This manuscript reports on a landmark symposium on the ethical, legal and technical challenges of xenotransplantation in the UK. King’s College London, with endorsement from the British Transplantation Society (BTS), and the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT), brought together a group of experts in xenotransplantation science, ethics and law to discuss the ethical, regulatory and technical challenges surrounding translating xenotransplantation into the clinical setting. The symposium was the first of its kind in the UK for 20 years. This paper (...) summarises the content of the expert lectures showcasing the progress which has been made in xenotransplantation including—the history of xenotransplantation, advances in gene edited animals and progress towards clinical xenotransplantation. We then set out the ethical and legal issues still to be resolved. Finally, we report the themes of the roundtable discussion highlighting areas of consensus and controversy. While the detail of the legal discussion was directed towards the UK, the principles and summary reported here are intended to be applicable to any jurisdiction seeking to implement clinical xenotransplantation. (shrink)

"The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind--not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but the new unconscious, a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now Dr. Bargh presents an engaging and enlightening tour of the influential psychological forces that are (...) at work as we go about our daily lives--checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee, or getting a flu shot. Dr. Bargh takes you into his labs at New York University and Yale where his ingenious experiments have shown how the unconscious guides our actions, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. He reveals the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind on who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as tricks to help you remember to-do items, shop smarter, and sleep better. Before You Know It will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving."--Jacket. (shrink)

Those daunted by the massive theology of the classic modern treatment of the problem of evil, John Hick's Evil and the God of Love, will find here a compelling alternative. With a wealth of vivid imagery, and illustrations from experience and literature, as well as theology and history, John Cowburn explores the problems caused by the existence of pain, suffering and evil and suggests how they may be understood and countered. Crucial to his argument is a distinction between (...) evils which are to be found in a growing and developing world where himan beings have been given freedom, the shadows, and the inexplicable existence of moral evil, the dark: 'The dark mystery of moral evil is in itself pure unintelligiblity, and does not surpass our minds but is opposed to reason as such, and God understands it even less than we do.'. (shrink)

For three days in April, 2005, I was a speaker and panelist at the NASA-sponsored “Physics for the rd Millennium II Conference” in Huntsville, Alabama, where twelve of us, including two Nobel Laureates, were invited to give 50-minute lectures about cutting-edge physics to an audience of NASA engineers, teachers, students, parents, and other interested attendees. In this column, I want to tell you about the work described in one of the talks, given by Dr. George Chapline of the Lawrence Livermore (...) Laboratory. (shrink)

The mass-to-volume ratio of the universe is of cosmic importance. It determines whether the universe will expand (as it is presently doing) forever or whether it will eventually recontract to a Big Gnab (the time-reverse of the Big Bang). The Big Bang is somewhat like a cannonball fired from a large Jules-Vern-style cannon on the surface of an airless planet. There is a "magic" cannonball speed called the escape velocity which measures whether its velocity "bank balance" exceeds the gravitational "debt" (...) which must be paid to escape the planet's gravity well. If the cannonball leaves the cannon barrel with a speed greater than escape velocity it will escape the planet's pull; with less than escape velocity it will fall back; with exactly escape velocity it will move ever more slowly away from the planet, requiring an infinite time to escape completely. (shrink)

This column is a milestone. In 1983, while I was on a one year sabbatical at the Hahn Meitner Institute for Nuclear Physics in what was then West Berlin, I received a letter from Stan Schmidt informing me that Jerry Pournelle had decided that he no longer wished to be an Alternate View columnist for Analog and asking if I was interested in taking over as the AV columnist and “alternating” with G. Harry Stine.

Cosmology, the study of the universe, has a past, which is reviewed here. The standard model—the Big Bang, or the hot, dense early universe that is still expanding—is based on observations that are basically consistent but which require additional input to improve the agreement. Out of the early universe came the galaxies and stars that shine today. The future of the universe depends on the density of matter: too much mass leads to the Big Crunch; too little leads to eternal (...) expans ion and cooling. The dark‐matter problem prevents us from knowing which will be the fate of the universe. Thelimits of what may be called “scientific” are addressed. (shrink)

Alternate View Column AV-91 Keywords: dark matter WIMPs weakly interacting massive particles detection DNA eV energy deposition Published in the September-1998 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine ; This column was written and submitted 02/20/98 and is copyrighted ©1998 by John G. Cramer. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the author.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Revolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South American Lectures by John Howard Yoder, and: John Howard Yoder: Spiritual Writings by John Howard YoderJohn C. ShelleyRevolutionary Christianity: The 1966 South American Lectures John Howard Yoder. Edited by Paul Martens, Mark Thiessen Nation, Matthew Porter, and Myles Werntz eugene, or: cascade books, 2011. 193 pp. $18.00John Howard Yoder: Spiritual Writings John Howard Yoder. Selected with an Introduction (...) by Paul Martens and Jenny Howell. Modern Spiritual Masters Series maryknoll, ny: orbis, 2011. 172 pp. $20.00For more than sixteen years after his death in late 1997, John Howard Yoder has provoked, challenged, and inspired a new generation of theologians, ethicists, and pastors—including the editors of these two volumes—many of whom never met Yoder nor heard him speak. Now, just as this new generation prepares to preserve and enlarge his legacy, a series of revelations detailing Yoder’s repugnant behavior against women and against administrators of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) in Elkhart, Indiana, compromises that legacy. It has been widely known that in 1992, after some initial resistance, Yoder submitted to a disciplining process initiated by his home congregation for inappropriate advances to women and that he had been reconciled and reunited in worship shortly before his death.1 The new allegations, which have become broadly public only since 2013, are considerably more serious and include coercive—indeed, “violent”—advances toward a number of women over three decades, including many students and others in subordinate positions. Further, Yoder abused the power of his reputation by intimidating the president and other administrators of AMBS, compelling them to keep the matter quiet as he slipped away to a more prestigious appointment at Notre Dame in 1984.2 According to some witnesses, this inappropriate behavior continued at Notre Dame. [End Page 210]These revelations have complicated the process of writing even a simple review.3 Were Yoder an astrophysicist with groundbreaking discoveries regarding dark matter, we would be disappointed with his behavior, but we would not challenge on those grounds the veracity of his discovery. With Christian ethics, the issue is more complicated, especially for someone of Yoder’s stature whose persona suggested that he was committed to and embodied, however imperfectly, what he proclaimed. Reading these volumes a second time has brought several jarring moments. For example, in both volumes, Yoder defines in almost identical language the temptation of “egocentric altruism”:The real temptation of good people like us is not the crude, the crass, and the carnal as those traits are defined in Puritanism. The real refined temptation, with which Jesus himself was tried, was that of egocentric altruism, of being oneself the incarnation of a good and righteous cause for which others are to suffer, of stating our self-justification in the form of a duty to others.(Revolutionary Christianity, 83; Essential Writings, 144)Consider also the following statement on religious liberty, which is certainly prescient in view of the current conflicts being played out in the courts: “Religious liberty is not only a necessary limitation upon the power of the state; it also marks a voluntary renunciation by the church of any capacity to coerce” (Revolutionary Christianity, 11). At the very least, then, perhaps we should read Yoder’s misdeeds as a warning: even we may be tempted by the crude and the carnal as well as by egocentric altruism; when threatened, even we may resort to coercion.The fourteen lectures in Revolutionary Christianity, published here for the first time, are organized into three sections—“The Believers Church,” “Peace,” and “Church in a Revolutionary World”—roughly the order of presentation to predominantly Mennonite and Anabaptist groups in Montevideo and Buenos Aires in May–June 1966. Written and delivered when Yoder was only thirty-eight and not yet a full-time faculty member, it is remarkable how fully they anticipate his later work. Clearly he mined them for later writings. The four lectures titled “The Believers Church” may be the best theological introduction available to the Anabaptist/Mennonite tradition. Yoder’s description of the church as a community of forgiveness, discernment, grace; of the mandate to share; and of a morality of participation and community... (shrink)

A number of contemporary philosophers endorse a Pyrrhonian theme: that one has knowledge only if one knows or understands that one’s beliefs are reliably formed. Otherwise, one is like a man who grasps gold in the dark: such a man is successful, but his success is a matter of luck, and so not creditable to him. It is argued that the skeptical problem and the problem of moral luck share a common structure and a common solution. Specifically, a virtue-theoretic (...) approach helps us to understand important relations among luck, success and credit for success. It is argued that knowledge is an instance of success through virtue, and that, in general, success through virtue is creditable to the virtuous agent. (shrink)

"College" is a word that means many things to many people: a space for knowledge, a place to gain lifelong friends, and an opportunity to transcend one's socioeconomic station. Today, though, this word also recalls a slew of headlines that have revealed a dark and persistent world of racial politics on campus. Does this association disturb our idealized visions of what happens behind the ivied walls of higher learning? It should - because campus racism on college campuses is as (...) American as college football on Fall Saturdays. From Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine and the leading expert on sororities and fraternities, Blackballed is an explosive and controversial book that rips the veil off America's hidden secret: America's colleges have fostered a racist environment that makes them a hostile space for African American students. Blackballed exposes the white fraternity and sorority system, with traditions of racist parties, songs, and assaults on black students; and the universities themselves, who name campus buildings after racist men and women. It also takes a deep dive into anti-affirmative action policies, and how they effectively segregate predominately white universities, providing ample room for white privilege. A bold mix of history and the current climate, Blackballed is a call to action for universities to make radical changes to their policies and standards to foster a better legacy for all students"--. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Metaphor and analogy are the scaffolding of science. Kepler's theory of the retinal picture could not have been built without the analogy between an eye and a camera obscura, and, two hundred and fifty years later, Charles Darwin devoted most of the first chapter of The origin of Species to discussion of pigeon fanciers. Unlike Darwin, Kepler was bewitched by his own imagination and was led to wonder "how (...) this image or picture is joined to the visual faculty, which is situated in the retina and in the nerve, and whether it is placed within the hollows of the brain, before the soul or tribunal of the visual faculty, or whether the visual faculty, like a magistrate sent by the soul from the administrative chamber of the brain, descends into the optic nerve or retina to meet this image, as though to a lower court" . ;The theory of the retinal image answered the crucial question of medieval optics: the scaffolding had served its purpose and should have been dismantled. Instead, Kepler mistook it for a part of the building: what he construed as a scientific problem was nothing more than the extension of a metaphor. As a result, and in spite of his remarkable achievement, he left the theory of vision in a state of confusion. ;I intend to show that Descartes revolutionized visual theory by manipulating the pair of analogies which had dominated visual theory since its inception and by advancing a theory of depiction which has since become orthodox. Advocates of the first analogy suggest that seeing the world is rather like seeing pictures of it; Kepler's analogy between the eye and a camera obscura, which was anticipated by Leonardo de Vinci, was a variation on this theme. Advocates of the second analogy compare vision to the use of a walking-stick: the air transmits an impression of a visible object to the eye rather as a walking-stick enables us to find our way around in the dark by transmitting pressures to the hand. As I shall show, Descartes' rejection of the pictorial analogy in favour of the walking-stick analogy and his theory of depiction were designed to salvage Kepler's theory of the retinal picture, a pearl of great price, from its murky setting. ;Descartes aimed to show that whilst Kepler's theory of the retinal picture correctly described the optics of the eye, the pictorial analogy was misleading and stood in the way of a mechanistic theory of perception. ;Current visual theory is Cartesian in some respects and un-Cartesian in others. The walking-stick analogy is no longer used, but the explanatory pattern that it served to illustrate is adhered to closely where the perception of brightness and colour are concerned, and the causal theory of depiction commands widespread support. At the same time, the pictorial analogy has not lost its appeal. (shrink)

Liberalism in Dark Times claims to have two aims, to reconstruct a particular form of liberalism that developed in the interwar years and to save it from neglect because it can serve us well in con...

Utilitarian (U.) theories must be capable of being applied in practical reasoning, or they would have no value as a guide to rational conduct. However, I show that epistemic extensions to U. theories produce logical confusion. Basic questions about what one needs to know in order to apply a U. analysis embroil one in an infinite regress. And attempts to incrementally apply U. either are no help at all (leaving one entirely 'in the dark'), or in general constitute arbitrary (...) gambles which no practical reasoner could defend taking. These problems are serious enough to completely discredit U. theories as having any relevance to practical reasoning. (shrink)

This article compares seven novels published from 1932 to 1980 which are set in drug dystopias in order to answer two questions. What are the effects and symbolic meanings of the fictional drugs they describe? Why are there so few examples of this subgenre? Today, their warnings about the reduction of populations to docility or of assaults on the integrity of individual minds seem overwrought, and the apparent passing of the subgenre need not be mourned. Two of the seven novels, (...) however, Brave New World and A Scanner Darkly, continue to be read because they warn against more subtle forms of tyranny. (shrink)

Learning and memory are inextricably intertwined. The capacity for learning presupposes an ability to retain the knowledge acquired through experience, while memory stores the background knowledge against which new learning takes place. During the dark years of radical behaviorism, when the concept of memory was deemed too mentalistic to be a proper subject of scientific study, research on human memory took the form of research on verbal learning (Anderson, 2000; Schwartz & Reisberg, 1991).

Contents: John BURNHEIM: Introduction. Mihály VAJDA: A Lover of Philosophy - A Lover of Europe. Phillippe DESPOIX: On the Possibility of a Philosophy of Values. A Dialogue within the Budapest School. Martin JAY: Women in Dark Times: Agnes Heller and Hannah Arendt. Johann P. ARNASON: The Human Condition and the Modern Predicament. Richard J. BERNSTEIN: Agnes Heller: Philosophy, Rational Utopia and Praxis. Zygmunt BAUMAN: Narrating Modernity. Peter BEILHARZ: Theories of History - Agnes Heller and R.G. Collingwood. Richard WOLIN: (...) Heller's Theory of Everyday Life. Paul HARRISON: Radical Philosophy and the Theory of Modernity. Arthur J. JACOBSON: The Limits of Formal Justice. Peter MURPHY: Civility and Radicalism. Peter MURPHY: Pluralism and Politics. Victoria CAMPS: The Good Life: A Moral Gesture. Laura BOELLA: Philosophy Beyond and the Baseless and Tragic Character of Action. György MÁRKUS: The Politics of Morals. Agnes HELLER: A Reply to My Critics. The Bibliography of Agnes Heller. (shrink)

In a number of recent films, Scotland has served as the setting for dramas that could have taken place anywhere. This has occurred in two related ways: First, there are films such as Perfect Sense (2011) and Under the Skin (2013). These films involve storylines that, while they do take place in Scotland, do not require the country as a setting. Second, there are films such as Prometheus (2012),The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Cloud Atlas (2012), and World War Z (...) (2013). These films, while being filmed (at least partly) in Scotland, have plots that do not involve Scotland. Scottish locations, in this second group of movies, act as stand- ins for locations in other cities, or even other worlds. -/- This phenomenon, in which the uniqueness of Scottish locations is deemphasized so that they may act as mere backdrops for the primary action in films, is a relatively new one. It is in sharp contrast to another, more traditional tendency in movie making in which Scottish locations are foregrounded to dramatize myths and stereotypes uniquely Scottish; such as Kailyard, Tartantry or Clydesideism. In this paper I pursue an analysis, drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, that characterizes this trend as part of a new Scottish myth in the making: the myth of Scotland as nowhere in particular. -/- The myth of Scotland as nowhere in particular takes the countryside and cities of Scotland as raw material for the telling of stories having transcultural interest. In this, Scotland becomes a space or clearing with no particular defining characteristics of its own to distract from the dramas themselves. This allows for the unfolding of narratives that, while they use Scotland as a setting, have little if anything to do with Scotland, and thus appeal to anyone, anywhere. (shrink)

The dominant current in the contemporary environmental movement fails to make the connection between the preservation of the environment and the survival of humans. The fashionable concept of the “Anthropocene” is not fully adequate to get to grips with the full gravity of the situation. Contemporary human society, based on a neo-liberal market economy, is “locked in” to a productivist mode of existence, so that it will be extremely difficult to abandon the goal of “growth” and to achieve a sustainable (...) relationship with the eco-system on which human existence depends. The “TAC” thesis, that “Technology is Anthropologically Constitutive,” has a dark side: technology may be anthropologically destructive. (shrink)

"In the 25 essays that comprise this grimly fascinating volume, Reed shines a light into some very dark corners. From its opening tale of South African baboons with a taste for human babies to a thoroughly icky account of a middle-aged woman's seduction of young boys, these are literary snapshots of the world at its worst."--Amazon.com.

Introduction -- Navigating the neosurreal : background and premises -- Neosurrealist tendencies in recent films -- Neosurrealist metamusicals, flow and camp aesthetics -- In tandem with the random : loose synchronisation and remediation in Philip Glass's -- La Belle et la Bête and The dark side of Oz -- The surrealism of the virtual band in the digital age : Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" and "Feel good inc." -- Back to the garden? Performing the disaffected acoustic imaginary in the digital (...) age -- Concluding thoughts : all that is solid melts into air? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 139-140 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dimensionen Der Leere: Gottals Nichts Und Nichts Als Gott Im Christlich-Buddistischen Dialog Dimensionen Der Leere: Gottals Nichts Und Nichts Als Gott Im Christlich-Buddistischen Dialog. By Armin Münch. Münster, Hamburg, London: LIT-Verlag, 1998. 337 pp. This is a most unusual study, pieced together out of hidden facets and neglected aspects of Buddhist and Christian studies and containing an unrivaled (...) overview of the literature. If modernWestern theology, taking its cue from Heidegger, has emphasized the temporality of existence, Münch draws our attention to its "spatiality" in what he calls "dimensional thinking." He is able to point to an astonishing number of thinkers from a variety of disciplines who have taken as their starting point our need to orient ourselves in space. In this light, the kenôsis.assage Philippians 2:5-11 is seen to be patterned on a U-shaped movement linking the dimensions "above" and "below" as distinct from S- and O-shaped movements found elsewhere in the mystical tradition.Münch goesonto establish left/right, behind/before, inside/outside, coming to be/passing away as what he calls "immanentals" (12-13) analogous to the "transcendentals" of scholastic theology. In particular, he seeks out thinkers who have tried to formulate the "fourth dimension," which would take us beyond conventional space-time. Plotinus, Eckhart, and the Kabbala are all examined for their attempts to conceptualize the transcendent in this way.What is the purpose of this exercise? Münch's leading question, to which he eventually returns, is clear: "What is lacking in our idea of God if we are ignorant of Buddhist experience?" (5). His purpose is to evaluate the relative significance of kenôsis ("he emptied himself") and tapeinosis."he humbled himself") in Philippians 2. This becomes apparent when he comes to the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School--Nishida, Nishitani, and Abe--and the debate between Takizawa and Yagi. Here Münch finds evidence of a "backwards-directed," or "dorsal," theology that corresponds to a rearwards movement in Buddhist thinking (264). This interesting hypothesis would need further verification by consulting the textual and extratextual traditions that shaped Japanese Buddhism in the context of their Indian and Chinese origins. In criticizing the work of Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Münch suggests that for Buddhists the balance between the experiences of relationship and transitoriness is not so much a matter of different directions or perspectives of transcendence as a leaving behind of all perspectivity (130-133). The search for salvation is orientated rearward in the Buddhist case, forward in the Christian, but these can be seen as complementary directions on the one road.Münch is able to agree with Ueda that Buddhist "nothingness" is best understood as a "desubstantializing dynamic" (283-284). Shûnyatâ.s the "fullness of nothingness" corresponds to the Christian concept of God. Christ is said to have "gone outside himself" rather than to have "emptied himself out" ["Christus entäusserte sich, aber er entleerte sich nicht!"(287)], to have undergone a metamorphosis. In Münch's view, only trinitarian language can encompass all the dimensions, from zero to the [End Page 139] elusive fourth, which are necessary to express what we mean by God in Buddhist terms (305-306).One of the most original things Münch does is to draw a parallel between the Zen ox-herding pictures and the Christian story. This serves to draw together pictorially, if not conceptually, the sometimes arcane researches that go to make up Münch's mosaic. It is perhaps because spatially dimensional thinking has been so rare in Western science, philosophy, and theology that he must search in such dark corners for evidence of it. The result is an at times bewildering patchwork of apparently unrelated contributions that do not blend smoothly into a unity. This sometimes puzzling heterogeneity is justified, in my view, in that it presents us with a highly diversified tool kit for getting to work on the potential offered... (shrink)

The enduring popularity of Star Wars has much to do with its mythic dimensions. However, there are problems with Joseph Campbell's work on myth and George Lucas's use of Campbell's ideas in Star Wars. Both Campbell and Lucas promote a simplistic view that encourages fans to avoid some darker, more unsettling ideas in Star Wars, which may obscure myth's true power. Campbell remains one of the most famous mythologists, but he was by no means the first. Campbell's influence on Star (...) Wars seems obvious, but the details are difficult to determine, partly because Lucas himself gives different accounts of it. Campbell's monomyth leads us to see similarities between tales and, in so doing, overlooks many significant differences. Tensions between mythos and logos date back to ancient Greek philosophers, if not earlier. The mythic structure of Star Wars has immense hidden power, and this power has a dark side. (shrink)

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is (...) defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason. (shrink)

Comparing the Bhagavad Gītā and the Buddhist essay “Prajñā is Not-knowing” (Panruo Wuzhi 般若無知) yields interesting insights. The texts have similar dialogical structures and discuss complex philosophical matters. Rhetorically, both texts weave together quotations and allusions from other texts, make liberal use of paradox, and have decidedly spiritual intentions. Their differences, though, remain striking. They emerge from distinct circumstances and their original languages (Sanskrit, Chinese) differ markedly. Stylistically, “Prajñā” is more intellectual and less devotional, espousing a distinctly “this worldly” ideal; (...) by contrast, the Gītā is more dramatic. While espousing “this worldly” ideals, the Gītā is more inclusive and thus more accessible to a broad audience; on the contrary, “Prajñā” has a subtler effect, its “dark” qualities appealing to a more select group. Therefore, while these texts are not “the same,” reading across their convergences and divergences can lead to a deeper understanding of mysticism and cross-cultural spirituality. (shrink)

Exploring reflection -- Writing self : the 1st dialogical movement -- Surfing the reflective spiral : the 2nd dialogical movement -- Framing insights -- The dance with Sophia : the 3rd dialogical movement -- Guiding reflection : the 4th dialogical movement -- Weaving narrative and performance : the 5th & 6th dialogical movements -- The reflective curriculum -- Reflections on touch and the environment -- Reflections on caring -- Life begins at 40 -- Balancing the wind or a lot of (...) hot air -- A reflective model of clinical practice -- Reflective leadership -- Teetering on the edge of chaos -- Ensuring quality (clinical standards and clinical audit) -- Clinical supervision -- Tales of clinical supervision -- Therapeutic journaling with patients -- The bully and the sheep : storyboard -- Reflective prose poems -- Through a glass darkly : the performance turn. (shrink)

How should Christians interact with historical violence in their own tradition? Faced with a barrage of arguments from the ‘New Atheists’ that this killing invalidates biblical truth claims, Christians might be tempted to ignore or excuse these darker episodes. This article argues that they should be willing to confess the failings of the past, place the violent acts in a careful reading of their historical context and re-examine these acts in light of scripture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like (...) that," he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OwlJohn HollanderOwlNow that the owl-light—in the time between Dog and wolf, as some call it—ends, we wait As you alight on an unseen Branch to interrogateThe listener and the rememberer; Lost outlines heighten—as last colors fade— The sounder darkness you confer Upon the spruce’s shade.Deluded by the noonlight’s wide display Of everything, our vision floats through thin Spaces of ill-illumined day: How we are taken inBy what we take (...) in with our roving eyes! Your constant ones, if moved to track or trace, Take their head with them, lantern-wise Taking heed, keeping faceIn the society of night, and keeping Faith with the spirit of pure fixity That sets the mind’s great heart to leaping At what you more than see. [End Page 163]Medusa’s visage gazed our bodies to Literal stone unshaded: your face, caught In our glance widely eyes us through, Astonishing our thought. You who debated with the nightingale The rectitude of northern wisdom, cold Against the love-stuff of the tale The laid-back south had told; And yet who stood amid the lovely, thick Leaves of the ivy, while in all their folly The larks and thrushes sought the prick And berries of the holly; You who confounded the rapacious crow Thus to be favored by the great sky-eyed Queen of the air and all who know, Now ever by her side; With silent wing and interrogative Cry in lieu of a merely charming song, You sound the dark in which you live Perched above right and wrong. Resonance is not vacancy: although He could hear nothing in your hollow howls But woe and his own guilt, Thoreau Rejoiced that there were owls. Scattered and occasional questionings With here and there too late a warning shout, Wisdom arises on the wings Of darkness and of doubt. Where in day’s vastnesses does truth reside? In noon’s uncompromising light and heat When even our own shadows hide Under our very feet? Or in the hidden center of the quick Resilient dark on which your narrowed sight So pointedly alights to pick Not the day, but the night, [End Page 164] Its fruitful flower, petaled a hundredfold? Oh it is there, truth, with the poor blind prey Trembling with prescience or cold Waiting for how your way Of well-tuned suddenness and certitude Tight-strung and execution highly wrought Leads to the pounced-on object, food For something beyond thought, By overlooking nothing, overseeing In all the stillness hidden, tiny motions Squirming with the life of being Inferences and notions. With patient agency the beak and claws Of fierce sublime awareness pluck it clean Deriving what for us are laws Governing the unseen. Under torn canvas we put out to sea Trusting, though puzzled by what glows above, To something like philosophy To be the helmsman of Life (but whose life?). Your lessons of the land, Down-to-tree, then, if not -to-earth, indict Our helplessness to understand Just what we are at night. Immensities of starlight told us lies Of what and where we are; but, we allow, Drunk with the Milky Way, our eyes Are on the Wagon now, Fugitive slaves, leaving despair for dread As if in search of the cold, freeing North, Keep gazing steadily ahead Keep on Keep knowing forth You urge us, as your silences address The power that Minerva chose you for: Great-winged, far-ranging consciousness Now come to rest in your [End Page 165] Olympian attentiveness that finds The affrighted heartbeat on the ground, perceives The flutter of substances, the mind’s Life in the fallen leaves.John HollanderYale UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summary Of The Spoken Responses By The Poets To Their CriticsJohn HollanderMark Strand responded to Charles Berger’s comments by mak-ing appreciative remarks about the kind of attention his work had received, adding that he did occasionally in writing perceive “glimmers, in the kind of attention I pay, to what Charles Berger has spoken of.” With regard to certain aspects of prior intention, he said that “vague formal imperatives got (...) fulfilled in the writing” and that knowing at the time “the rightness of what I’ve said,” I was nonetheless able to “know the meaning of what I’d said only weeks afterward.” He also acknowledged the kinds of allusiveness which Berger had adduced in his writing, speaking of how and when in the course of writing the resources of his particular sort of echo and allusion seemed to make themselves available.He then turned to the specific question of one of the sequences of poems that Berger had discussed, the “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” He averred that in choosing a dog as speaker he had “not just meant to be funny” [he avowed later on in his remarks that his poems frequently began with “dark humor”] but had also sought for a mode of introspection more original than the fashionably solemn ones of so much contemporary poetry: “I could look within and bark.” With respect to the final line, he observed “I like to finish with a flourish, to pretend I’m Laforgue or Rimbaud,” manifesting “a desire to be a symbolist poet.” With respect to that concluding verse, “I feel like the end of a gorgeous line,” he added that if a dog said that—particularly “a [End Page 189] platinum retriever”—it could not be self-pitying. He spoke in general of the relation of high and low in the poem (a dog named “Rex,” and so forth) and of the relation of this sequence to a much earlier poem of his called “Eating Poetry” in which the speaker is likewise a dog.With regard to formal design, he concluded by saying that in general he tended to start poems “with rough drafts in blank verse” which he then “roughened up” in various ways, preferring as he said “cadences” rather than “measure” in the framing of lines. But he added that in the De Chirico poems he had read, he felt that if one wrote a villanelle, one should keep strictly to the form, without changing words in the refrain lines, and keeping to the iambic meter, saying that “I don’t think you should cheat” under those circumstances.Strand concluded by thanking Berger for the precise nature of his critical attentiveness.John Hollander started out by acknowledging with pleasure that Eleanor Cook’s analysis of his “Owl” had certainly helped him to understand it better; he observed that he felt he had only started to write what he called “real poetry” in his third book, when he had first written a poem he could not understand at the time, and only came to understand years later. He remarked that “The relation of poet and critic as framed by this panel is this: good criticism is a poem’s best friend. We all depend on our friends to point out to us things about ourselves we may not know or acknowledge; although their cousins and other familial relations are other poems, our poems’ best friends are pieces of critical writing.”He was particularly grateful to Cook for pointing out things he hadn’t himself seen—such as the question of the terminal words in the first stanza—but which as a result of the critical insight he had to acknowledge. And this brought up the crucial question of intentionality at the practical rather than theoretical level: in the case of such observations by critics and acknowledgments by poets, it would seem that the writing of a poem could have an intention of which the writer would be unaware. Hollander adduced the analogy of dreaming to poetic composition, paralleling the question “Did you mean to write that?” with (to anyone reporting a dream) “Did you mean to dream that?”He then observed about the... (shrink)

Agathon's mannered yet striking encomium on Eros in Plato's Symposium has attracted critical attention in ample measure, yet at least one dark corner remains unilluminated. As the speaker approaches his climax in the words quoted above, he slips into nautical imagery: κυβερντης πιβτης … , but then disconcerts readers and commentators alike by immediately lapsing into the down-to-earth language of παρασττης τε σωτρ … words which seem to lack maritime connotations. The standard editions offer no help: Hug–Schöner devote several (...) lines to the metaphors as they conceive them and suggest various groupings, but conclude somewhat despairingly: ‘dass es im ubrigen hier nicht auf Schärfe der Begriffe ankommt, leuchtet ein’. Dover, elsewhere a supportive editor, here only offers observations on πιβτης and the ‘predominantly nautical sense’ of κυβερντης ; he translates παρασττης as ‘comrade-in-arms, – strictly the hoplite posted beside one’. Bury has some desultory statements which lead nowhere, while lecture-notes of pupils betray perplexity; some consider the four nouns here to be an ‘odd assortment’, and say that ‘many emendations have been suggested’. It has even been suggested that it was perhaps Plato's intention to show Agathon talking ‘near-nonsense’. (shrink)

This chapter talks about Merold Westphal's views on ontotheology and the philosophy of transcendence, and how they are interrogated as criticizing. It starts by defining what ontotheology is, and then widens its scope through its critique.

Rev. ed. of: Shadows and the dark: the problems of suffering and evil. 1979.

On a mountain top on a clear moonless night the brilliant stars strewn across the sky press down almost oppressively, the Milky Way so full of them it seems about to burst. And yet, we have been learning in the past decade that the visible matter of the universe, the stars that we see, represent only a tiny fraction, perhaps less than one part in 200, of the mass of the universe. The question of what the remainder of the universe (...) is made of is called the Dark Matter Problem. It is one of the most vexing in modern physics. (shrink)

On of the earliest triumphs of quantum mechanics, when the theory was first formulated in the 1920s, was George Gamow's use of quantum tunneling to explain the phenomenon of alpha decay. It was well known then that certain heavy radioactive nuclei, including radium then widely used for glow-in-the-dark clock dials, would spontaneously and unpredictably spit out an energetic helium-4 nucleus (also called an alpha particle) and be transformed into a new lighter nucleus with two fewer nuclear charges. Alpha radioactivity (...) is often very improbable, and this takes the form of alpha-decay half-lives measured in thousands or even millions of years. The question was, how and why did the alpha particle escape its prison in the nucleus, where it should have been tightly and permanently bound? (shrink)

Exposing and illustrating how an ongoing engagement with nihilistic alienation may contribute to, rather than detract from, the value of life, Cinematic Nihilism both challenges and builds upon past scholarship that has scrutinised nihilism in the media, but which has generally over-emphasisedits negative and destructive aspects. Through case studies of popular films, including Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, Dawn of the Dead and The Human Centipede, and with chapters on Scotland's cinematic portrayal as both a site of "nihilistic sacrifice" (...) and as "nowhere in particular", this bookpresents a necessary corrective, re-emphasising the constructive potential of cinematic nihilism and casting it as a phenomenon that need not be overcome. (shrink)

Introduction: Why so serious? -- The super body-politic: nationally assembling Joss Whedon's exceptional The avengers -- "He was deceived by a lie": tragedy and the dark plague of the politics of fear in George Lucas' Star wars -- Dystopian polyvalence: emancipating the mediated life from The matrix.

Introduction: Why so serious? -- The super body-politic: nationally assembling Joss Whedon's exceptional The avengers -- "He was deceived by a lie": tragedy and the dark plague of the politics of fear in George Lucas' Star wars -- Dystopian polyvalence: emancipating the mediated life from The matrix.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like (...) that," he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

The photocycle of visual opsins is essential to maintain the light sensitivity of the retina. The early physical observations of the rhodopsin photocycle by Böll and Kühne in the 1870s inspired over a century's worth of investigations on rhodopsin biochemistry. A single photon isomerizes the Schiff‐base linked 11‐cis‐retinylidene chromophore of rhodopsin, converting it to the all‐trans agonist to elicit phototransduction through photoactivated rhodopsin (Rho*). Schiff base hydrolysis of the agonist is a key step in the photocycle, not only diminishing ongoing (...) phototransduction but also allowing for entry and binding of fresh 11‐cis chromophore to regenerate the rhodopsin pigment and maintain light sensitivity. Many challenges have been encountered in measuring the rate of this hydrolysis, but recent advancements have facilitated studies of the hydrolysis within the native membrane environment of rhodopsin. These techniques can now be applied to study hydrolysis of agonist in other opsin proteins that mediate phototransduction or chromophore turnover. In this review, we discuss the progress that has been made in characterizing the rhodopsin photocycle and the journey to characterize the hydrolysis of its all‐trans‐retinylidene agonist. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley has assured us that where all is bad it must be good to know the worst. In the case before us the worst is that Jonathan Edwards, from whatever perspective he is viewed, represents an imposing enigma. I confess at the outset that the enigma is one I am unable entirely to dispel, although I am confident that I can explain what is enigmatic about his thought, his approach, his caste of mind, and that I can do (...) so "not through a glass darkly." The central problem is this: Edwards, on the one hand, accepted totally the tradition established by the Reformers with respect to the absolute primacy and authority of the Bible, and he could approach the biblical writings with that conviction of their inerrancy and literal truth which one usually associates with Protestant fundamentalism. On the other hand, Edwards insisted vigorously on the criteria of reason and experience, and he was without equal on the American scene up to the time of Charles Peirce in his capacity for philosophical analysis, for sustaining a logical argument, and for expressing his conclusions with the most painstaking attention to subtle nuances of meaning and rhetorical effectiveness. Moreover, he insisted on the use of philosophical concepts and principles in considering the "things of religion" and his speculations about creation, his estheticism, and pantheism caused deep anxiety in the minds of traditional Calvinists, whose theology was as literal as their biblical exegesis. This double-barrelled character of his approach has led critics to define him as a reactionary and "medieval" thinker who had lost touch with those currents of thought which would eventually lead to the "modern" point of view. Without pausing to evaluate that charge at this point, one thing at least is clear: in relation to his contemporaries Edwards was alone in his attempt to make the religious tradition intelligible in those philosophical terms first laid down by Augustine and Anselm in their enterprise of "faith seeking understanding.". (shrink)

This paper reviews the evidence, from studies of acute denervation plasticity, that NCCs in the sensory cortex are composed of particular patterns of intracolumnar excitation in a certain type of neuron, and not of specific anatomically identified neurons. This leads to an enquiry as to what the microneurological basis of NCCs in general may be. Further evidence is examined as to the possible NCCs of the stroboscopic patterns. The hypotheses are presented that the geometrical bright phase patterns arise as dissipative (...) structures generated by interacting cortical rhythms; whereas the non-geometrical dark phase patterns have as their NCCs dendritic potentials in the GABAergic gap-junction linked network in layers II and III of the visual cortex. (shrink)