Endothelial cells, when cultured on gelled basement membrane matrix exert forces of tension through which they deform the matrix and at the same time they aggregate into clusters. The cells eventually form a network of cord-like structures connecting cell aggregates. In this network, almost all of the matrix has been pulled underneath the cell cords and cell clusters. This phenomenon has been proposed as a possible model for the growth and development of planar vascular systems in vitro. Our hypothesis is (...) that the matrix is reorganized and the cellular networks form as a result of traction forces exerted by the cells on the matrix and the latter's elasticity. We construct and analyze a mathematical model based on this hypothesis and examine conditions necessary for the formation of the pattern. We show cell migration is not necessary for pattern formation and that isotropic, strain-stimulated traction is sufficient to form the observed patterns. (shrink)

The Ethics of Time" explores a rather uncharted field in philosophy, namely the ethical implications of time. It does so by utilizing the resources of phenomenology and hermeneutics. On the one hand, its rigorous analyses of such phenomena as waiting, memory, and the body are carried out phenomenologically, while on the other hand, it engages in a hermeneutical reading of such classical texts as, Augustine's Confessions and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, among others. Nevertheless, this book makes a claim to originality, as (...) it does not provide a commentary on any single text or thinker. Even though a strictly philosophical endeavour, this book engages literature, theology and the arts more generally. It takes seriously phenomenology's claim of a consciousness both constituting time and being constituted by time. This claim has some important implications for the "ethical" self or, rather, for the ways in which such a self informed by time, might come to understand anew the problems of imperfection and ethical goodness. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s sustained reflection on Greek thought has been increasingly recognized as a decisive feature of his own philosophical development. At the same time, this important philosophical meeting has generated considerable controversy and disagreement concerning the radical originality of Heidegger’s view of the Greeks and their place in his groundbreaking thinking. In Heidegger and the Greeks, an international group of distinguished philosophers sheds light on the issues raised by Heidegger’s encounter and engagement with the Greeks. The careful and nuanced essays (...) brought together here shed light on how core philosophical concepts such as phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and ethics are understood today. For readers at all levels, this volume is an invitation to continue the important dialogue with Greek thinking that was started and stimulated by Heidegger. Contributors are Claudia Baracchi, Walter A. Brogan, Günter Figal, Gregory Fried, Francisco J. Gonzalez, Drew A. Hyland, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, William J. Richardson, John Sallis, Dennis J. Schmidt, and Peter Warnek. (shrink)

Who or what comes after God? In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy has shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger's last God, Levinas's God of Infinity, Derrida's and Caputo's tout autre, Marion's God without Being, Kearney's God who may be.

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic (...) concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious 'real' as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists. (shrink)

Given the resurgence of eschatological thought in contemporary theology and the continued relevance of phenomenology in philosophy, this book brings together leading thinkers such as Lacoste, Romano, Kearney and Hart to explore the ways in which these two seemingly unrelated disciplines illuminate each other. Through a series of phenomenological analyses of key eschatological concepts and detailed readings in some of the key figures of both disciplines, this text reveals that phenomenology and eschatology are fundamentally inter-related, and that neither can be (...) fully understood without the other: without eschatology, phenomenology would not have developed the ethical and temporal aspects that characterize it today; without phenomenology, eschatology would remain relegated to the sidelines of serious theological discourse. Along the way, such diverse themes as time, death, parousia, and the call are re-examined and redefined. (shrink)

While philosophy believes it is impossible to have an experience of God without the senses, theology claims that such an experience is possible, though potentially idolatrous. In this engagingly creative book, John Panteleimon Manoussakis ends the impasse by proposing an aesthetic allowing for a sensuous experience of God that is not subordinated to imposed categories or concepts. Manoussakis draws upon the theological traditions of the Eastern Church, including patristic and liturgical resources, to build a theological aesthetic founded on the inverted (...) gaze of icons, the augmented language of hymns, and the reciprocity of touch. Manoussakis explores how a relational interpretation of being develops a fuller and more meaningful view of the phenomenology of religious experience beyond metaphysics and onto-theology. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

John Panteleimon Manoussakis - Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 674-675 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by John Panteleimon Manoussakis Boston College Jeff Malpas. Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge-London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 2006. Pp. x + 413. Cloth, $38.00. The exclusive focus on the who-question has often made philosophy forget the correlate where-question. All the answers given to the first question describe (...) a man who is essentially nowhere. Place is never taken into account as part of one's identity and this implies nothing less than the exclusion of the body, for belongingness.. (shrink)

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated--and long overdue--study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy. The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored (...) in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time--Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum--as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher. (shrink)

The original hermeneutics was theological, that is, theology was the origin of hermeneutics. This chapter examines the relationship between theology and hermeneutics so as to demonstrate how the origin of hermeneutics and thereby its character, regardless of its object, could not have been anything but theological. This can only be done if the remarks that fulfill this double imperative by being as much an exposition on theology as on hermeneutics. Christological hermeneutics are permeated with the paradox of affirming both continuity (...) and discontinuity, both communion and difference. The Trinitarian affirmation of history assumes a particular significance as soon as one can turn to the hermeneutical site par excellence, namely, the Eucharist. The Greek term martyrion signifies witness, testimony, and also martyrdom. The testimonial character of testimony implies and necessitates an Other and even a Third, inscribing, the act of hermeneutics within a witnessing community that is founded upon such testimonies. (shrink)

This paper traces the seminal notion of khora back to its birthplace text of Plato's Timaeus. At the same time, it develops a critique of Jacques Derrida's reading of khora in the context of apophatism, or negative theology. John Caputo's reading as well as Richard Kearney's criticism of the latter are presented and discussed in this text. Finally, the article suggests that the image of khora could provide continental philosophy with an example of wliat the author calls "Hermeneutics of Hyphenation", (...) where an attempt to overcome the binary structure of traditional metaphysics, especially in our thinking of God, is accomplished. /// O presente artigo traça a genealogia da noção seminal de khora até ao seu local de nascimento no Timeu de Platão. Para além disso, o autor apresenta uma crítica da leitura que Jacques Derrida faz da noção de khora no contexto do apofatistmo, ou teologia negativa. A leitura que desta noção faz John Caputo bem como a crítica que desta por sua vez faz Ri-chard Kearney são igualmente apresentadas e discutidas no presente texto. Por fim, o autor sugere que a imagem de khora pode dotar a filosofia continental europeia com um exemplo daquilo a que neste texto se designa por "Hermenêutica da hifenização", na qual se procede justamente a uma tentativa de superação da estrutura binária própría da metafísica tradicional, particularmente no que se refere ao nosso pensamento acerca de Deus. (shrink)

Near is andDifficult to grasp, the God.Religion, too, perhaps religion even more, seems to be “near” enough; for it is such proximity, it would seem, that allows us to make all kinds of statements about it—whether in defense of it or against it. Yet were we to be asked, “What is religion?” and what makes an experience “religious,” or rather, what makes us append this characterization to any particular experience, we would find that, in Hölderlin’s words, religion is “difficult to (...) grasp”. To paraphrase one famous passage: “We know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of [religion] and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it. What, then, is [religion]? If no one asks me, I... (shrink)

This essay is an attempt towards a phenomenology of God. The leading question in our analysis will be whether God could be given to consciousness as a phenomenon. First, we go back to Husserl and to his formulation of the possibility of phenomenality. Then, the discussion proceeds to the innovative reappropriation of Husserlian phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and his notion of the saturated phenomenon. Finally, I propose that God can “appear” only through an “inverted intentionality,” such as it is exemplified (...) in certain divine manifestations recorded in Scripture, in the techniques of depicting the divine in icons, and finally, in the human person. (shrink)

The present essay is apologetic in as much as it aims to justify as well as to explain the philosophical appropriation of Dionysian metaphysics by contemporaryFrench phenomenology, especially by the work of Jean-Luc Marion. It should be noted that Dionysius serves as the inspiration, direct or indirect, of many authors in the contemporary French school, among whom the most notable are Jacques Derrida, Jean-Louis Chretien, and Jean-Yves Lacoste. The present essaywill focus particularly on the convergence between Dionysius’s theology and Marion’s (...) phenomenology. (shrink)

As I sat down to sketch this review of Richard Kearney’s new book on touch, I happened to have received just then in the post a record I had ordered some time ago. It was an album by the French gro...

This essay gives a close reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in light of Schelling's discussion of theodicy as teleology. The article raises the question of the connection between ethics and time, and it argues that ethical categories are really temporal ones, so much so that it would make little sense to posit a choice between good and evil as if there were two simultaneous options. Instead, the story of Oedipus shows us how Thebes is always to precede if one is (...) to reach Colonus, that evil precedes and enables the good. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the ways in which meaning is conveyed in language. Alan Cruse covers semantic matters, but also deals with topics that are usually considered to fall under pragmatics. A major aim is to highlight the richness and subtlety of meaning phenomena, rather than to expound any particular theory. Rich in examples and exercises, Meaning in Language provides an invaluable descriptive approach to this area of linguistics for undergraduates and postgraduates alike.

Authors philosophical notes on life, conduct of life from the perspective of a life.

This book: * assumes no mathematical background and keeps the technicalities to a minimum * explains the most important applications of probability theory to ...

In this entry we provide a critical review of recent work on the nature and ethics of blame, including issues of moral standing.

A record of the words and teachings of Confucius, _The Analects_ is considered the most reliable expression of Confucian thought. However, the original meaning of Confucius's teachings have been filtered and interpreted by the commentaries of Confucianists of later ages, particularly the Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty, not altogether without distortion.In this monumental translation by Professor D. C. Lau, an attempt has been made to interpret the sayings as they stand. The corpus of the sayings is taken as an organic (...) whole and the final test of the interpretation rests on the internal consistency it exhibits. In other words, _The Analects_ is read in the light of _The Analects._This results in a truer understanding of Confucius' thought than the traditional interpretation and paves the way for a re-assessment of its importance in the history of Chinese thought and its relevance to the present day world.This volume also contains an introduction to the life and teachings of Confucius, and three appendices on the events in the life of Confucius, on his disciples, and on the composition of _The Analects._. (shrink)