The author of the paper analyzes John Milton’s great epic narrative through the lenses of Paul Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics and his philosophical reflection, in particular the second chapter of the philosopher’s last book, Parcours de la Reconnaissance, devoted mainly to the prospects and pitfalls of recognizing oneself. Two excerpts from St. Paul’s Letter to Romans and the Letter to Corinthians highlight the main points of reference in this argument: the concept of involuntary wrongdoing and the contrast between the present opacity (...) and the projected transparency of the knowing subject, connected with the promise of seeing face-to-face, whose fulfilment is rooted in God’s antecedent knowledge of a human being. It is argued that Ricoeur’s focus on the precarious fate of the “fallible man” and his simultaneous desire to outline the destiny of the “capable man” elucidate Milton’s masterpiece evocations of the Aristotelian anagnorisis in Paradise Lost. (shrink)

The rule of law offers legal certainty, laying down boundaries to the state's playing field. The precautionary approach stipulates that the absence of scientific certainty is no reason not to act to prevent harm. Here, uncertainty frames action. The precautionary approach potentially expands the state's playing field, and this expansion might well undermine the precepts of the rule of law. The certainty-uncertainty axis exposes a tension between the rule of law and the precautionary approach in what Ulrich Beck has termed (...) the world risk society in second modernity. It is this tension that is the focus of analysis in this article. (shrink)

In an interdependent world of overlapping political memberships and identities, states and democratic citizens face difficult choices in responding to large-scale migration and the related question of who ought to have access to citizenship. In an influential attempt to provide a normative framework for a more just global order, The Law of Peoples , John Rawls is curiously silent regarding what his framework would mean for the politics of migration. In this piece, I consider the complications Rawls’s inattention to these (...) issues creates for his broader vision of global justice. Yet I also attempt to show how these aspects of Rawls’s theory emerge from an underlying tension which confronts all liberal democratic conceptions of justice, both in theory and in practice. In my conclusion, I sketch an alternative rooted in the insights of agonistic pluralism, which “breaks” the Rawlsian silence and actively theorizes the democratic legitimation of political borders. (shrink)

_Eyes Wide Shut_ Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick Warner Bros., 1999.

Imagination has played a major role in theories of numerous aesthetic phenomena: it figures in accounts of the interpretation of art, of our emotional responses to art, and even of what art is, to name but a few topics. But imagination seemingly has a role to play also in aesthetic theorising itself, in particular in aesthetic thought experiments. Thought experiments in general pose an epistemic puzzle: how can a merely imagined scenario yield knowledge? In the paper, I have a look (...) at a special version of this puzzle that some thought experiments in aesthetics occasion. Many thought experiments in aesthetics—e.g. Kendall Walton’s guernica-experiment, or Arthur Danto’s imagined eight-hour long film of the title page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace—involve making judgements regarding the aesthetic properties of merely imagined works of art. But according to a widely accepted principle in aesthetics, one has to be acquainted with a work— seen it, heard it, and so on—in order to be able to judge its aesthetic qualities. But no one has ever seen Danto’s merely imagined film of Tolstoy’s book. So how are we in a position to judge its aesthetic properties? I propose a solution to the puzzle by elaborating on Tamar Gendler’s notion of “quasi-observation,” which she holds to be a common element of thought experimenting. As a coda, I also give a sketch of how aesthetic thought experiments are not only a tool for theorising about art, but often also figure in the production of art. (shrink)

In his treatise on dreams Somniorum Synesiorum Libri IIII, published in 1562, the Italian Renaissance philosopher and physician Girolamo Cardano distinguishes between idola and visiones. Historians have discussed the reasons for such a distinction without taking into account Cardano’s original theory of sense-perception. In this article I shall argue that, in order to interpret the meaning of idola and visiones in Cardano’s theory of dreams, one should bear in mind his view that hearing is superior to sight and that while (...) idola are essentially based on sound, visiones depend on images. (shrink)

In this contribution, I plumb the depths of Georges Didi-Huberman’s abiding notion of the “eye of history” and, in particular, I explore to which responsible acts this notion might hold us. Does a reader of texts or viewer of an image have a right to claim a certain status as witness if the experience of being present at the crime is “merely” by the proxy of a text or an image? This is a fundamental ethical question and, consequently, a profoundly (...) political one that Didi-Huberman’s abiding exploration of the “eye of history” asks. I attempt to answer it by reading a variety of texts by the prolific author. In particular, however, I test what Didi-Huberman speculates in Images in Spite of All about what went through the mind of Alex, the Sonderkommando who took four furtive shots from an Auschwitz gas chamber, against what I’ve learned recently after having discovered the Hiroshima photographs made on 6 August 1945 by hibakusha Yoshito Matsushige. (shrink)

Introduction -- Media and representation. On the one medium / Eric Gans -- The scapegoat mechanism and the media: beyond the folk devil paradigm / John O'Carroll -- The apocalypse will not be televised / Chris Fleming -- Film. Mirrors of nature: artificial agents in real life and virtual worlds / Paul Dumouchel -- Superheroes, scapegoats, and saviors: the problem of evil and the need for redemption / Joel Hodge -- Sanctified victimage on page and screen: The hunger games as (...) prophetic media / Debra E. Macdonald -- The mimetic e-motion: from The matrix to Avatar / Nidesh Lawtoo -- Apocalypse of the therapeutic: The cabin in the woods and the death of mimetic desire / Peter Y. Paik -- Eyes wide shut: mimesis and historical memory in Stanley Kubrick's The shining / David Humbert -- Against romantic love: mimeticism and satire in Woody Allen's Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona; you will meet a tall dark stranger; and To Rome with love / Scott Cowdell -- A beautiful crisis: Ang Lee's film adaptation of The ice storm / Carly Osborn -- Cowboy metaphysics, the virtuous-enough cowboy, and mimetic desire in Stephen Fears' The hi-lo country / Thomas Ryba -- Television. The self in crisis: watching Mad men and Homeland with Girard and Hegel / Paolo Diego Bubbio -- Media, murder, and memoir: Girardian baroque in Robert Drewe's The shark net / Rosamund Dalziell -- Conversion in Dexter / Matthew John Paul Tan and Joel Hodge. (shrink)

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work (...) with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

In this chapter, I comment on the organization of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and on SPEP as an organization by describing its inspirations as an “Openness Toward and Being Other,” its enthusiasm in terms of “Eyes Wide Open,” some dangers and shortsightedness it faced as “Eyes Wide Shut,” the relation of continental philosophy to phenomenology as “Continental Drift,” and the understanding of SPEP as a phenomenological movement as “Edging Beyond Itself.” I conclude (...) with some reflections on the Phenomenology Research Center. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard on Faith and LoveDaniel WhistlerSharon Krishek. Kierkegaard on Faith and Love. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 201. Cloth, $90.00.Contemporary scholarship on Kierkegaard is frequently confronted by two problems. First, there is the question of Kierkegaard’s worldliness: does Kierkegaard have anything substantial to say about politics, society, and the ethical dilemmas of intersubjective existence? Second, there remains the perennial problem of (...) the rhetorical singularity of Kierkegaard’s writings: can anything conceptually coherent be salvaged from the panoply of pseudonyms, indirections, and ironies? And, if so, to what extent do such abstractions falsify the richness of a particular text? The virtue of Krishek’s Kierkegaard on Faith and Love is that it answers both these questions in a radical and challenging manner. To the problem of worldliness, Krishek responds by insisting on the presence of a disposition to “full concreteness” or “a full return to the world” in Kierkegaard’s account of love (128). In answer to the problem of rhetorical singularity, Krishek embraces Kierkegaard’s incoherence, so as to affirm Fear and Trembling against Works of Love (or “Kierkegaard versus Kierkegaard,” as she puts it on p. 138).Kierkegaard on Faith and Love is a sustained investigation into the status and structure of love in Kierkegaard’s corpus. It thus takes its place alongside Evans’s Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Love (Oxford, 2004), Ferreira’s Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford, 2001), Amy Laura Hall’s Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (Cambridge, 2002), Ronald L. Hall’s The Human Embrace (Penn State, 2000), and Mooney’s Love and Faith in Kierkegaard (Indiana, 2008) as one more contribution to the recent explosion of literature on the subject. However, Krishek is distinctive in limiting her scope to romantic love alone; she steadfastly reconstructs [End Page 302] a Kierkegaardian phenomenology of romantic attitudes toward the beloved—the proper and improper modes of comportment when in love.The first half of the book is split into three chapters, which together present a hierarchy of these different comportments. The reader passes by inadequate attempts to hold onto the beloved through recollection (chapter 2) and resignation (chapter 3) to arrive at the Kierkegaardian ideal of faithful or “faith-full” love. Modelled on the knight of faith of Fear and Trembling, the faith-full lover accomplishes a double movement in which he resigns himself to the loss of the beloved while simultaneously trusting in her return. Unfortunately, on the way to this ideal, some of the great lovers of Kierkegaard’s writings (Don Juan, the Seducer) are brushed aside in an overly schematic way. This is a shame because they surely have much to teach us about his views on romantic love. Nevertheless, the effect of Krishek’s whistle-stop tour through the aesthetic works is to quickly bring us face to face with Fear and Trembling, in which, she contends, we find a positive model of romantic love. Making the early, pseudonymous Fear and Trembling determinative of Kierkegaard’s conception of love is a bold move, especially in light of the tendency in recent Kierkegaard scholarship to valorize the “rediscovered” religious works. Yet it pays off: Krishek’s choice not only allows a rich and affirmative description of romantic love to emerge; it also sheds light on Fear and Trembling itself, especially the Merman episode.The final three chapters of Kierkegaard on Faith and Love take up the task of justifying this ideal of faith-full love. First, Krishek attempts to show its conceptual plausibility by appealing to non-Kierkegaardian examples: the novel On the Way Home, Kubrik’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. Second, she engages at length with existing scholarship, employing the double movement of love abstracted from Fear and Trembling to great effect to overturn the orthodox emphasis on resignation, failure, and asceticism in Kierkegaard’s account of love. Finally, Krishek turns to Works of Love, which is usually regarded as Kierkegaard’s mature and definitive statement of a philosophy of love. She challenges the derogatory attitude Kierkegaard takes therein to romantic or “preferential” love with her more affirmative model drawn from Fear... (shrink)

In this important and timely work, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro examine the current and growing prevalence of dogmatic, intellectually rigid forms of thought—so-called “Fundamentalisms”—whi...

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory (...) implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy from (...) the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers--including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others--Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass society. (shrink)

Eye gaze plays an important role in communication but understanding of its actual function or functions and the methods used to elucidate this have varied considerably. This systematized review was undertaken to summarize both the proposed functions of eye gaze in conversations of healthy adults and the methodological approaches employed. The eligibility criteria were restricted to a healthy adult population and excluded studies that manipulated eye gaze behavior. A total of 29 articles—quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods were returned, with a (...) wide range of methodological designs. The main areas of variability related to number of conversants, their familiarity and status, conversation topic, data collection tools—video and eye tracking—and definitions of eye gaze. The findings confirm that eye gaze facilitates turn yielding, plays a role in speech monitoring, prevents and repairs conversation breakdowns and facilitates intentional and unintentional speech interruptions. These findings were remarkably consistent given the variability in methods across the 29 articles. However, in relation to turn initiation, the results were less consistent, requiring further investigation. This review provides a starting point for future studies to make informed decisions about study methods for examining eye gaze and selecting variables of interest. (shrink)

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory (...) implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

In the deviance literature, sexual assaults at work have not been given the sustained attention that harm to property or violation of production guidelines has received. This omission suggests that sexual harassment is considered normative and that when women fail to accommodate this reality, it is the survivor rather than the perpetrator who is considered deviant. This article reports on 64 cases of attempted or completed rape in a sample of heterosexual and lesbian women workers in a wide range (...) of occupations. Two atypical responses, quitting the job or filing a complaint as a result of a workplace sexual assault, highlight the process by which informal deviance defining occurs in everyday interactions at work. (shrink)

Face perception and emotion categorization are widely investigated under laboratory conditions that are devoid of real social interaction. Using mobile eye-tracking glasses in a standardized diagnostic setting while applying the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, we had the opportunity to record gaze behavior of children and adolescents with and without Autism Spectrum Conditions during social interaction. The objective was to investigate differences in eye-gaze behavior between three groups of children and adolescents either with ASC or with unconfirmed diagnosis of ASC or (...) with neurotypical development during social interaction with an adult interviewer in a diagnostic standard situation using the ADOS-2. In a case control study, we used mobile eye-tracking glasses in an ecologically valid and highly standardized diagnostic interview to investigate suspected cases of ASC. After completion of the ASC diagnostic gold standard including the ADOS-2, the participants were assigned to two groups based on their diagnosis and compared with a matched group of neurotypically developed controls. The primary outcome measure is the percentage of total dwell times assessed for different areas of interest with regard to the face and body of a diagnostic interviewer and the surrounding space. Overall, 65 children and adolescents within an age range of 8.3–17.9 years were included in the study. The data revealed significant group differences, especially in the central-face area. Previous investigations under laboratory conditions gave preferential attention to the eye region during face perception to describe differences between ASC and NTD. In this study – using an ecologically valid setting within a standard diagnostic procedure – the results indicate that neurotypically developed controls seem to process faces and facial expressions in a holistic manner originating from the central-face region. Conversely, participants on the Autism Spectrum seem to avoid the central-face region and show unsystematic gaze behavior, not using the preferred landing position in the central-face region as the Archimedean point of face perception. This study uses a new approach, and it will be important to replicate these preliminary findings in future research. (shrink)

For many of us, our relationship with the College Art Association (CAA) centers around the organization's annual meeting, that cacophonous yearly ritual that sees job applicants, panelists, and old friends and colleagues descend upon a convention hotel for one long weekend in February. The recent publication The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association, edited by former CAA executive director Susan Ball, attempts to historicize not only this event but the entire range of the association's (...) activities over its long life. Additionally, it serves as a reminder to all of us that the organization has long engaged in a wide range of pursuits that extend well beyond planning its annual conference. .. (shrink)

Essays covering a wide range of subjects: spiritual symbolism, the afterlife, and more.

The lex talionis of the Old Testament has been widely perceived—understandably, but mistakenly—as a barbaric law of retribution in kind. It is better understood as a seminal expression of restraint and proportionality as moral principles of punishment. This has been recognized from the earliest times. Over the intervening centuries, the lex talionis has lost neither its moral significance nor its penal relevance. This is reflected in H.L.A. Hart's synthesis of modern retributivist and utilitarian theories of punishment and, again, in contemporary (...) Canadian law through the recognition of proportionality as the fundamental principle of sentencing under the Criminal Code. The tension between this fundamental principle and Canada's increasing resort to mandatory minimum sentences of imprisonment is examined briefly in this light. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something (...) can be felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Throughout the early modern period, the most widely read astronomical textbooks were Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera and the Theorica planetarum, ultimately in the new form introduced by Georg Peurbach. This essay argues that the images in these texts were intended to develop an “intelligent eye.” Students were trained to transform representations of specific heavenly phenomena into moving mental images of the structure of the cosmos. Only by learning the techniques of mental visualization and manipulation could the student “see” (...) in the mind's eye the structure and motions of the cosmos. While anyone could look up at the heavens, only those who had acquired the intelligent eye could comprehend the divinely created order of the universe. Further, the essay demonstrates that the visual program of the Sphaera and Theorica texts played a significant and hitherto unrecognized role in later scientific work. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all utilized the same types of images in their own texts to explicate their ideas about the cosmos. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Throughout the early modern period, the most widely read astronomical textbooks were Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera and the Theorica planetarum, ultimately in the new form introduced by Georg Peurbach. This essay argues that the images in these texts were intended to develop an “intelligent eye.” Students were trained to transform representations of specific heavenly phenomena into moving mental images of the structure of the cosmos. Only by learning the techniques of mental visualization and manipulation could the student “see” (...) in the mind's eye the structure and motions of the cosmos. While anyone could look up at the heavens, only those who had acquired the intelligent eye could comprehend the divinely created order of the universe. Further, the essay demonstrates that the visual program of the Sphaera and Theorica texts played a significant and hitherto unrecognized role in later scientific work. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all utilized the same types of images in their own texts to explicate their ideas about the cosmos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something (...) can be felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On John Hollander’s “Owl”Eleanor CookSuppose we start with grammar, assuming we’ve glanced at the look of “Owl” on the page, as if through the eyes of May Swenson. Here is the way she began to read a poem: “I like to see the poem first as a shut box or package to be opened, within which is an invention whose particular working I hope to discover. Something (...) can be felt about it even before beginning to read: its profile on the page, its regular or irregular pattern of stanzas, length of lines, their symmetry, its wide or thin shape, its look of bulk or lightness.” 1 So here, we observe a one-word title: a noun, no article, and so more like Bishop’s “Sandpiper” than Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Then quatrains, twenty-four of them, each shorter in its third and more in its fourth line; the pulse iambic and 5 5 4 3 (pentameter twice, tetrameter, trimeter), the rhyme a b a b. Each stanza, in little, looks and listens like an owl, narrowing down to its fourth line, listening to the sounds and silences both—the sounds of the full end-rhymes, assonance, midline rhyming, schematic echoes, and so on; and the silences resonating in the vacant space left by one fewer foot in the third line, then two in the fourth, an effect especially noticeable in the end-stopped lines. This stanza form is (I believe) John Hollander’s own, 2 and it teaches us how to listen better. Owls hunt with their ears as well as their eyes, and with only their ears if necessary.In starting with grammar, I am simply choosing one partner in the dance of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic that constitutes all writing. I shall touch on lexical questions and two senses of voice, before turning to the heart of the matter, the poem’s figuration and fable, then end [End Page 167] with some remarks on “Owl” as part of all Hollander’s work and also as a poem of our moment.The grammar, then, and first the syntactic variety of the sentences. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918 that technique is not simply “what may be learned from a manual of prosody. This is making technique easy.... Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it, by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake....” 3 Something of Hollander’s distinctive voice in both poetry and prose lies in his great command of grammatical structures, including his syntactic variety. “Owl” is strongly predicative in style (note the complex syntax, and the remarkably high use of participles, past and present). The sentences give the effect of generating themselves, especially through their parallel grammatical constructions, where the last term in a double or triple set is likely to be modified by a clause or phrase—the whole sentence ramifying and exfoliating, as if we were watching a zoological or genealogical tree grow under our eyes. [See, for example, the parallel participles in the last line of stanza 4 and stanza 5: “Taking heed... you more than see.” Or consider how one participle leads to another in stanzas 15 through 17, beginning with “Trembling....”]Such syntactic energy gives a quick, vital rhythm to the sentence—a fast pace, given the richness of thought, hints, implications. A pace sometimes slightly nervous, curbing and steadying its own energies, partly through the regular beat of the simple rhyme scheme and quatrain. It seems to me that the forward propulsion of both the grammar and dialectic is steadied, directed, by the rhetorical schemes—that rhetoric here offers what I want to call something like a discipline of simplicity. This is a function we may not associate with rhetorical schemes, those “surface patterns of words” that “carry no meanings per se.” 4 In Roman Jakobson’s terms—and his discussion of parallelism was really the only thing that helped with what I was hearing—what I am hearing is the pull between a regular, simple parallelism of stanza form and a much-varied, complex parallelism of... (shrink)

Mathematician, poet, philosopher, life scientist, playwright, teacher, Jacob Bronowski could readily be referred to as a Renaissance Man. But in the historical context that would do him a disservice: he is, par excellence, a Twentieth Century Man, who has traced the arts and sciences of earlier centuries and especially those of his own time to their common root in the uniquely human imagination.Bronowski is the author of such widely read books as The Ascent of Man and Science and Human Values. (...) In 1977, The MIT Press published A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy. In those essays, the emphasis is on scientific questions, but in a number of them the notion of "art as a mode of knowledge" is invoked to make the science clearer and its human dimension more vivid. The Visionary Eye serves as a companion volume: here the emphasis is on the arts and humanities, but "science as a mode of imagination" comes into play to extend the reach of the visionary eye.The Visionary Eye contains eleven essays: "The Nature of Art," "The Imaginative Mind in Art," "The Imaginative Mind in Science," "The Shape of Things," "Architecture as a Science and Architecture as an Art," and Art as a Mode of Knowledge, Bronowski's A. W. Mellon Lectures given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The essays discuss examples taken from across the spectrum of the arts, past and present -- music, poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, industrial design, and engineering artifacts -- in the coherent context of Bronowski's view of the human creative process. (shrink)

Deepfakes pose a multi-faceted threat to the acquisition of knowledge. It is widely hoped that technological solutions—in the form of artificially intelligent systems for detecting deepfakes—will help to address this threat. I argue that the prospects for purely technological solutions to the problem of deepfakes are dim. Especially given the evolving nature of the threat, technological solutions cannot be expected to prevent deception at the hands of deepfakes, or to preserve the authority of video footage. Moreover, the success of such (...) technologies depends on institutional trust that is in short supply. Finally, outsourcing the discrimination between the real and the fake to automated, largely opaque systems runs the risk of undermining epistemic autonomy. (shrink)

Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image is of broad concern to historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations which no longer presuppose a fixed viewer, urban space becomes envisioned and planned through "fly throughs," and technologies such as GPS add data to the experience of travel, moving images have captured the attention of geographers and scholars across the humanities (...) and social sciences. Their practice of "mobility studies" is remaking how we understand a contemporary world in relentless motion. Media theorist and historian Anne Friedberg (1952-2009) was among the first practitioners of visual studies to theorize the experience of vision in motion. Although widely influential beyond her own discipline, Friedberg's work has never been the subject of an extended study. The Moving Eye: Film, Television, Architecture, Visual Art and the Modern gathers together essays by renowned thinkers in media studies, art history, architecture, and museum studies to consider the rich implications of her work for understanding film and video, new media, visual art, architecture, exhibition design, urban space, and virtual reality. Ranging from early cinema, to works by Le Corbusier, Sergei Eisenstein, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Pierre Huyghe, to theories of the image in motion informed by psychoanalysis, theories of the public sphere, and animal studies, each of the nine essays in the book advances the lines of inquiry commenced by Friedberg. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that knowledge of certain of one’s own mental states is authoritative in being epistemically more secure than knowledge of the mental states of others, and theories of self-knowledge have largely appealed to one or the other of two sources to explain this special epistemic status. The first, ‘detectivist’, position, appeals to an inner perception-like basis, whereas the second, ‘constitutivist’, one, appeals to the view that the special security awarded to certain self-knowledge is a conceptual matter. I (...) argue that there is a fundamental class of cases of authoritative self-knowledge, ones in which subjects are consciously thinking about their current, conscious intentional states, that is best accounted for in terms of a theory that is, broadly speaking, introspectionist and detectivist. The position developed has an intuitive plausibility that has inspired many who work in the Cartesian tradition, and the potential to yield a single treatment of the basis of authoritative self-knowledge for both intentional states and sensation states. (shrink)

Thomas Reid argued that the geometrical properties of visible figures equal the geometrical properties of their projections on the inside of a sphere centred around the eye. In recent scholarship there are only a few suggestions of which sources might have inspired Reid. I point to a widely ignored body of early eighteenth-century literature – introductions into projective geometry, the use of celestial globes and astronomy – in which the model of the eye in the centre of a sphere was (...) immensely popular. Moreover, I argue that Reid's account results naturally from some astronomical doctrines in conjunction with George Berkeley's theory of vision. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick was one of the great intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Britain. He was first and foremost a great moral philosopher, whose masterwork The Methods of Ethics is still widely studied today. He also wrote on economics, politics, education and literature. He was deeply involved in the founding of the first college for women at the University of Cambridge. He was also much concerned with the sexual politics of his close friend John Addington Symonds, a pioneer of gay studies. Through (...) his famous student, G. E. Moore, a direct line can be traced from Sidgwick and his circle to the Bloomsbury group. Bart Schultz has written a magisterial overview of this great Victorian sage. This biography will be eagerly sought out by readers interested in philosophy, Victorian literary studies, the history of ideas, the history of psychology and gender and gay studies. (shrink)

Backround Education in ethics and professionalism should reflect the realities medical students encounter in the hospital and clinic. Method We performed content analyses on Case Observation and Assessments (COAs) written by third-year medical students about ethical and professional issues encountered during their internal medicine and paediatrics clinical clerkships. Results A cohort of 141 third-year medical students wrote 272 COAs. Content analyses identified 35 subcategories of ethical and professional issues within 7 major domains: decisions regarding treatment (31.4%), communication (21.4%), professional duties (...) (18.4%), justice (9.8%), student-specific issues (5.4%), quality of care (3.8%), and miscellaneous (9.8%). Conclusions Students encountered a wide variety of ethical and professional issues that can be used to guide pre-clinical and clinical education. Comparison of our findings with results from similar studies suggests that the wording of an assignment (specifying “ethical” issues, “professional” issues, or both) may influence the kinds of issues students identify in their experience-based clinical narratives. (shrink)