As the first of its kind this collection draws together cutting edge scholarship in the field, focusing on the theory and practice of yoga in contemporary times ...

Feminist Buddhology is a burgeoning area of study, with many scholar-practitioners examining the interaction between Buddhism and feminist theory. Here I examine the contributions made by Buddhist Feminists and argue that, in general, Feminist Buddhology runs the serious risk of being ‘apologist’. I contrast the discrimination against women evident in Buddhist traditions with the claims of Buddhist Feminists that ‘Buddhism is feminism’ and ‘feminism is Buddhism’. In order to do so I provide a brief history or the position of women (...) in Buddhism, an overview of Feminist Buddhology and lastly the beginnings of an alternate perspective from which we may interweave Buddhism and feminism, without an underlying apologist perspective. (shrink)

These essays by Old Dominion University students deal with two questions: What impact do their own race, class, gender, and ethnic identities have upon them as students? How do their culture and the university culture interact to affect their ability to learn? The focus of these essays is on the overlap between the students’ identities as students and their identities based on gender, race, class, and ethnic origin. The project began as an assignment in a women’s studies class at Old (...) Dominion University in 1993, when students in a mixed graduate and undergraduate course were asked to write a brief analysis of themselves as students, accounting for the impact of gender, race, and social class on what they studied, what they heard in class, how they were treated in the classroom, how they treated others there, and what their level of comfort in the university was. Invited to add other variables, such as religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or disability— if they considered these significant to their identities as students—the students were urged to consider not only the disadvantages these various identities gave them but also the privileges and advantages. The resulting essays stimulated great interest in what students had to say and led to the formation of The Broad Minds Collective—made up of four students from the class as well as its instructor—which set about the task of soliciting and collecting additional essays. Although most essays contain overlapping themes, the editors detected four motifs that encompass virtually every essay included in the book. In the section "Cultural Perceptions and Assumptions," students show their awareness of how culturally defined categories affect education. Essays in "Belonging and Alienation in the Classroom" discuss the students’ level of comfort in the classroom and the degree to which they feel they belong at the university. The essays in "Making Sense of Our Lives Through Education" reveal the students’ use of education to learn more about the forces that shape them. "In Search of an Education" highlights students’ efforts to wrest what they feel they need from a college education. Rather than presenting a "multicultural educational theory" or conducting a sterile sociological study, The Broad Minds Collective has allowed students to speak for themselves.ion is replaced by stories of personal conflict, struggle, and victory. __. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Humanist History of Mathematics?Regiomontanus's Padua Oration in ContextJames Steven ByrneIn the spring of 1464, the German astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician Johannes Müller (1436–76), known as Regiomontanus (a Latinization of the name of his hometown, Königsberg in Franconia), offered a course of lectures on the Arabic astronomer al-Farghani at the University of Padua. The only one of these to survive is his inaugural oration on the history and utility (...) of the mathematical arts.1 Regiomontanus tells his audience that the purpose of the oration is torelate first the origin of our arts, and among which nations they first began to be cultivated, in what way they were at last translated from various foreign tongues into Latin, which of our ancestors were famed in these disciplines, and to whom in our lifetimes recognition should be granted.2To this end, he offers a history of the quadrivial arts (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) and other important mathematical disciplines from [End Page 41] antiquity to his own time, praises their utility, and exhorts his audience to revive the languishing study of mathematics at Padua. Astrology, a discipline with which Regiomontanus himself was closely associated, is singled out for particular praise.Traditionally, Regiomontanus's Padua oration has been seen through the lens of its rather obvious humanism. In particular, the Padua oration has come to be understood as the rhetorical embodiment of the fifteenth-and-sixteenth-century revival of ancient (Greek) mathematics. Just as this revival is inextricable from the rise of humanism, so Regiomontanus has come to be seen as an exemplar of humanist mathematics.3 It is the aim of this paper to examine the Padua oration in the context both of contemporary humanist rhetoric and of Regiomontanus's own intellectual background in order to argue that, while the oration is stylistically consistent with humanist norms, the vision of mathematics presented in it is also deeply grounded in the university mathematical curriculum and in Regiomontanus's own reading of mathematical texts.Regiomontanus was educated primarily at the University of Vienna (he was also briefly at the University of Leipzig), where he enrolled in 1450, completed his baccalaureate in 1452 and became a master in 1457.4 He remained at Vienna until 1461, when the death of his friend and teacher Georg Peurbach prompted him to travel to Italy with his patron, Cardinal Bessarion.5 In Regiomontanus's day Vienna was probably the most important of the German universities, rivaled only by Prague, whose prestige had declined after it was stripped of its theology faculty in the aftermath of the Hussite Wars.6 The curriculum at the University of Vienna was modeled [End Page 42] after that of Paris, and Parisian scholars played a major role both in its founding in 1365 and in its re-establishment (this time with a theology faculty) in 1384.7Most importantly for the purposes of this paper, the Viennese mathematical curriculum of Regiomontanus's day included all of the traditional authorities taught at Paris in the fourteenth century. For arithmetic and algebra, various "algorisms" (prose or poetry instructions for carrying out arithmetical operations that often also included a small amount of number theory) were the basic texts, supplemented in the fourteenth century by the Quadripartitum numerorum of Jean de Murs. Jordanus de Nemorare's De numeris datis and al-Khwarizmi's Algebra were common sources for those engaged in more advanced studies (i.e., they were not normally the subject of ordinary lectures, but were readily available to interested students, and would perhaps have been the subject of occasional extraordinary lectures). Euclid's Elements, supplemented by the commentaries of Pappus and Campanus, was the central text for geometry, and a number of medieval texts on practical and speculative geometry were in circulation as well. For astronomy, the Sphere of Sacrobosco and the Theorica planetarum were the most commonly used teaching texts, sometimes supplemented by al-Farghani's Elements of Astronomy (the subject of Regiomontanus's Padua lectures). Advanced students could read numerous more specific treatises by Arabic and Latin authors. For optics, the Perspectiva communis of John Peckham was the most common basic text, with texts... (shrink)

Of all the terms Jean Améry might have chosen to explain the deepest effects of torture, the one he selected was world. To be tortured was to lose trust in the world, to become incapable of feeling at home in the world. In July 1943, Améry was arrested by the Gestapo in Belgium and tortured by the SS at the former fortress of Breendonk. With the first blow from the torturers, he famously wrote, one loses trust in the world. (...) With that blow, one can no l onger be certain that “by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me — and more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being.” In a vault inside the fortress, beyond the reach of anyone who might help — a wife, a mother, a brother, a friend — it turned out that all social contracts had been broken and torture was possible. His attackers had no respect for him, and no-one else could or would help. (shrink)

This paper examines Angela Davis’s 1969 Lectures on Liberation and her critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s views regarding freedom and enslaved agency. Across four sections, the paper etches out Davis’s response to what she calls Sartre’s ‘notorious statement’ through her own existential reading of Frederick Douglass’s resistance to chattel slavery. Instead of interpreting Davis’s existential insights through the work of Sartre or other Western continental philosophers, the paper engages Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, Frank Kirkland, and LaRose Parris to develop an (...) alternative frame for assessing Davis’s existential thinking. Embracing a diverse lineage of existential philosophy, the paper argues for Black-centered approaches to existential philosophy that resonate with, but are not reducible or indebted to, European existentialism. (shrink)

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

To explore the neural mechanisms engaged by the perception of action with the intent to imitate, positron emission tomographic activation studies were performed in healthy human subjects. We discuss the results in light of the framework proposed by Byrne & Russon, especially the distinction between mechanisms subserving action-level and program-level imitation.

Johnson-Laird & Byrne (1991; 1993) present a theory of human deductive reasoning based on the notion of mental models. Unfortunately, the theory is incomplete. The present commentary argues that pragmatic considerations, particularly of the type discussed in Sperber and Wilson (1995), can complement the theory.

This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main flavours, metaphysical and epistemological.

L'espere humaine est conflictuelle et gregaire, menacee de toutes parts par la montee aux extremes de la violence. Aussi se trouve-t-elle confrontee a ce probleme urgent: comment vivre ensemble sans s'entre-tuer? Le politique est l'ordre humain en charge de ce probleme, et son objectif est la paix par la justice. Dans ce bref precis didactique, Jean Baechler prouve que le seul moyen d'eviter la guerre et de resoudre des problemes communs dans un monde dangereux et imprevisible est de s'efforcer (...) a l'union politique, meme si celle-ci est bien evidemment extremement difficile a realiser. (shrink)

According to a long interpretative tradition, Aristotle holds that the formal cause is the ultimate object of induction when investigating perceptible substances. For, the job of induction is to find the essential nature common to a set of individuals, and that nature is captured solely by their shared formal cause. Against this view, I argue that Aristotle understands perceptible individuals as irreducibly composite objects whose nature is constituted by both their formal and their material cause. As a result, when investigating (...) perceptible objects, the job of induction is to discover their composite, formal and material nature. The process by which universal claims about this composite nature are justified, I argue, is similar to what we now know as mathematical induction. In particular, such claims are grounded in a non-enumerative, but replicable process in which things are resolved into their simplest components. As a result, the observation of past uniformities has, at most, a heuristic function in scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Three arguments for the thesis that sex is socially constructed are examined and rejected. No such argument could succeed, because sex is not socially constructed.

The terminology surrounding the dispute between higher-order and first-order theories of consciousness is piled so high that it sometimes obscures the view. When the debris is cleared away, there is a real prospect.

Some things are _about_, or are _directed on_ , or _represent_, other things. For example, the sentence 'Cats are animals' is about cats (and about animals), this article is about intentionality, Emanuel Leutze's most famous painting is about Washington's crossing of the Delaware, lanterns hung in Boston's North Church were about the British, and a map of Boston is about Boston. In contrast, '#a$b', a blank slate, and the city of Boston are not about anything. Many mental states and events (...) also have "aboutness": the belief that cats are animals is about cats, as is the fear of cats, the desire to have many cats, and seeing that the cats are on the mat. Arguably some mental states and events are not about anything: sensations, like pains and itches, are often held to be examples. Actions can also be about other things: hunting for the cat is about the cat, although tripping over the cat is not. This -- rather vaguely characterized -- phenomenon of "aboutness" is called _intentionality_. Something that is about (directed on, represents) something else is said to "have intentionality", or (in the case of mental states) is said to be an "intentional mental state". (shrink)

One very popular framework in contemporary epistemology is Bayesian. The central epistemic state is subjective confidence, or credence. Traditional epistemic states like belief and knowledge tend to be sidelined, or even dispensed with entirely. Credences are often introduced as familiar mental states, merely in need of a special label for the purposes of epistemology. But whether they are implicitly recognized by the folk or posits of a sophisticated scientific psychology, they do not appear to fit well with perception, as is (...) often noted. -/- This paper investigates the tension between probabilistic cognition and non-probabilistic perception. The tension is real, and the solution—to adapt a phrase from Quine and Goodman—is to renounce credences altogether. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind have distinguished (and sometimes conflated) various qualities. This article tries to sort things out.

Millar has written a valuable monograph on perceptual knowledge. Knowing By Perceiving is careful and detailed, at times laborious, delivering many insights. Oc.

This text surveys the thesis that all religions are alike in referring and relating to a single, common transcendent and sacred reality. It treats this thesis as one in the philosophy of religion and systematically sets out its main philosophical strengths and weaknesses. The key to understanding and defending pluralism is argued to lie in a realist understanding of religion, which is defined by way of an account of the reference of names for sacred, transcendent reality.

argument fails, and the purpose of this note is to bring out that failure. The view in question which Heck calls the Hybrid Vie~istinguishes between the meanings of names and the contents of beliefs which are expressible using names. According to the Hybrid View the meaning of a name is its referent: names do not have senses. Thus (a) "George Orwell wrote 1984" means the same as (b) "Eric Blair wrote 1984". However, the Hybrid View tells a different story about (...) the beliefs one expresses when one utters (a) or (b). The content of a belief expressed using a sentence that contains a name has more to it than just the referent of the name and whatever properties the sentence ascribes to the name's referent. There is.. (shrink)

This comment mainly examines Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne’s preferred framework for examining whether narrow content is viable, arguing that their framework is not well-suited to the task; once a more traditional framework is adopted, Y&H’s case against internalism is strengthened.

This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I unpack Husserl’s analysis of interest from his 1893 manuscript, “Notes Towards a Theory of Attention and Interest” to demonstrate that it comprises his first rigorous genetic analysis of attention. Specifically, I explore Husserl’s observations about how attentive interest is passively guided by affections, moods, habits, and cognitive tensions. In doing so, I reveal that the early Husserl described attention as always pulled forward to new discoveries via the rhythmic recurrence of tension and pleasure. (...) Second, I demonstrate that “Notes” is the germ of Husserl’s mature genetic phenomenology of attention. The 1893 analysis provides Husserl with all of the philosophical reasons and tools for the construction of his genetic account of attention in his late works. I then discuss how the disclosure of this novel subterranean link can prompt a rethinking of the development of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this article I use Baudrillard’s claim that systems of exchange are ontologically and historically prior to systems of production, and Arendt’s understanding of birth as the arrival of something both quite familiar and quite new into the world as the starting-points for a theory of labour as relation. Such a theory has the virtue of avoiding the problem, found in Marx, Arendt and elsewhere, that labour is both a vital feature of being human and yet a drudgery that will (...) be absent from post-revolutionary society (in the case of Marx) or strictly relegated to the private realm (for Arendt). It also involves repositioning the work of social reproduction – of which women’s labour in giving birth is exemplary – as paradigmatic. (shrink)

In this edited volume, authors from multiple academic and creative disciplines interrogate constructionist and new materialist paradigms to assess their adequacy when analysing entanglements and weavings of gender and love in diverse contexts where discursive and material elements intra-act.

This study is an introduction to the problems of moral philosophy designed particularly for those interested in theology and religious studies. It offers an account of the nature and subject matter of moral reasoning and of the major types of moral theory in contemporary moral philosophy. The account aims to bring out the major issues in moral theory, to present a clear, non-technical articulation of the structure of moral knowledge, and to explore the relation between religious belief and morality.

This chapter considers Aristotle's requirements for perceptible objects qua movable, changeable, and perceptible, namely that they must be extended in three dimensions, movable in space, and capable of physical contact with other extended bodies.

Various claims have been made concerning the role of narrative in grief. In this paper, we emphasize the need for a discerning approach, which acknowledges that narratives of different kinds relate to grief in different ways. We focus specifically on the positive contributions that narrative can make to sustaining, restoring and revising a sense of who one is. We argue that, although it is right to suggest that narratives provide structure and coherence, they also play a complementary role in disrupting (...) established structure and opening up new possibilities. We add that both of these roles point to the importance of interpersonal, social and cultural factors in shaping the trajectory of grief. We conclude by briefly considering the implications for distinguishing between typical and pathological forms of grief. (shrink)

Comment on David Papineau's _The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience_.

‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘first­person authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and (...) confusions in Ashley’s paper. (shrink)

The human body has come to be seen as forever susceptible to both external and internal hazards, which in many circumstances require immediate, heroic, and expensive intervention. In response to this, there has been a shift from a treatment‐based healthcare model to one of prevention wherein nurses play an integral role by identifying and assessing risks for individuals, communities, and populations. This paper uses Deborah Lupton’s outline of the spectrum of risk and applies the theoretical works of Foucault and Plato (...) to demonstrate the means by which nurses maintain social order by identifying and counselling risk takers. It also utilizes the work of Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate how Plato’s framework for creating social order through the creation of the good citizen can be viewed as a micro‐fascist system, which has been adopted wholeheartedly by preventative health professionals. The goal of this paper is to present an alternate understanding of risk to provide nurses and other healthcare professionals with a non‐traditional appreciation of certain aspects of their practice as researchers and clinicians. (shrink)

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's (...) thinking advances and deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought. (shrink)

In this book it explores science and technology, makes connections between these epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity.

Dans les sociétés démocratiques contemporaines, les individus revendiquent le droit d'aimer librement. Ils sont attachés à la réussite de leur vie sentimentale et à l'épanouissement de leur sexualité. Mais le corps épris nous permet-il d'accéder à l'existence heureuse que nous désirons? Dans ce livre, Jean-Marie Frey met au jour les ressorts de l'inquiétude suscitée par l'amour charnel. Il montre comment la pudibonderie et le libertinage expriment, chacun à leur manière, une tentative pour se rassurer. Les prudes désireux de voiler (...) les femmes et les libertins exhibant un corps morcelé dans l'imagerie pornographique, n'éprouvent-ils pas les uns et les autres une crainte devant la chair désirable? L'auteur oppose les figures du pudibond et du libertin à celle d'un amant disposé à jouer le jeu d'une passion amoureuse à la fois inquiétante et joyeuse. (shrink)

Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has never (...) been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative. Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines. Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question “Who comes after the subject?” Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology. (shrink)

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

In this study on deduction, the authors argue that people reason by imagining the relevant state of affairs, ie building an internal model of it, formulating a tentative conclusion based on this model and then searching for alternative models.

A 62-year-old female with Huntington’s disease presented after a suicide attempt. Her advance directive stated that she did not want intubation or resuscitation, which her family acknowledged and supported. Despite these directives, she was resuscitated in the emergency department and continued to state that she would attempt suicide again. Her suicidality in the face of a chronic and advancing illness, and her prolonged consistency in her desire to take her own life, left careproviders wondering how to provide ethical, respectful care (...) to this patient. Tension between the ethical principles of autonomy and beneficence is central in this case. The patient’s narrative demonstrated that her suicide was an autonomous decision, free from coercion or disordered thinking from mental illness. Beneficence then would seem to necessitate care aligned with the patient’s desire to end her life, which created ethical uneasiness for her family and careproviders. The case highlights several end-of-life ethical considerations that have received much recent attention. With ongoing discussions about the legalization of aid in dying across the country, caregivers are challenged to understand what beneficence means in people with terminal illnesses who want a say in their death. This case also highlights the profound moral distress of families and careproviders that arises in such ethically challenging scenarios. (shrink)

In 2016, the Colorado legislature passed an amendment to Colorado’s medical proxy law that established a process for the appointment of a physician to act as proxy decision maker of last resort for an unrepresented patient (Colorado HB 16-1101: Medical Decisions For Unrepresented Patients). The legislative process brought together a diverse set of stakeholders, not all of whom supported the legislation. Following passage of the statutory amendment, the Colorado Collaborative for Unrepresented Patients (CCUP), a group of advocates responsible for initiating (...) the legislative process, coordinated a unique effort to engage these stakeholders in the creation of a set of voluntary guidelines to assist facilities and individual careproviders in the implementation of policies and procedures enabled by the statute. This article delineates the questions and concerns of stakeholders, describes how those issues were addressed within the guidelines, and proposes additional opportunities for research to assess the impact of the legislation in Colorado. (shrink)