the most spectacle-driven mainstream films such as Avatar, The Matrix and Terminator can raise interesting and important questions about the human (...) self and our interaction with the world. Apart from these well-known science fiction epics, her analysis also draws on recent works, such as Inception, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Aeon Flux, Total Recall (2012), Transcendence and TRON: Legacy. These films stimulate an engaging discussion on what makes us human, the role memory plays in understanding ourselves, and how virtual realities challenge the moral concepts that govern human relationships. (shrink)

This book explores the role of divine severity in the character and wisdom of God, and the flux and difficulties of human life in relation to divine salvation. Much has been written on problems of evil, but the matter of divine severity has received relatively little attention. Paul K. Moser discusses the function of philosophy, evidence and miracles in approaching God. He argues that if God's aim is to extend without coercion His lasting life to humans, then commitment (...) to that goal could manifest itself in making human life severe, for the sake of encouraging humans to enter into that cooperative good life. In this scenario, divine agapē is conferred as free gift, but the human reception of it includes stress and struggle in the face of conflicting powers and priorities. Moser's work will be of great interest to students of the philosophy of religion, and theology. (shrink)

"_The Moment of Complexity_ is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of _Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics_ The science of complexity accounts for (...) that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With _The Moment of Complexity_, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. _The Moment of Complexity_, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper studies the capture of organisms and materials in soil construction – a branch of ecological engineering dedicated to making soil in order to compensate for soil degradation. This approach takes all organisms to be ‘ecosystem engineers’, and often refers to earthworms as ‘collaborators’ in making soil. I examine the claim that such a convocation of worms amounts to a redistribution of agency and the underlying assumption that form-taking is the shaping of raw matter according to pre-existing forms. Drawing (...) on processual anthropology, I question the distinction between living and material components of soils, and between growing and making. I elaborate on soil scientists’ description of soil growth as pedogenesis in order to propose a view in which soil materials, along with organisms, participate in soil’s transformative and generative fluxes. I envisage the process as a concrescence, an experimentation that brings humans, worms, and soil materials together in new ways. (shrink)

The needless proliferation of virtues is a possible pitfall of the explosion of work in virtue ethics. I discuss two positions on proliferation and offer my own. Russell takes the first approach, arguing that virtue ethical right action is impossible unless we adopt a finite and specifiable list of the virtues. I argue against this. Hursthouse offers a second perspective, looking first to standard Aristotelian virtues, and adding virtues only when the standard list fails to capture something of moral importance. (...) Like Hursthouse, I believe that questions arising from applied ethics present the real challenge to the adequacy of traditional lists of virtues. These challenges are becoming increasingly urgent. Technologies are not only shaping our conceptions of ourselves, the human good, and virtues, but also, through germline gene editing, have the potential to change human nature. My position takes its cue from Hursthouse but goes beyond her by arguing for an “anthropological turn” in virtue ethics. The anthropological turn examines forms of life, especially those influenced by technology and science, and how they affect articulations of the human good and the virtues needed to attain it. Any new virtues, I argue, should be identified through study of how dispositions conducive to human good arise organically within forms of life. In this way, virtues remain grounded in what is good for humans, yet the anthropological turn recognizes that what counts as human good is now in flux because of science and technology. (shrink)

The Internet has been identified in human enhancement scholarship as a powerful cognitive enhancement technology. It offers instant access to almost any type of information, along with the ability to share that information with others. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the enhancement potential of the Internet. We argue that unconditional access to information does not lead to cognitive enhancement. The Internet is not a simple, uniform technology, either in its composition, or in its use. We (...) will look into why the Internet as an informational resource currently fails to enhance cognition. We analyze some of the phenomena that emerge from vast, continual fluxes of information–information overload, misinformation and persuasive design—and show how they could negatively impact users’ cognition. Methods for mitigating these negative impacts are then advanced: individual empowerment, better collaborative systems for sorting and categorizing information, and the use of artificial intelligence assistants that could guide users through the informational space of today’s Internet. (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)

In his work on Wu wei, Edward Slingerland argues that the classical Chinese ideal is an inherently paradoxical concept that is first and foremost spiritual and political only secondarily. Through a close reading of the Dao de Jing, the first major classical text to substantially deploy and develop the concept, I argue that Wu wei isn’t inherently paradoxical and that this is seen precisely when it is viewed in terms of its political primacy. On my reading, the emergence of Wu (...) wei in the Daoist canon is an equilibrating moment of political mediation between the highly intentionalized sphere of human pursuits and the purposeless fluidity and boundless flux of the natural world. Wu wei here takes on a different aspect—mystery rather than paradox—when considered within a form of political collectivity in which the intentional and the innate, purposive and natural are constantly juxtaposed and contending with one another. (shrink)

My book Abductive Cognition. The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning basically refers to all kinds of human hypothetical cognition, also of creative kind. During the research related to the preparation of that book I soon had the opportunity to examine the studies regarding the human process of continuous delegation and distribution of cognitive functions to the environment to lessen cognitive limitations, also and especially in the case of what has been called ‘manipulative abduction’. These design activities (...) are closely related to the process of cognitive niche construction, which I will specifically address in this article. Niche construction should be regarded as a second major participant, after natural selection, in evolution. Indeed, by altering their environment and partly controlling some of the energy and matter fluxes in their ecosystems, organisms are capable of changing some of the natural selective pressures in their local environments. The question I plan to answer is the following: we need to hypothesize a fundamental role of non-genetic information in the evolution, but what kind of evolution could we obtain in this case? I will illustrate that in building various mediating structures, humans transform the environment and create cognitive niches. Thus, humans and other non-human animals become ecological engineers and chance seekers, involved in the processing, the alteration, and even the creation of external structures to reduce or suppress their cognitive limitations. Hence, this article will address a detailed analysis of the role of extragenetic information in evolution and what this process of selection selects for purposeful organisms, so niche-constructing ones. (shrink)

Some evil actions are public. Maybe genocide is the most awful. Other evil actions are private, a matter of one person harming another or of self-inflicted injury. Child abuse, in our current reckoning, is the worst of private evils. We want to put a stop to it. We know we can’t do that, not entirely. Human wickedness won’t go away. But we must protect as many children as we can. We want also to discover and help those who have (...) already been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster.We are so sure of these moral truths that we seldom pause to wonder what child abuse is. We know we don’t understand it. We have little idea of what prompts people to harm children. But we do have the sense that what we mean by child abuse is something perfectly definite. So it comes as a surprise that the very idea of child abuse has been in constant flux the past thirty years. Previously our present conception of abusing a child did not even exist. People do many of the same vile things to children, for sure, that they did a century ago. But we’ve been almost unwittingly changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our values and our moral codes accordingly. Ian Hacking, a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of Toronto. His latest book is entitled The Taming of Chance. (shrink)

significance of its problems and ideals.2 Still, a philosophical doctrine has a timeless quality about it, a fundamental unalterableness of its quest coinciding with the unaltering core of human nature itself.3 The importance of the temporal flux for ...

Persons with borderline personality disorder are often described as affected by extreme emotional fluctuations and by the sudden emergence of uncontrollable and disproportionate emotional reactions. Borderline persons frequently experience their own self as dim and fuzzy, are deprived of a stable sense of identity and unable to be steadily involved in a given life project. We will interpret these typical features as fluctuations between a clearly normative emotion such as anger and the more diffuse and confusing background of bad moods (...) like dysphoria. Our main focus will be on dysphoria. The intentional structure that characterizes much of human emotional experience, we shall argue, is absent in dysphoria. If we imagine emotions as fluxes of intentionality that innervate the body and connect it to the world, dysphoria is empty intentionality, so to speak, devoid of the moderating power of language and representation. Dysphoria exerts a centrifugal force which fragments the borderline person's representations of herself and of others, inducing a painful experience of incoherence and inner emptiness, a feeling of uncertainty and inauthenticity in interpersonal relationships, and an excruciating sense of futility and inanity of life. But it also entails a sense of vitality, although a disorganized, aimless, and explosive one -- a desperate vitality. (shrink)

This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or entity to (...) its ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends. If there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work, to represent, but also and always to desire, no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the ex-sistence of the “subject”? If the earth turned and more especially turned upon herself, the erection of the subject might thereby be disconcerted and risk losing its elevation and penetration. For what would there be to rise up from and exercise his power over? And in? Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Jane Bennett has recently argued that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption”, continuing that: “The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption”.11J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, ix. Henceforth VM. View all notes This insight is prefigured and re-affirmed by the work of Irigaray. Her sustained analysis of western thought and culture shows how its constitutive disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal is inextricably bound up with an equally deep-rooted disavowal of matter and corporeality. As the above passage from Speculum suggests,22L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133. Henceforth S. View all notes Irigaray seeks to expose woman's reduction to an object for a subject and a maternal-material resource for man's speculations; but in disentangling woman from her symbolic identification with the earth, she also seeks to release the earth from its identification with a passive and manipulable matter. Her work thus bears directly on the revaluation required to transform human beings' relations to materiality: both their own, and that of the earth they inhabit. At the centre of this revaluation is Irigaray's work to displace the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that Bennett also critiques, and to affirm instead a sexuate materiality that is both living and generative. Her consistent troubling of hylomorphism is as unsettling for the subject as her question: “But what if the ‘object’ started to speak?” This question is echoed in Bennett's concern with “the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol speaks”.33 VM, 2, citing W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 157. View all notes As this passage indicates, Bennett's own project is more concerned with the agency of non-human materialities – including their role in the constitution of the human – than with specifically sexed bodies or a materiality inflected by sexual difference. It is these crucial differences in emphasis, I will suggest, that allow the work of these two thinkers to be brought together in productive dialogue. On the one hand, Bennett's approach affords a greater attentiveness to inorganic and non-sexuate matter; on the other, Irigaray's twinned ontology of sexual difference and maternal relation is better able to affirm the relational differences on which the “vitality” of a vital materiality depends. The paper begins by outlining several key elements of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference to show how it leads necessarily to a rethinking of matter. This rethinking is especially helpful for shifting away from the hylomorphism that has been a dominant strand in western thought, informing an understanding of the earth as a fundamentally inert and ever-ready resource. As I will show, the figures through which Irigaray re-articulates female specificity also allow her to refigure the earth as active matter that “turns upon herself ” in generative flux. In the second section, I will situate Irigaray's re-thinking of matter in relation to Bennett's “vital materiality”.44Bennett can be aligned with a number of thinkers who have come to be grouped under the heading “new materialisms”. See S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. View all notes An advantage of this concept is that it refuses the separation between humans and matter still implicit in concepts such as “the environment”. By attending to “our own constitution as vital materiality”, as well as the ways our “own” bodies are never “fully or exclusively human”, Bennett adjusts the status of human actants while re-evaluating non-human bodies “as actants rather than as objects”. As I will show, her approach provides a constructive critical perspective on Irigaray's work by drawing attention to the specifically non-sexuate nature of the elemental. Equally, however, Irigaray's insistence on sexuate difference problematises any appeal to a generic notion of “the human”. This is especially helpful, I will suggest, in relation to contemporary descriptions of climate change as “anthropogenic”. By homogenising human beings, such descriptions make it more difficult to address the ways in which current ecological problems are inseparable from global patterns of social, political and economic inequity. For both thinkers, challenging hylomorphism needs to be matched with a critique of the dominant modern model of the subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. And for both, this model is displaced and undone by the capacity of the human body to bear others within, in ways that engender and sustain human life. Yet as I will discuss in the final two sections, each thinker renders this “other within” in very different ways, with significant implications for the ethics and politics of a “vital materiality”. In the end it is Irigaray's rendering of a distinctively female capacity to bear an other within, explored via the generative relationality of a placental economy, that more fully escapes the individualism of the One and the Same. Together, Irigaray and Bennett show that to take seriously the ecological crises that currently confront us means overcoming the disavowal of both human beings' own fundamental materiality and our dependency on the sustaining materialities of the earth. In contrast, a dominant strand in contemporary responses to these crises is an environmental politics of “enlightened self-interest”55I borrow this phrase from H. Kopnina's critical discussion in “Forsaking Nature? Contesting ‘Biodiversity’ Through Competing Discourses of Sustainability”, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 7, no. 1 : 51–63. that precludes any serious re-evaluation of human beings' relations to matter and the earth. If human beings can be persuaded that current levels of environmental degradation are damaging to them, threatening perhaps their very survival, they are more likely to take decisive steps to alter their behaviour. Insofar as such approaches demand action only for the sake of human interests and ends, they are both anthropocentric and spring from the same instrumentalising rationality that has engendered the ecological crises we currently face. They may well be successful in prompting action. But by foregrounding the survival of “the human species” per se, such approaches foreclose discussion of whose interests are served if survival is all that is allowed to be at stake, and whose lives are thereby consigned to ongoing exploitation. Moreover, as I will argue below, the instrumental rationality that serves survival is at odds with an affirmation of life, as a becoming that depends on difference. With this in mind, I will problematise Bennett's proposed politics of “expanded self-interest”, while seeking to retain many of the insights her approach brings. To more fully displace the “rational” self-interest that has encouraged human exploitation of the earth, we might take up Bennett's “vital materiality” in ways informed by Irigaray's conception of generative difference and the relational space-time of the in-between. (shrink)