This paper discusses the poetic art of cultivating the sacred by connecting the thought of two unlikely figures, twentieth-century anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson and nineteenth-century poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin. Gregory Bateson’s theory of mental process within the ecology of mind, characterized in terms of metaphor and simile, or poetry and prose thinking, is illustrated with the aid of two syllogisms, the syllogism in Barbara and the syllogism in Grass. In light of these syllogisms, Friedrich Hölderlin’s views on the task (...) of the poet and the logic behind tragic song are then examined. Hölderlin’s poetic theory reveals how two elements of the song, tragic metaphor and caesura, invoke a living representation of the sacred, or the whole of ecology of mind. (shrink)

Introduction: Depression, biology, aggression -- Underbelly -- The biological unconscious -- Bitter melancholy -- Chemical transference -- The bastard placebo -- The pharmakology of depression.

The inhuman in the humanities : Darwin and the ends of man -- Deleuze, Bergson, and the concept of life -- Bergson, Deleuze, and difference -- Feminism, materialism, and freedom -- The future of feminist theory : dreams for new knowledges -- Differences disturbing identity : Deleuze and feminism -- Irigaray and the ontology of sexual difference -- Darwin and the split between natural and sexual selection -- Sexual difference as sexual selection : Irigarayan reflections on Darwin -- Art and (...) the animal -- Living art and the art of life : women's painting from the western desert. (shrink)

Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue concerns (...) the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet (...) routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’ used live recording, transcription and public-led analysis to address the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives. (shrink)

It is one thing to read about the methodology and methods of Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological research, the ontic description. It is quite another thing to be faced with an interview transcript. This article draws on a study that asked doctoral students about their experience of doing such research. How did they become “phenomenological/hermeneutic” in their thinking and writing? What helped them to find their way? We offer this article as a means of letting others learn from our own experiences. We (...) support our insights with the writings of Heidegger and Gadamer to show the methodological congruence that is essential to Heideggerian phenomenological hermeneutic research. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How do politicians engage with and offer to assist their constituents: the people who vote them into power? We address the question by analysing a corpus of 80 interactions recorded at the office of a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, and comprising telephone calls between constituents and the MP’s clerical ‘caseworkers’ as well as face-to-face encounters with MPs in their fortnightly ‘surgeries’. The data were transcribed, and then analysed using conversation analysis, focusing on the design and placement of (...) offers of assistance. We identified three types of offers within a longer ‘offering’ sequence: ‘proposal offers’, which typically appear first in any offering sequence, in which politicians and caseworkers make proposals to help their constituents using formats that request permission to do so, or check that the constituent does indeed want help ; ‘announcement offers’, which appear second, and indicate that something has been decided and confirm the intention to act and ‘request offers’, which appear third, and take for form ‘let me do X’. Request offers indicate that the offer is available but cannot be completed until the current conversation is closed; they also appear in environments in which the constituent reissues their problems and appears dissatisfied with the offers so far. The article contributes to what we know about making offers in institutional settings, as well as shedding the first empirical light on the workings of the constituency office: the site of engagement between everyday members of the public and their elected representatives. (shrink)

This book explores the tradition of the 'science of man' in French medicine of the era 1750-1850, focusing on controversies about the nature of the 'physical-moral' relation and their effects on the role of medicine in French society. Its chief purpose is to recover the history of a holistic tradition in French medicine that has been neglected because it lay outside the mainstream themes of modern medicine, which include experimental, reductionist, and localistic conceptions of health and disease. Professor Williams also (...) challenges existing historiography, which argues that the 'anthropological' approach to medicine was a short-term by-product of the leftist politics of the French Revolution. This work argues instead that the medical science of man long outlived the Revolution, that it spanned traditional ideological divisions, and that it reflected the shared aim of French physicians, whatever their politics, to claim broad cultural authority in French society. (shrink)

What exactly does it mean to “trust your gut”? What use are gut-level insights when a person is attempting to consciously and deliberately navigate life altering decisions, such as those surrounding marriage, divorce, job changes, home buying, etc.? This essay provides a partial answer to those questions by leveraging the account of “emotional bodily feelings” offered in Tom Cochrane’s The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States. This essay shows why “trusting your gut” is a reasonably good path to (...) emotional self-awareness in decision-making. The first half of the essay offers an analysis of what many people mean by the colloquial advice to “trust your gut,” at least when they deploy that advice in context of an ongoing dialogue about a friend or family member’s major life-decision. In the second half, this article briefly summarizes Cochrane’s account of emotions and emotional bodily feelings, and spells out how these concepts might be deployed to understand the advice to “trust your gut” as nearly tantamount to saying “pursue emotional self-awareness.”. (shrink)

This paper proposes a qualitative study exploring anomalous self and world-experiences in individuals with high levels of depersonalization experiences. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by distressing feelings of being a detached, neutral and disembodied onlooker of one’s mental and bodily processes. Our findings indicate the presence of a wide range of anomalous experiences traditionally understood to be core features of DP, such as disembodiment and disrupted self-awareness. However, our results also indicate experiential features that are less highlighted in previous (...) work, such as faster time perception and blurriness of the self/other boundaries which may play a key role in altering one’s sense of self and sense of presence in the world. Our qualitative study provides an in-depth examination of self-reported disturbances of one’s relatedness to one’s self and the world, thereby shedding further light on the nature of altered subjective experiences in DP. In doing so, this paper draws attention to key aspects yet overlooked that may prove valuable for shedding further light into the phenomenon of depersonalization. We conclude by highlighting limitations of this study and a number of open questions that further work needs to address in the future. (shrink)

In his article ‘Saints and Heroes’, Urmson argues that traditional moral theories allow at most for a threefold classification of actions in terms of their worth, and that they are therefore unsatisfactory. Since the conclusion of his argument has led to the widespread use of the term ‘acts of supererogation’, and since I do not believe that such acts exist, I propose to argue that the actions with which he is concerned not only can, but should, be contained within the (...) traditional classification. (shrink)

Through an examination of a variety of cultural forms and texts, Sexy Bodies investigates the ways in which sexual bodies, sexual practices and sexualities are produced.Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, (...) all carnalities.Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from National Velvet to Marnie; discuss figures of the lesbian body from vampires to tribades to tomboys; uncover 'virtual' lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinised and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard. (shrink)

A goal of living as well as possible is central to practice and research with young adults living with home mechanical ventilation (HMV). Significant effort has been put into conceptualizing and measuring the quality of life (QOL) as a proxy for living well. Yet, dominant understandings of QOL have been influenced by normative, ableist, and biomedical discourses about what constitutes a good life that, when applied in practice and systems with those living with HMV, can contribute to exclusion and constrain (...) opportunities to live well. Inquiry into what certain understandings of living well can do is critical to opening up possibilities to reimagine living well with HMV. This paper draws on findings from a critical narrative inquiry that explored the experiences of five young adults (ages 18–40 years) living with HMV. Data were co‐constructed virtually through an initial interview and photo‐elicitation using participant‐generated photographs. A critical narrative analysis of participants' stories made visible the ideological effects of ableist, biomedical, and individualist discourses and how the young adults reproduced and resisted these dominant discourses. Their stories further opened up possibilities for nurses and other healthcare providers to see living well and QOL differently. (shrink)

There is an emerging ethical consensus that injured research participants should receive medical care and compensation for their research-related injuries. This consensus is premised on notions of beneficence, distributive justice, compensatory justice and reciprocity. In response, countries around the world have implemented no-fault compensation systems to ensure that research participants are adequately protected in the event of injury. The United States, the world's leading sponsor of research, has chosen instead to rely on its legal system to provide injured research participants (...) with medical care and compensation. This article argues that US reliance on its legal system leaves injured research participants unprotected in the event of injury. Nearly every injured research participant will have difficulty receiving compensation in court, and certain classes of research participants will be barred from receiving compensation altogether. The United States’ outlier status also threatens to impede US-sponsored multinational research, potentially delaying important biomedical advances. To rectify this injustice, researchers, Institutional Review Boards, sponsors and research institutions should advocate systematic no-fault compensation in the United States to bring US law into accord with global ethical norms and ensure that injured research participants are adequately protected. (shrink)

In this response article, I focus on two issues. First, I discuss the problem, raised by the commentators, of ‘categorial ambiguity’ in membership categorization analysis, and make suggestions about how to approach it. Second, I argue that, as conversation analysts have demonstrated the ‘systematics’ of interactional practices, membership categorization analysis should also begin to build a robust corpus of studies of ‘categorial systematics’.

Shifts in funding and a worldwide trend towards marketising higher education have led to a new emphasis on the quality of the student experience. In the UK this trend finds its strongest expression in recent policy proposals to simultaneously increase student fees and student choice so that students themselves become the drivers of higher education. We trace the policy developments of this shift over recent years and rehearse some of the criticisms against it. Accepting that there is good reason to (...) support improving the student experience, we then consider ways in which this might be achieved that foreground the relation of university teachers with their subject matter and students' engagement in this. A higher education, we argue, should expose its students to disciplines whose standards are rightly contested and to a form of learning that intensifies or unsettles desires rather than simply aspiring to satisfy them. (shrink)

This article examines patients’ calls to three different GP services in the United Kingdom. Using conversation analysis, combined with coding of 447 calls, we studied the role of thank you in closing sequences, focusing on their timing and order in relation to service outcome. We show first how patients withhold thank you in orientation to an absent summary or specification of service: patients are more likely to initiate thank you if the receptionist volunteers such a summary. Second, we show there (...) is variation in how appropriately participants project the termination of calls using thank you. Finally, while thank you serves a primary role in managing the termination of calls, the timing, order and design of thank you can also display patient satisfaction. We discuss our findings in terms of service encounters more generally, including implications for larger scale analysis. (shrink)

Growing opioid misuse in the United States has resulted in more children living with an adult with an opioid use history. Although an abundance of research has demonstrated a link between opioid misuse and negative parenting behaviors, few intervention efforts have been made to target this underserved population. The Family Check-Up has been tested in more than 25 years of research, across multiple settings, and is an evidence-based program for reducing risk behavior, enhancing parenting skills, and preventing the onset of (...) substance use. It is designed to motivate parents to engage in positive parenting practices and to change problematic parenting and has been tested across a variety of ages including early childhood and adolescence. It is highlighted in NIDA’s Principles of Substance Use Prevention for Early Childhood: A research-based guide as one of only three effective selective prevention programs for substance abuse among families with young children. Recently, we developed an online version of the FCU that has now been adapted for early childhood and families with opioid use histories. The online platform and telehealth model allow for wide-scale dissemination, ease of training with community providers, and increased public health reach for families in remote, rural areas. This is particularly important when targeting families with opioid misuse and addiction because there are high rates of addiction in remote areas, yet few services available. In this article, we describe the FCU Online and review new content in the model that targets a population of young adult parents with substance abuse histories, including opioid use. New modules include content focused on harm reduction for this high-risk population of parents, such as safety in the home, substance use while parenting, and managing conflict with partners and friends. (shrink)

Five-year-old children categorized as skilled versus unskilled counters were given verbal estimation and number word comprehension tasks with numerosities 20 – 120. Skilled counters showed a linear relation between number words and nonsymbolic numerosities. Unskilled counters showed the same linear relation for smaller numbers to which they could count, but not for larger number words. Further tasks indicated that unskilled counters failed even to correctly order large number words differing by a 2 : 1 ratio, whereas they performed well on (...) this task with smaller numbers, and performed well on a nonsymbolic ordering task with the same numerosities. These findings provide evidence that large, approximate numerosity representations become linked to number words around the time that children learn to count to those words reliably. (shrink)

This comprehensive and up-to-date textbook gives a clear account of the different philosophical and theoretical approaches to psychology and discusses major philosophical questions such as free will and the relation between mind and body.