Despite the frequency of stillbirths, the subsequent implications are overlooked and underappreciated. We present findings from comprehensive, systematic literature reviews, and new analyses of published and unpublished data, to establish the effect of stillbirth on parents, families, health-care providers, and societies worldwide. Data for direct costs of this event are sparse but suggest that a stillbirth needs more resources than a livebirth, both in the perinatal period and in additional surveillance during subsequent pregnancies. Indirect and intangible costs of stillbirth are (...) extensive and are usually met by families alone. This issue is particularly onerous for those with few resources. Negative effects, particularly on parental mental health, might be moderated by empathic attitudes of care providers and tailored interventions. The value of the baby, as well as the associated costs for parents, families, care providers, communities, and society, should be considered to prevent stillbirths and reduce associated morbidity. (shrink)

This paper examines the competing ‘languages’ of line in Julie Mehretu’s series, Grey Area and elaborates on the implications these lines have for theories of space, bodies and, in particular, the relationship between the two. Grey Area explores what Mehretu describes as a grey and in-between space. The series is composed of seven large abstract canvases covered in an assortment of gestural tracings and neatly traced rational lines. The juxtaposition of these competing linely narratives not only creates a grey space (...) visually, but compels viewers to stretch their bodies across the canvases and between the lined layers thus, facilitating a brief inhabitance of grey space. Building from this analysis, the paper reflects on the relevance of the lines and the stretching they elicit for examining the complexities of contemporary modes of inhabitation that often extend across multiple geographical sites and temporal modes. Thus, engaging with Mehretu’s lined abstractions draws attention to the importance of space in the production of bodily boundaries, what I call geographical and temporal bodily outlines. In addition to contributing to body-space theories, the paper also demonstrates the valuable insights gained by attending to the unique social-aesthetic analyses of visual art and artists. (shrink)

Although the concept of ‘true infinity’ is undoubtedly central to Hegel's philosophy, the Anglophone rehabilitation of Hegel as a post-Kantian critical philosopher has avoided any sustained interpretive confrontation with the concept. In this paper, I provide a revisionary reconstruction of Hegelian true infinity by engaging with Martin Hägglund's argument in This Life (2019) for the centrality of finitude to Hegel's philosophy. For Hägglund, Hegel's philosophy effects a ‘secular reconciliation’ with finitude by demonstrating that our mortality is not a negative condition (...) to be overcome; rather, mortality is constitutive of rational social agency or ‘spiritual life’. While Hägglund's interpretive emphasis on finitude prima facie occludes a consideration of the concept of true infinity, I show that Hägglund's understanding of spiritual life in terms of the dynamic of self-maintenance implicitly articulates a revisionary understanding of true infinity as instantiated in and through the activity of finite living rational beings. More specifically, I show that Hägglund's understanding of finitude as constitutive of spiritual life is grounded in three closely interrelated Hegelian meta-concepts, all of which Hegel derives in the second chapter of the Logic (‘Existence’): (a) the distinction between abstract and determinate negation; (b) the form of individuality as constituted through determinate negation; and (c) true infinity as the form of individuality understood in explicitly processual terms. I thus ground a deflationary interpretation of true infinity in Hegel's logical account of determinate individuality, and at the same time, contribute to This Life's ongoing critical reception by articulating its Hegelian logical infrastructure. (shrink)

This commentary considers Robert Pippin's treatment of Hegel’s attempt to overcome Kant’s account of the distinction between (and necessary togetherness of) conceptual and intuitional representation. Pippin reads Hegel as committed to Kant’s discursivity thesis, namely, that thought is mediate and general, and thus reliant on sensible intuition for singular immediate contents – a position broadly in line with Wilfrid Sellars’ famous portrayal of Hegel as “that great foe of immediacy.” It is suggested, however, that such a reading makes it difficult (...) to provide an account of the concept/intuition distinction in Hegel that is not, at bottom, Kantian. Attention to the preservation of a certain Schellingean moment in Hegel’s mature thinking—the maintenance of a form of intellectual intuition—perhaps provides resources for an understanding of Hegel’s distinctively post-Kantian understanding of the relation between immediacy and mediation. In my view, intellectual intuition understood as the immediacy of thought is central to the Science of Logic’s attempt to generalise Kant’s distinction between (and claim for the togetherness of) concept and intuition as a logical relation, not one limited to sensibly conditioned cognition. (shrink)

Volume 2, Issue 4, December 2018, Page 440-457.