Parents, after learning of a life-limiting fetal condition (LLFC), experience emotional distress and must consider options that impact the remainder of the pregnancy, their future lives, and family members. For those who continue, little is known about their longterm presence or absence of regret about their choice, the reasons for this feeling, or its impact on their life. The aim of this research was to examine the concept of decision regret in parents who opted to continue a pregnancy affected by (...) an LLFC. The contextual factors, conditions, and consequences surrounding the presence or absence of regret were analyzed.Data were retrieved from a cross-sectional study using the Quality of Perinatal Palliative Care and Parental Satisfaction Instrument. Participants were parents (N = 405) who experienced a life-limiting prenatal diagnosis and opted to continue their pregnancy. Secondary data analysis examined qualitative responses (121/402) to an item addressing regret. Dimensional analysis was “I Would Do It All Over Again”: Cherishing Time and the Absence of Regret in Continuing a Pregnancy after a Life-Limiting Diagnosis Charlotte Wool, Rana Limbo, and Erin M. Denney-Koelsch used to examine data, identifying context, conditions, and consequences associated with the presence or absence of regret.Absence of regret was articulated in 97.5 percent of participants. Parents valued the baby as a part of their family and had opportunities to love, hold, meet, and cherish their child. Participants treasured the time together before and after the birth. Although emotionally difficult, parents articulated an empowering, transformative experience that lingers over time. (shrink)

La sensación de la imposibilidad de alcanzar la versión definitiva del pasado resulta en la urgencia a tematizar los discursos que se arrogan su representación. En respuesta a las guerras de los discursos, la filosofía de la historia en el siglo XX examina centralmente el lenguaje en el que se expre..

It seems that more often than not, refugees and asylum seekers are associated with the notion of ‘limbo’. This terminology is used to illustrate situations in which people are unable to access systems that would alleviate their ‘standstill’ lives. In other words, when it is said that people are in limbo, it is understood they have a sense of hopelessness. Specifically, in the media, at least three examples of ‘limbo’ are often used: limbo as a physical (...) space, limbo as a type of legal conflict or legal irreconcilability and metaphysical limbo or the type of limbo that exists in one’s mind. Unfortunately, the refugee experience is so commonly associated with the idea of limbo that it appears to be the central space that refugees ‘belong’—presumably, due to the inaccessible or unpreventable nature of their predicament, they are unable to escape their life in limbo. However, it is important to understand that limbo does not simply ‘exist’. It is something that is created. In the case of Australia, refugee limbos appear as certain types due to the restrictive nature of the Government’s laws and policies. This article explores the usage of the term ‘limbo’ in the media in order to draw attention to its overwhelming presence and map specific types of discourse and ideologies. Further, it is shown that limbo should not be considered something which is out of our control or something inherent in the refugee experience but instead, is a tool used by governments to restrict refugee access to the border and systems of protection. (shrink)

This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...) the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are _indeterminate_, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires. (shrink)

The fate of the ungraced innocents highlights much of what has been most difficult about the doctrine of original sin. As an alternative to the extremes of an easy-going universalism or consignment to the fires of hell, this paper re-examines Aquinas’s claims about a possible state of ungraced natural flourishing, arguing that this state is richer and more interesting than the name “limbo” implies. The paper also applies recent work in philosophy and psychology, especially on the second-person perspective, to (...) understand better the state of those in limbo, who might more appropriately be called the “children of faerie.” It concludes by examining the possible relationship of the children of faerie and the children of God in a post-resurrection state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.1 (2006) 72-84 [Access article in PDF] "The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra": A Reply to Ron Greene Dana L. Cloud Department of Communication Studies University of Texas, Austin Steve Macek Department of Speech Communication North Central College James Arnt Aune Department of Communication Texas A&M University In two recent articles, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," and "Rhetoric and Capitalism" (1998, 2004), Ronald Walter Greene pays considerable attention (...) to Marxist rhetorical theory, especially the work of Dana L. Cloud (1994, 2001a, 2001b, 2002) and James Arnt Aune (1994, 2001). These essays usefully point up what is at stake in the debate between poststructuralist theory and Marxism: whether an instrumental, class-based, socialist critical and political project is still feasible and necessary in today's world. Rejecting both Aune's Marxist-humanist approach and Cloud's more economic vision of agency, Greene claims that the changing character of global capitalism and recognition of the "constitutive power" of discourse render rhetorical criticism and practical politics on a Marxist basis untenable. Although we appreciate Greene's engagement with Marxism, we contend that the arguments sketched out in his essays are theoretically and politically flawed.First, Greene's criticisms are directed against a crude caricature of Marxist epistemology that obscures the complexity of theories of representation and ideology in the historical materialist tradition. Second, underwriting Greene's entire project are confused, and in some cases demonstrably false, assessments of the nature and historical trajectory of world capitalism and of the current prospects for class-based social movements. Finally, Greene endorses something like a democratic project but offers no normative criteria for such a project beyond the immanence of always-already present communicative agency and the excesses of joy afforded (to some) by the capitalist system. We will examine each of these shortcomings in turn. [End Page 72] Real Lies: The Complexity of Marxist Epistemology Greene and other poststructuralists charge Marxist theorists in the field of rhetorical studies with holding a dubious representational theory of truth.1 In contrast, Greene embraces a critical approach that examines "how rhetorical practices create the conditions of possibility for a governing apparatus to judge and program reality" and that views "what is in the true" as rhetorically produced (1998, 22). At odds with Greene's approach, Marxists claim that, in a range of ways, ideological discourses reflect, distort, and/or negotiate with the objective social realities, interests, and lived experiences of contending classes in capitalist society. Moreover, we believe that—by means of interpretive, historical, and empirical research—Marxist scholars and activists may develop fuller and more accurate theoretical "representations" of such realities and interests and of the various ways they shape our lives and our political struggles.2This is not to say, however, that the process is simple or mechanistic. Marxist critical practice retains the evaluative power of realism without laying claim to absolute or unmediated empirical knowledge; moreover, we do not believe that ideas are mechanistically generated epiphenomena of economic motive. Discourses, as any communication scholar would agree and as Greene points out, do have effects or "effectivities." Yet anyone interested in a normative political project (which Greene wishes to escape, a point to which we shall return) must recognize the possibility of falsehood. However, as Raymond Geuss (1981) argues, falsehood is not only a matter of empirical misrepresentation. In addition to epistemic falsehood, ideological discourses may exhibit both functional falsehood (referring to how even plausible ideas can bolster oppressive power) and genetic falsehood (ideas promulgated by those with ulterior motives, or intentional mystification).Similarly, analytic Marxist Jon Elster (1985) offers a view of ideology that regards discourses as more than simple epiphenomena of economic situations and struggles.3 Elster describes three overlapping forms of ideological production: the interest-based dissemination of distorted ideas, the failure of social imagination associated with widespread support for the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism, and the psychological comfort of palliative discourses such as religion and patriotism.4 Understanding how widespread adherence to common-sense ideas is accomplished is a project central to... (shrink)

The observation that our world is signed by a lasting crisis is as much underwritten as it is questioned. This book offers a new and provocative thesis by taking recourse to the religious discourse of Limbo, and by investigating the temporal and spatial structures of crisis and modernity. Modernity reveals itself to be the state of perennial crisis, and we all live in an immanentized state of Limbo.

My two-year experience with post-doctoral limbo has been categorically thrilling and appalling, at once. Upon finishing a PhD at Deakin University, in Australia, in June 2014 (meaning submitting my dissertation “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture” for external review), and having barely subsisted for almost three years on a nonetheless generous Australian Government-sponsored International Postgraduate Research Scholarship, plus stipend and occasional paid teaching, I first escaped to Ljubljana, Slovenia, by way of Hong Kong and England, where I wrote my (...) first postdoctoral fellowship applications: first for a US Fulbright Scholar Award (which failed); and then, one year later, for an EC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Independent Research Fellowship (which failed). The latter was monumentally bureaucratic, and I only tackled it after the Fulbright had failed. It came back scored like Olympic figure skating. Mostly I got “fives” (and there were no Russian judges involved) ... (shrink)

In my previous paper I argued that if in vitro fertilization (IVF) is legal and practiced there is no moral ground to object to legalization of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). My opponent raises an objection that my paper “fails to address the ethical argumentation of one key opponent of IVF – the Catholic Church”. In this reply I show that her/his thesis that embryos created during IVF are in ‘ethical limbo’ and “fall outside the moral universe of Christian ethics” (...) does not undermine my argumentation and masks the serious problem Catholics have with the moral status of early embryos. (shrink)

In this paper I argue from a number of positions that are, while not uncontested, at least common among analytic philosophers of religion for the possibility, and indeed the plausibility, of a doctrine of limbo. The account of limbo that I advocate is substantially different than the element of Catholic speculative theology that goes by the same name. According to that doctrine, the limbus infantium is a place or state of perfect natural happiness for those who, prior to (...) the age of reason, die without baptism. Given the possibility of ‘baptism by desire’, the need for limbo, as I shall develop it, is not based on whether or not an agent has received the sacrament of baptism. Instead limbo is, I argue, a place where individuals who have not had sufficient opportunity to be reconciled to God in the present life will be given the opportunity to do so in the next life. Limbo, so understood, is a place which allows for the post-mortem healing and growth of individuals so that they are able to choose either for or against God in the way required for redemption in this life. On this view, limbo is not a place of ‘second-chances’, but rather a place of first-chances for those who were denied them in their terrestrial life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Forced by the COVID-19 pandemic into lockdown during intercontinental travels, the author finds herself in limbo. With help from literary precedents such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Defoe supported by a brief interrogation of contemporary utterances surrounding the master trope “virus,” she claims a chiasmic relation between the concepts “consolation” and “control.”.

Neste artigo, argumento que a marca de uma metafísica viável é tanto prática e ética quanto é lógica e sistemática. Para tal, analiso os Diálogos no Limbo de George Santayana, no qual ele afirma seu apoio ao materialismo atomístico de Demócrito em bases pragmáticas. Uma metafísica, ele sugere, é uma visão de mundo que acomoda uma pessoa – vista como um determinado tipo de organismo psicológico – sabiamente às forças da natureza e da melhor forma possibilita essa pessoa a (...) levar uma vida próspera. Ao mesmo tempo, Santayana coloca sua marca no materialismo ao questionar a possibilidade da caracterização geométrica dos átomos de Demócrito ser uma explicação literal da substância material. Ele interpreta a metafísica Democritiana como uma posição poética e mitológica que desconsidera a experiência subjetiva e, em vez de, volta nossa atenção para as origens substrativas do nosso ser. (shrink)

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Sigrid Fry-Revere’s The Kidney Sellers: A Journey of Discovery in Iran, an allegedly first-hand examination of the Iranian paid kidney donation model, has been criticized by Koplin in an essay formerly published in the Monash Bioethics Review. Koplin especially challenges Fry-Revere’s claim that financially compensating kidney vendors might facilitate altruistic kidney donation. The current situation in Iran, according to Koplin, suggests that the market model has undermined altruistic donation. On this point, this commentary tries to show that healthcare policymakers in (...) Iran no longer see the Iranian paid kidney donation model as a sustainable and ethically justifiable status quo. Briefly touching on the criticisms that have been made even by some positive commentators of the Iranian model, this commentary aims to call attention to the fact that the current dynamic within healthcare policymaking in Iran seeks primarily to decrease its reliance on the organ market instead of revising and modifying it. This complicates the plausibility of any kind of extrapolation, replication or extracting empirical support from the Iranian model to create organ markets in other countries, for example, as Fry-Revere suggests to conduct a trial of a financially incentivized kidney donation scheme in the US. The conclusion is that the Iranian healthcare system should tackle the organ shortage through increasing altruistic living and postmortem kidney donations. This might also provide, finally, a space for conducting extensive and long-term follow-up studies on well-being, satisfaction and social integration of Iranian kidney vendors. (shrink)

El presente trabajo ofrece una interpretación hermenéutica del espectáculo Limbo, de la artista mexicana Gabriela Muñoz, también conocida como “Chula the clown”, a partir de los conceptos desierto y exilio, presentes en este ejercicio escénico, así como en el pensamiento de María Zambrano, donde se muestran como un problema filosófico, y en la obra del investigador Ignacio Izuzquiza. Exilio y desierto aparecen también en Esperando a Godot de Samuel Beckett, obra que se revela como influencia del trabajo de Muñoz (...) y con la que comparte algunos signos poéticos. El texto, asimismo, retoma los apuntes de la investigadora Melissa Lima Caminha, principalmente la noción de deconstrucción del clown femenino moderno y la categoría de monstruosidad para hablar de quienes han sido expulsados o expulsadas del grupo social por ser considerados diferentes y con lo cual viven, precisamente, en los linderos del exilio. En Muñoz, como sucede con la tradición clown, esta figura cómica se muestra como símbolo de lo excluido, lo deforme, lo anormal e, incluso, de lo despreciable. A partir de estas claves, la artista muestra el limbo como un estado emocional donde se diluyen las fronteras del tiempo y el espacio, en un ambiente que se mueve entre la desolación y la comicidad. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Life in LimboM. ChiuWhen my son was 7 years old, he began complaining of headaches. They were frequent, but never seemed severe. “I have a headache!” was always followed by “Can I watch TV?” I didn’t believe the pain was real until it woke him up in the middle of the night. I knew then that something must be wrong. I approached our pediatrician, who said it sounded like (...) migraines, but we should order an MRI to rule anything out. The appointment was scheduled several months in advance, and I always had the urge to cancel it. I was pretty sure my son just wanted to watch TV. The pediatrician told me I might as well do the MRI. He told me that if we skipped it and something was wrong, I would never be able to live with the regret. We kept the Monday morning appointment, and went to the MRI expecting reassurance that nothing was wrong. Instead, we got a phone call later that day. They needed to see us on immediately, but wouldn’t tell me why. Of course, I knew something was wrong. “Is it a tumor?” I asked. “This isn’t something we can discuss on the phone” was the answer I got. An appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. Two days might be “immediately” to medical professionals, but to a parent who just heard that her child had an abnormal MRI, it was an eternity. I planned my son’s funeral in those two days.Our meeting with the Neurologist began with reviewing the MRI. “See this spot here? It shouldn’t be there”. A tumor. 1 ½ × 1 ½ × 2 ½ cm tumor, in the right thalamus. Small, they said. Looks like a Low Grade Glioma they said. The kind of tumor you want to have, if you have to have a brain tumor. A biopsy was scheduled for two weeks later. The [End Page E2] biopsy confirmed it was a Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma (JPA). The neurosurgeon was confident she could remove all of the tumor. We were at one of the best Children’s Hospitals in the world. We were in good hands.A few days before the surgery, a friend who is a medical doctor suggested we get a second opinion. “It couldn’t hurt, it could help”, my husband said. Fortunately, he just sold a start–up company, and was planning to take a few months off from work before starting his next venture. He had time to research, talk to friends in the medical field and make phone calls.Our second opinion from another leading hospital reviewed the MRI’s with us. The neurosurgeon asked, “Did they say tumor? One?” Yes, they did. “See this here?” he said, pointing to a second spot on the MRI. He said it was possibly a second tumor, or more likely, an extension of the first. It was in inoperable location. Surgery wasn’t an option. Chemo would be our best choice. Why would we cut into our son’s brain to remove part of the tumor when he would need to do chemo anyway? Why not try chemo first?I would like to say that we do not fault our original neuro–oncology team for missing this second abnormality. It is hard to notice an ant in the room when there is an elephant staring at you. People make mistakes, and tumors don’t always look the same. That’s what second opinions are for. That is why doctors should encourage patients to get second opinions.We scheduled the surgery for port implantation, and got busy educating ourselves about chemo regimes. It was going to be a long journey. 18 months of transfusions with a pretty low success rate and a high rate of secondary complications. Unsure if we were doing the right thing, we got a third opinion. I am so grateful that my husband was between jobs and had time to devote to finding the best possible treatment for our son. We were financially stable and had great insurance. What do people do when they don’t have this luxury?By now, several months had passed since our first MRI. Our... (shrink)

El objetivo de este texto es presentar una interpretación sobre las condiciones e implicaciones de la cultura de la memoria que, desde los años ochenta, caracteriza las relaciones que mantienen las sociedades occidentales con su pasado. A partir del ámbito de la filosofía de la historia, pero retomando instrumentos conceptuales de otros campos, interpretamos los límites de este énfasis en el pasado en función de las peculiaridades de los soportes materiales que lo han hecho posible. Dicha tesis rechaza la comprensión (...) de este boom de memoria como una tentativa para establecer una relación premoderna con el pasado o como una mera reacción a la crisis del futuro, evidenciada a finales del siglo xx. Lo interpretamos, más bien, como un contramovimiento de resistencia a la aplicación de los ritmos de obsolescencia, propios del actual modelo occidental de consumo de información, a nuestro pretérito. (shrink)

Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.In recent years, few novelists have gone to chart the abyss of human violence and unflinchingly returned its gaze to shape our vision of apocalypse as has the Irish American author Cormac McCarthy. Writing in thorough obscurity for almost 25 years, he is today considered not (...) only one of America’s greatest living writers but also the heir apparent to the grand literary tradition associated with Melville and Faulkner. Born a decade after René Girard, McCarthy is also a writer whose novels—which... (shrink)

Researchers in the areas of prehistoric art, anthropology of art, psychology, philosophy, feminist art theory, histories of visual arts education, and the emerging field of neuroaesthetics have created new interest within education in the writings of John Dewey related to art and experiential learning as found in Art as Experience and Experience and Nature. Thus, another look at Dewey’s life experience and his philosophy of experiential art may bring renewed support for visual arts education in the twenty-first century. Dewey has (...) influenced the public education system through his philosophy of experience and his less well-known theory of aesthetics. The definition that Dewey provided for education centers on the.. (shrink)

Nihilism is in the air. Yet, it is hard to say to what profit—beyond that for marketers and manufacturers of electronic devices. Advertisements paradoxically take on a bravura of appealing to targeted-consumers’ nihilism in the guise of bold autonomy dependent on one’s incorporating their brand names into one’s life. Social analysts themselves, reporting on such phenomena, seem to shy from too much criticism of the trend lest they appear out of touch. We seem to have ended up in a sociopolitical (...) condition in which everyone senses some kind of social and ecological disaster looms but the free market of ideas should not disturb itself too much about it. (shrink)

The ethical limbo in which frozen human embryos exist is, tragically, a real limbo, and in their untouchability lies an apparent contradiction: that God cannot rescue a person whom man, in his pride, has co-created outside the truly necessary incorporation within a family. The author explores the possibility that ethical objections to embryo adoption are based on a flawed conflation of two problems: the immorality, injustice, and harm of the procedure that supplants the marriage act; and the rights (...) of the child conceived outside the welcoming nature of the marriage act—the primary rights of every conceived person to completing, wholesome, and relational nurture. The author argues for the humanitarian right to embryo adoption, within marriage, from the point of view of the rights of the person conceived. (shrink)

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" _Star Trek_-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In _How We Became Posthuman,_ N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost (...) its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel _Limbo_ by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, _How We Became Posthuman_ provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here. (shrink)

Michelle Bella & Giovanni Maddalena – Many Peirce scholars wonder about what is going on with the publication of the Writings? André De Tienne – The answer is at once, almost nothing, but a lot! We are in a state of quasi-limbo, and so people do notice that we have not been publishing any volume for the last 10 years and the universal question is, what is happening to the Peirce Edition Project? It is a question that I keep (...) asking myself! But I am glad to share this more publicly, so that peo... (shrink)