In recent years feminist scholarship has increasingly focused on the importance of the body and its representations in virtually every social, cultural, and intellectual context. Many have argued that because women are more closely identified with their bodies, they have access to privileged and different kinds of knowledge than men. In this landmark new book, Paula Cooey offers a different perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice. Building on the (...) pathbreaking work of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, Cooey looks at a wide range of evidence, from the Argentine prison narrative of Alicia Partnoy, to the novels of Toni Morrison and the paintings of Frida Kahlo. Drawing on current social theory and critique, cognitive psychology, contemporary fiction and art, and women's accounts of religious experience, Cooey relates the reality of sentience to the social construction of reality. Beginning with an examination of the female body as a metaphor for alternative knowledge, she considers the significance of physical pain and pleasure to the religious imagination, and the relations between sentience, sensuality, and female subjectivity. Cooey succeeds in bringing forward a sophisticated new understanding of the religious importance of the body, at the same time laying the foundations of a feminist theory of religion. (shrink)

For the millions of people who struggle with food and body issues, yoga and its practice of mindfulness can offer a surprisingly effective path to well-being. For Melissa Grabau, a psychotherapist who has battled her own eating disorders since she was a child, yoga contains the key ingredients to transforming our connection to food and to our bodies. The Yoga of Food invites you to explore contemplation prompts and meditations that will help you create a deeper appreciation of the (...) body's health and vitality. Sharing lessons and stories she's cultivated from years of clinical practice, Melissa provides a roadmap toward a healthier approach to nutrition and the human spirit. (shrink)

A philosophical inquiry into politics, embodiment and religion takes us straight to some of contemporary culture's most notorious issues: suicide bombing, the veiled and the exposed body, and present-day biopolitics. Interpretations of the body have always been contested, both in the history of philosophy and in the history of religions. On the one hand, the body has been perceived as a prison, binding the soul to transience, darkness, and confusion. Yet on the other hand, it has itself (...) been controlled and disciplined by reason and will, law and culture. The ten contributors to The Body Unbound suggest that inquiries into the nature of human embodiment must take into account both context and history in order to scrutinize them and to uncover resources for unbinding a body which has been doubly bound. (shrink)

By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault's thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher's work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies (...) and how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious _rhetoric_ page after page—even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist. Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to frustrate academic expectations about history and theory, Mark Jordan gives equal weight to the performative and theatrical aspects of Foucault's writing or lecturing. How does Foucault stage possibilities of self-transformation? How are his books or lectures akin to the rituals and liturgies that he dissects in them? _Convulsing Bodies_ follows its own game of hide-and-seek with the agents of totalizing systems and gives us a Foucault who plays with his audiences as he plays for them—or teaches them. (shrink)

Resolving Dooyeweerd’s temporal/supratemporal dialectic opens the way to a deeper appreciation of naive experience and human identity as the image of God. This essay makes a case for that proposition, building on my critique of Dooyeweerd’s idea of cosmic time published previously in this journal. There I hypothesized that time—temporality—should be recognized as the first modal aspect rather than as a transaspectual common denominator of the other aspects. The religious root unity of the human community is (...) not a supratemporal, spiritual concentration point but rather humans themselves in their generations answering to God in all that they are and do. Humans are not temporal bodies directed by imperishable souls but whole persons-in-community, subject to all the modal laws and norms, living by faith in the true God or in false gods throughout this age, which opens to creation’s fulfillment in the age to come. (shrink)

For millennia, the basic idea that there is a universal order that connects human beings and the universe has lived on in many cultures. This order has often been expressed in geometric or musical-harmonic terms. From Pythagoras to Kepler, universal scholars were firmly convinced that this order represented the primordial code of all things. This chapter explores a new interdisciplinary perspective that combines the fields of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), music theory, and Keplerian astronomical insights. By means of corresponding (...) mathematical analyses, it is shown that the energy meridians of the human body correspond to a specific musical-harmonic order, which in turn is inextricably linked to certain relational aspects of the celestial bodies of our solar system. The study represents completely new discoveries in relation to this universal connection. In doing so, it also opens up new levels of understanding and provides new aspects for the further development of the concept of cosmic life. (shrink)

In cultural history the human body has been the object of a great variety of opposing valuations, ranging from "imago dei" to "the devil's tool". At present, the body is commonly regarded as a mere means to fulfill the wishes of its "owner". According to these wishes it can be technically improved in an unlimited way. Against this view the text argues for a conception of the human body as a valuable "common heritage". The "normal" (...) human body as the result of natural and cultural history is an essential condition of the modern social and legal order. The consequences of its technical alteration should be the subject of public debates and common decisions. (shrink)

He served as editor of The Theosophical Society's Theosophical Review, and later formed The Quest Society and edited its journal, The Quest Review.

On interprète assez souvent le succès actuel des médecines parallèles comme une réaction à une double insatisfaction que la médecine scientifique laisse au patient dans nos sociétés occidentales. D'une part, la difficulté d'être entendu comme sujet dans sa maladie, comme une personne globale affectée dans la totalité de son être, dans le sens qu'elle donne à sa vie, à ses relations, etc. Et d'autre part, la difficulté d'être appréhendé d'une manière unitaire par le médecin, corps et esprit réunis. Les différents (...) auteurs de cet ouvrage, qu'ils soient théologiens, philosophes, médecins ou historiens de la médecine, ont tous pris au sérieux ces appels à dépasser ce que l'on peut appeler les impasses de la biomédecine en proposant, selon différentes inspirations, une anthropologie renouvelée du corps humain. En particulier, s'il s'agit de faire droit aux convictions du patient et du professionnel de santé, à quelles conditions - épistémologiques mais aussi politiques - un dialogue entre l'Eglise et la science peut-il s'avérer légitime et fécond? Que peuvent nous apprendre les écrits hippocratiques et les textes bibliques pour construire une autre représentation du corps humain et de la maladie? Le modèle des soins palliatifs ne pourrait-il pas fournir à la biomédecine un nouveau paradigme de prise en charge du patient où celui-ci reste un sujet, capable de relation, une personne jusqu'au bout? (shrink)

English summary: Ideas of man and concepts of the body are closely linked, and are a key factor in defining anthropological theories and problems. In addition, they are closely connected to the social structure of each cultural region, which itself has a continuous influence on human actions and attitudes, but which at the same time is also the result of human actions and attitudes. Scholars from various disciplines used this as their basis to explore the subject in (...) their own cultural field, each of them taking the perspective of their own methodological approach. The studies incorporate both, text and image sources. It is the authors' common goal to provide a precise description of specific anthropological developments which are dependent on time and culture and to include a discussion of basic issues of the conditio humana. German description: Menschenbilder und Korperkonzepte gehoren eng zusammen und bestimmen massgeblich anthropologische Lehren und Fragestellungen. Sie sind zudem eng mit der Sozialstruktur des jeweiligen Kulturraums verflochten, wobei dieselbe zwar ununterbrochen konditionierenden Einfluss auf menschliche Handlungen und Haltungen hat, sie aber zugleich auch das Ergebnis menschlicher Handlungen und Haltungen ist. Auf diesen Grundlagen haben sich Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Disziplinen zusammengefunden, um aus der Perspektive ihres jeweiligen methodischen Ansatzes dem Thema in ihrem jeweiligen Kulturbereich nachzugehen. Dabei werden Textquellen ebenso in die Untersuchungen mit einbezogen wie Bildquellen. Gemeinsames Ziel ist, zeit- und kulturgebundene Spezialentwicklungen prazise zu profilieren und Grundfragen der conditio humana in den Blick zu nehmen. (shrink)

In March 2013, after reading articles about the questionable marketing styles of Victoria's Secret, targeted especially to younger demographics, Dolive penned an open letter calling for companies to not view girls as objects but as human beings. The letter came out of his desire to instill in his own daughter that love, care, and acceptance should not be based on articles of clothing. The letter was viewed nearly four million times (on his site alone) in about a week-and-a-half, and (...) dozens of other news organizations and publications picked up the story. Dolive was interviewed by national news publications and appeared on CNN and Headline News. The letter was a catalyst for conversations about body image, marketing, and how the church could affect change and confidence in people of all ages. Seeking Imperfection explores these false messages and takes a look at people from the Bible who, despite their flaws, were still able to serve God faithfully. (shrink)

Modern medicine has produced many wonderful technological breakthroughs that have extended the limits of the frail human body. However, much of the focus of this medical research has been on the physical, often reducing the human being to a biological machine to be examined, understood, and controlled. This book begins by asking whether the modern medical milieu has overly objectified the body, unwittingly or not, and whether current studies in bioethics are up to the task of (...) restoring a fuller understanding of the human person. In response, various authors here suggest that a more theological/religious approach would be helpful, or perhaps even necessary. Presenting specific perspectives from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the book is divided into three parts: "Understanding the Body," "Respecting the Body," and "The Body at the End of Life." A panel of expert contributors—including philosophers, physicians, and theologians and scholars of religion— answer key questions such as: What is the relationship between body and soul? What are our obligations toward human bodies? How should medicine respond to suffering and death? The resulting text is an interdisciplinary treatise on how medicine can best function in our societies. Offering a new way to approach the medical humanities, this book will be of keen interest to any scholars with an interest in contemporary religious perspectives on medicine and the body. (shrink)

As in religious traditions, the soul organizes entirely the human condition horizon; postmodern culture sets the body as the organizing centre of its sacralizing mechanisms. Some even speak about a cult and about ritual mechanisms having a religious charge. On the one hand, the body is attributed a symbolic dimension surfacing in the fight against the finite and life’s lack of meaning. On the other, turning the body into a centre of the existential universe (...) triggers a better delineation of the functions it may fulfill. An important role belongs to the networking function that crosses over the human inhabited worlds, from the physical one to the spiritual and religious one. To highlight these aspects, I called on the reflections in Aurel Codoban’s communication philosophy. The new view on corporality brings the image of body as language, as communication instrument and as significant surface. Against this background, the body sets a self-concern whose consequence, symbolically, is a dialectic movement of body and soul nourishing one other and improving one another in light of authenticity. (shrink)

Your soul is your connection to the richness and power of Universal Source. When body and soul are misaligned you can't be the divine human you are meant to be.

The story of the body. Fay Bound Alberti takes the human body apart in order to put it back anew, telling the cultural history of our key organs and systems from the inside out, from blood to guts, brains to sex organs.

Who or what determines the right to die? Do advancing reproductive technologies change reproductive rights? What forces influence cultural standards of beauty? How do discipline, punishment, and torture reflect our attitudes about the human body? In this challenging new book, Jean Bethke Elshtain, a nationally recognized scholar in political science and philosophy, and J. Timothy Cloyd, a strong new voice in social and political science, have assembled a collection of thought-provoking essays on these issues written by some of (...) the finest minds of our day. (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper I will explore the contribution of philosophical anthropology to music education research which, over recent years, has been showing an increasing interest in the human body. In order to do this I will especially be drawing on the ideas of one of its pioneers, Helmuth Plessner. Plessner’s philosophy should be understood as an effort to overcome the Cartesian dualism ‘mind/body’ and to highlight the unity of a human being and her/his relation to her/his (...) environment. With his central theory of “eccentric positionality,” Plessner draws on a human’s relation to her/his body because a human is able to acknowledge that “I am body” and “I have body” while at the same time being able to realize her/his own situation and reflect upon it. Plessner grounds his thinking about music on his phenomenological observation about sound. He remarks that sound, which can be at the same time far and near, has voluminosity, impulsivity, an undeviating relation to human expressivity, is organized in vertical and horizontal arrangement, and tends towards sequentially. Because of all this, sound is compliant with a human body. His philosophy and especially his writings about music and sound could be fruitful for music educational theory and praxis. Some crucial aspects of his theory are embodiment in music, the relation between the meaning of music and body movements, the relation between the conduct of music and conduct of a human and the formation of culture as an open process. In this theoretical terrain concrete proposals and more general suggestions for an efficient and successful music education practice can be located. (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

This paper briefly summarizes Durkheim’s theory of the dual nature of man suggested earlier in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It is characteristic of human beings that two opposite principles confront each other within them: soul and body, concept and sensation, moral activity and sensory appetites. Although this inherent inconsistency of man has been long recognized by philosophical thought, no doctrine explanation to it has been provided to date. While empiricist monism has proved to be unable (...) to explain how concepts emerge from sensations and disinterestedness develops from self-interest, absolute idealism, on the contrary, cannot deduce sensations from concepts. Although theories suggested by Plato and Kant do not bypass the problem of dualism, they only rephrase it and make no progress in solving it. According to Durkheim, dualism of human nature stems from the fact that all religions are founded on dividing all things into the sacred and the profane. This division, in turn, is explained by coexistence of collective and individual origins in the human being. Sacred things arise out of the collective origin that enables individual consciousnesses to fuse into communion. Collective origin does not act with constant strength, but intensifies during the periods of effervescence, when it subdues the individual origin. Since the importance of the social aspect of man increases over time, there is no reason to believe that complete consent between individual and society is possible that would endow man with internal harmony. (shrink)

How should the law deal with the challenges of advancing biotechnology? This book is a philosophical and legal re-analysis.

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches-somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny-may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours-evocative objects designed at once to to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, imaginative pages not only enables a (...) window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past, but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body. (shrink)

The trade in human body parts can be understood as a solution to key challenges for both buyers and suppliers, as well as being a manifestation of individual property rights over one’s own body. However, it can be argued that there are serious ethical issues involved in commercializing the body in this way, despite which there has recently been a large increase in the international trade in human body parts. The most extensive transactions have (...) concerned the trade in kidneys and the services of the fertility industry. An important driver of this is the fact that the medical profession is increasingly able to facilitate exchanges of human body parts relatively smoothly. The chapter focuses on commercial surrogacy as an example of the ethical aspects of the trade in human body parts and addresses the potential interplay between markets and ethical issues. (shrink)

A useful concept that can be invoked to resolve complex bioethical issues is that of moral status (or, human dignity). In this article, we apply this concept to dead human bodies in order to support our view that research on such bodies is permissible. Instead of drawing from salient Western theories of human dignity that account for it by appeals to autonomy or rationality, we will base our investigation on emerging conceptions in African theories of moral status (...) as articulated by Thaddeus Metz and Munamato Chemhuru. Our conclusion is that neither of these theories of moral status, one secular, and the other religious, can accommodate the intuition that we have direct duties of respect towards such bodies because, in relation to Metz's conception, they lack the capacity to enter into social relationships while on Chemhuru's conception, dead bodies appear not to have any meaningful purpose within the hierarchy that captures the ontological systems that determine such status. Consequently, we argue that our analysis provides support for the use of unclaimed cadavers in training and research in medical institutions. (shrink)

A useful concept that can be invoked to resolve complex bioethical issues is that of moral status (or, human dignity). In this article, we apply this concept to dead human bodies in order to support our view that research on such bodies is permissible. Instead of drawing from salient Western theories of human dignity that account for it by appeals to autonomy or rationality, we will base our investigation on emerging conceptions in African theories of moral status (...) as articulated by Thaddeus Metz and Munamato Chemhuru. Our conclusion is that neither of these theories of moral status, one secular, and the other religious, can accommodate the intuition that we have direct duties of respect towards such bodies because, in relation to Metz's conception, they lack the capacity to enter into social relationships while on Chemhuru's conception, dead bodies appear not to have any meaningful purpose within the hierarchy that captures the ontological systems that determine such status. Consequently, we argue that our analysis provides support for the use of unclaimed cadavers in training and research in medical institutions. (shrink)

A useful concept that can be invoked to resolve complex bioethical issues is that of moral status (or, human dignity). In this article, we apply this concept to dead human bodies in order to support our view that research on such bodies is permissible. Instead of drawing from salient Western theories of human dignity that account for it by appeals to autonomy or rationality, we will base our investigation on emerging conceptions in African theories of moral status (...) as articulated by Thaddeus Metz and Munamato Chemhuru. Our conclusion is that neither of these theories of moral status, one secular, and the other religious, can accommodate the intuition that we have direct duties of respect towards such bodies because, in relation to Metz's conception, they lack the capacity to enter into social relationships while on Chemhuru's conception, dead bodies appear not to have any meaningful purpose within the hierarchy that captures the ontological systems that determine such status. Consequently, we argue that our analysis provides support for the use of unclaimed cadavers in training and research in medical institutions. (shrink)

The idea of a market in human organs has traditionally met with widespread and emphatic rejection from both secular and religious fronts alike. However, as numerous human beings continue to suffer an uncertain fate on transplant waiting lists, voices are beginning to emerge that are willing at least to explore the option of human organ sales. Anyone who argues for such an option must contend, however, with what seem to be largely emotional rejections of the idea. (...) Often it seems that rebuffs offered on a secular ground are rooted in nothing more than vague discomforts. We suspect that these discomforts are often based in religious sentiments that have wound their way into the fabric of secular America. Therefore, in order to contribute further to those voices heard in favor of human organ sales, it is worthwhile to show that from a religious perspective, it is just as possible to affirm the appropriateness of human organ sales as it is from a secular basis. Since Protestantism has historically had a powerful influence in American society it is a proper starting point for such an investigation. (shrink)

Using human dead body for medical purposes is a common practice in medical schools and hospitals throughout the world. Iran, as an Islamic country is not an exception. According to the Islamic view, the body, like the soul, is a "gift" from God; therefore, human being does not possess absolute ownership on his or her body. But, the ownership of human beings on their bodies can be described as a kind of "stewardship". Accordingly, any (...) kind of dissection or mutilation of the corpse is forbidden, even with the informed consent of the dead or his/her relatives. The exception of this principle is when such procedures are necessary for saving lives of other persons. In this article using the human dead body for medical education, research and treatment is discussed and the perspective of Iranian Shiite religious scholars in this regard is explained. (shrink)

Based on the concept of community, Kant's conception of religion may be connected, on my view, to the question of which mental attitude is suitable for the collective life of human society. It is possible to imagine a successful community, even if such a community does not exist in the empirical world, and to be oriented toward this ideal without ever being able to realize it. According to Kant, human moral self-understanding is developed by human reason, and (...) this explains the structural similarity between the secular republic and the Kingdom of God under the specific conditions of the enlightened consciousness of a person who thinks for herself. Thus the anthropological "fact": the self-understanding of the human being characterised by his faculty of reason. (shrink)

Within the past twenty years, contemporary Pagan leaders, progressive Christian and Goddess theologians, advocates for queer and BDSM communities, and therapeutic bodyworkers have all begun to speak forcefully about the sacredness of the body and of touch. Many assert that the erotic is a divinely transformative force, both for personal development and for social change. Although "the erotic" includes sexuality, it is not limited to it; access to connected nonsexual touch is as profound a need as that for sexual (...) freedom and health. In this book, Christine Hoff Kraemer brings together an academic background in religious studies and theology with lived experience as a professional bodyworker and contemporary Pagan practitioner. Arguing that the erotic is a powerful moral force that can ground a system of ethics, Kraemer integrates approaches from queer theology, therapeutic bodywork, and sexual minority advocacy into a contemporary Pagan religious framework. Addressing itself to liberal religious people of many faiths, Eros and Touch from a Pagan Perspective approaches the right to pleasure as a social justice issue and proposes a sacramental practice of mindful, consensual touch. (shrink)

Religious Representation in Place brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the Humanities and Sciences to broaden the understanding of how religious symbols and spatial studies interact. The essays consider the relevance of religion in the experience of space, a fundamental dimension of culture and human life.

The evolutionary neurological foundations of religious experience are detailed. Human beings have been burying and preparing their dead for the Hereafter for more than 100,000 years. These behaviors and beliefs are related to activation of the amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal lobe, which are responsible for religious, spiritual, and mystical trancelike states, dreaming, astral projection, near‐death and out‐of‐body experiences, and the hallucination of ghosts, demons, angels, and gods. Abraham, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus Christ, and others who have (...) communed with angels or gods display limbic system hyperactivity, whereas patients report religious hallucinations or out‐of‐body experiences when limbic structures are stimulated or excessively activated. It is postulated that limbic and temporal lobe structures account for the sexual and violent aspects of religious behavior and also serve as a “transmitter to God,” and that the evolution of these structures made spiritual experience possible. (shrink)

Western culture has a few traditions of representing the human body – among them mortuary art (gisants), the freak show, the culture of the relics, renaissance art and pre-modern and modern anatomy. A historical analysis in the spirit of Norbert Elias is offered with regard to body – person relationship in anatomy. Modern anatomy is characterized by separating the story of the person from the story of the body, a strategy that is incompatible with the bio-psycho-social (...) paradigm of clinical medicine. The paper discusses different aspects of the above traditions and how they might bear on this conflict and on contemporary bioethics and bedside practice. (shrink)

The Soul is considered, both for religions and philosophy, to be the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being, conferring individuality and humanity, often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self. For most theologies, the Soul is further defined as that part of the individual, which partakes of divinity and transcends the body in different explanations. But, regardless of the philosophical background in which a specific theology gives the transcendence of the soul as the (...) source of its everlasting essence – often considered to survive the death of the body –, it is always appraised as a higher existence for which all should fight for. In this regard, all religious beliefs assert that there are many unseen battles aiming to take hold of the human soul, either between divinity and evil, or between worlds, or even between the body and the soul itself. These unseen battles over the human soul raging in the whole world made it the central item of the entire universe, both for the visible and the unseen worlds, an item of which whoever takes possession will also become the ruler of the universe. Through this philosophy, the value of the soul became abysmal, incommensurable, and without resemblance. The point for making such a broad overview of the soul in religious beliefs is the question of whether we can build an interfaith discourse based on the religions’ most debated and valuable issue, soul? Regardless of the variety of religious beliefs on what seems to be the soul, there is always a residual consideration in them that makes the soul more important than the body. This universal impression is due to another belief or instead need of believing that above and beyond this seen, palpable, finite life and the world should exist another one, infinite, transcendent, and available all the same after here. This variety stretches from the minimum impact that soul has on the body, as being the superior essence that inhabitants and enlivens the matter, to the highest impact in which soul has nothing to do with matter[1] and is only ephemeral linked to it, but its existence is not at all limited, defined or depended on the matter [2], or even placed to the extreme, as the very life of the matter thus this seen universe is merely a thought in the soul/mind [3]. In this extensive variety of soul overviews, the emphasis of the soul’s importance gives an inverse significance to the body/matter, from being everything that matters to a thin, dwindle item that has no existence at all outside consciousness. (shrink)

A general dearth of theoretical engagements with the embodied, historical, and especially the religious dimensions of disablement pervades the social sciences. Paradoxically, the religious heritage of the West is commonly identified as the implicit catalyst of many disabling attitudinal barriers impinging on impaired bodies. Addressing this inconsistency, this article extends dominant disability conceptualizations through combining embodiment theories and humanities perspectives. Ultimately the article seeks to demonstrate how interdisciplinary investigation can produce fresh insights into the relationships between attitudes towards (...) physical impairment and Christianized forms of Western sociality. First, the radicalization of the definition of disability in the field of disability studies is briefly discussed. Second, aspects of the sociology of the body are examined in order to illustrate how the concepts of ‘effervescent’ and ‘emergent’ embodiment, through highlighting the persistence of the sacred in ‘somatic society’, can assist in the formulation of an analytical framework, suitable for analysing the religio-cultural dimensions of impairment. Finally, the dynamism of Christian attitudes towards physical impairment is illustrated through a survey of historical and contemporaneous theological examples. The confluence of these fields, it is argued, enables the interconnected terrain between impairment, embodiment and the sacred to be mapped. (shrink)

Long description: Die Frage ”Wissen wir, was ein Körper vermag?“ ist für Spinozas Ethik zentral, weil sie die leibliche Fundierung geistiger Tätigkeiten in den Blick kommen lässt. Immer wieder fragt er seine philosophischen Gegner, wie sich die ”schlafwandlerische Kreativität“ der Natur verstehen lässt, kraft der sie komplexe Gebilde hervorbringt, ohne sich diese im Vorhinein mental vorgestellt zu haben. Der Band geht dieser Frage in drei Hinsichten nach: Wie kommt die nachtwandlerische Kraft der Natur in religiösen Diskursen zur Sprache? Wie zeigt (...) sie sich in Performance-Praxis und -Theorie? Welches Bild von Denken wird durch ein solches Denken der Körper generiert? Mit Beiträgen von Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Marcus Steinweg u.a. (shrink)

The next book by award-winning author Robert Atkinson on our evolutionary path to peace.

In this paper, we aim at rethinking the concept of obesity in a way that better captures the connection between underlying medical aspects, on the one hand, and an individual’s developmental history, on the other. Our proposal rests on the idea that obesity is not to be understood as a phenotypic trait or character; rather, obesity represents one of the many possible states of a more complex phenotypic trait that we call ‘energy metabolism.’ We argue that this apparently simple (...) conceptual shift can help solve important theoretical misconceptions regarding the genetics, epigenetics, and development of obesity. In addition, we show that our proposal can be fruitfully paired with the concept of developmental channeling of a trait, which connects to the study of the plasticity and canalization of complex traits. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of our approach on the assessment, treatment, and social narratives of obesity. (shrink)

Since the very dawn of its history, modern philosophical anthropology has been addressing the issue of the human body. As a result of those efforts, Descartes, de Biran, Husserl, Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty and others have brought forward a variety of conceptions concerning various aspects of human corporeality. Anthropological explorations concerning the question of the human body, appear in a particularly interesting way, when they are considered in the context of those points of view which, (...) in an essential way, refer to the subjective character of the human being. It is a matter of reconstructing and analyzing how the subject's corporeality is given to the subject, originarily, according to the phenomenological rule zu den Sachen selbst. The aim of this paper is thus to put into some order the concerns of a variety of anthropologists with regard to the question of the human body, as it is given to, or experienced by, the subject. A metatheoretical analysis of this field proves it is possible to do so with the use of a tool, which is called here, a dimension of corporeality. (shrink)

Since the very dawn of its history, modern philosophical anthropology has been addressing the issue of the human body. As a result of those efforts, Descartes, de Biran, Husserl, Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty and others have brought forward a variety of conceptions concerning various aspects of human corporeality. Anthropological explorations concerning the question of the human body, appear in a particularly interesting way, when they are considered in the context of those points of view which, (...) in an essential way, refer to the subjective character of the human being. It is a matter of reconstructing and analyzing how the subject's corporeality is given to the subject, originarily, according to the phenomenological rule zu den Sachen selbst. The aim of this paper is thus to put into some order the concerns of a variety of anthropologists with regard to the question of the human body, as it is given to, or experienced by, the subject. A metatheoretical analysis of this field proves it is possible to do so with the use of a tool, which is called here, a dimension of corporeality. (shrink)

With the appearance of mankind, the history of mankind's understanding of the human body itself also began. This long process of development rang with the struggle of two world views. The history of the development of man's understanding of the structure and functions of the human body is the history of the unbroken triumph of materialism over idealism, of the dialectical over the metaphysical. This essay simply takes a preliminary look back at this struggle from several (...) aspects in the hope that it might be of use in promoting a deeper and more systematic study of the question. (shrink)

In this article, the author represents the aspect of philosophical and religious doctrine of Czeslaw Stanislaw Bartnik, a Polish personalist, which deals with the way the philosopher understands freedom as a structural component of a personality that enables a man to realize his inner and outer potential in both individual and social planes, in all dimensions of human existence: soul, body, intellect, will, actions, perception and creation of existence. Interrelation and interdependence between freedom and responsibility of a (...) personality, as well as between freedom and will of a person, are the issues of principle for a Catholic thinker. As interpreted by Bartnik, responsibility is a measure of freedom, because of direct relationship between them: the more freedom a person possesses, the greater responsibility it takes to implement and use it. The relationship between freedom and will explains the dialectic character of structure of a personality. Freedom of a man is manifested through auto- determination, which means the ability of will to make free choices, and ultimately the will determines itself, being evaluated by practical mind. Freedom in personal existence concerns personality as a whole, but not the will or actions taken separately. That is why, Bartnik believes, it is better to speak about personal freedom and free existence of a personality. Choice -making proves freedom of a man, but when choosing an option, a person chooses himself, thus creating his own spiritual image. Existence consists of possibilities to choose from and means the core and backbone structure of a personality in the dynamic process of self-realization. (shrink)