This paper explores the heart and brain metaphors used in the meaning-making efforts of Chinese individuals diagnosed with depression. Past studies assert that the origin of Chinese language metaphors for thinking and feeling can be found in traditional Chinese medico-philosophical theory, where the heart is viewed as the seat of thought and emotion, and the brain, which constitutes the cognitive center in western theories of the self, is secondary. While most participants employed heart metaphors to express thinking (...) and feeling, many of the participants also employed brain metaphors. Instead of suggesting that this multiplicity implies westernization, this paper argues that cultural understandings of the self can be multiple. To appreciate this, it is necessary to look at spontaneously generated speech in a narrative context. This paper thus analyzes three participant narratives, a process that carries several implications for studies approaching the relationship between metaphor, culture, and the self. (shrink)

American literary realism burgeoned during a period of tremendous technological innovation. Because the realists evinced not only a fascination with this new technology but also an ethos that seems to align itself with science, many have paired the two fields rather unproblematically. But this book demonstrates that many realist writers, from Mark Twain to Stephen Crane, Charles W. Chesnutt to Edith Wharton, felt a great deal of anxiety about the advent of new technologies – precisely at the crucial intersection (...) of ethics and language. For these writers, the communication revolution was a troubling phenomenon, not only because of the ways in which the new machines had changed and increased the circulation of language but, more pointedly, because of the ways in which language itself had effectively become a machine: a vehicle perpetuating some of society’s most pernicious clichés and stereotypes – particularly stereotypes of race – in unthinking iteration. This work takes a close look at how the realists tried to forge an ethical position between the two poles of science and sentimentality, attempting to create an alternative mode of speech that, avoiding the trap of codifying iteration, could enable ethical action. (shrink)

Spatial metaphors of affect display remarkable consistencies across languages in mapping sensorimotor experiences onto emotional states, reflecting a great degree of similarity in how our bodies register affect. At the same time, however, affect is complex and there is more than a single possible mapping from vertical spatial concepts to affective states. Here we consider a previously unreported case of spatial metaphors mapping down onto desirable, and up undesirable emotional experiences in Mlabri, an Austroasiatic language of Thailand and Laos, (...) making a novel contribution to the study of metaphor and Cognitive Linguistics. Using first-hand corpus and elicitation data, we examine the metaphorical expressions: klol jur ‘heart going down’ and klol khɯn ‘heart going up’/klol kɔbɔ jur ‘heart not going down’. Though reflecting a metaphorical mapping opposite to the commonly reported happy is up metaphor, which is said to link to universal bodily correlates of emotion, the Mlabri metaphors are far from idiosyncratic. Rather, they are grounded in the bodily experience of positive low-arousal states, and in that reflect an emic view of ideal affect centered on contentment and tranquility. This underscores the complexity of bodily experience of affect, demonstrating that cultures draw on the available sensorimotor correlates of emotion in distinct ways. (shrink)

We humans are remarkably interested in and skilled at games of make believe, games whose rules make what we are called on to imagine depend on what’s actually perceivably true about things and people that have what it takes to assume various fictional roles and that thereby function in the games as props. For the most part we play these games on an improvised pickup basis, working out the rules we play by in the very act of playing by them. (...) Part of what makes this coordinative feat possible are signals to the effect that as the speaker sees things, the rules and available props are such that this or that role is assumed by this or that prop, or props of this or that kind. Metaphors are make believe signals put to ambitious prop-characterizing use outside the game they serve to initiate, sustain, or otherwise regulate. Metaphoric competence is one manifestation of make believe competence. (shrink)

L’autobiographie intellectuelle du Discours de la méthode fait reposer la vocation philosophique de Descartes sur un événement, souvent associé à la découverte des « fondements de la science admirable », le 10 novembre 1619. L’article rapporte ici cet événement à l’injonction à « l’étude de soi » prescrite par les premières pages de la Sagesse de Charron. Il montre ensuite les similitudes entre la structure narrative du récit cartésien (le voyage, la halte, le choix du chemin, la mathesis comme « (...) chemin sûr ») et les auto-fictions narratives publiées par le mathématicien Caspar Grünewald entre 1617 et 1619. Enfin, il montre que le « désir d’apprendre à distinguer le vrai d’avec le faux » réécrit, sans lyrisme ni fioritures, le récit séminal du placard de la licence en droit (1616), où le récit de la vocation entrecroisait poétiquement les références mythologiques et théologiques. (shrink)

Among the various descriptions of the Christian life in Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–1843), the metaphor of war is prominent. This essay examines Newman’s extensive use of the metaphor of war from the viewpoint of cognitive semantics, which assumes that transcendental reality can only be conceived of and described in language that uses such conceptual mechanisms as image schemata, metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending. Analyzing the conceptual phenomena inherent in the metaphor of war provides both a better understanding of (...) Newman’s Parochial and Plain Sermons as well as a better appreciation of Newman’s understanding of the Christian life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American LiteratureElizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio)I begin with what we might call a bipolar disturbance in literary criticism. Caught between the materialism of cultural studies and the formalism of philosophy, literary criticism is construed, on the one hand, as useless—struck dumb by its lack of purpose in the face of real politics and real bodies—and, on the other hand, as (...) singularly efficacious, the only tool through which to reveal the essentially discursive character of all forms of culture, including bodies and politics. While this rhetorical model of criticism is regularly posited as politically bankrupt, as having no purchase on the facticity of the world, the model of materialist cultural criticism is just as regularly unmasked as, at base, rhetorically constructed and thus guilty of concealing its own formalist dimensions. 1 This “disturbance,” as I’ve described it, tends to be acted out as a debilitating dialectic: caught between formalism and materialism, literary criticism is left without any ground to stand on. Yet this peculiar bipolarity within literary criticism is intimately linked to the strange status of literature itself. Language becomes recognizably literary at the moment it assumes a rhetorical or formal dimension rather than serving as the invisible conduit of mimetic representation. 2 Whence, evidently, the allure of formalism for literary criticism: form would seem to be exactly what demarcates the literary from the nonliterary, what defines the exclusive territory of literature. Yet formalism, as has been widely and persuasively argued, tends to turn literature into precisely the kind of artifact that means little in relation to the world and tends to obscure the worldly relations that inform the text and its production. Indeed, in the field of Cultural Studies—a field whose defining gesture is political engagement—“formalist” is a term whose meaning often comes to approximate “apolitical.” “Formalist,” fashioned as opprobium, speaks chidingly of hermeticism or more acerbically of the insidious erasures enacted by universalism.In contemporary criticism, formalism has thus come to occupy an important antipodal position which encompasses far more than the New Critical practices of the 1940s and ‘50s. In emphasizing the formal, intrinsic qualities of the literary work, New [End Page 46] Critics closeted the text away from the world and from the possibility of social action: their agenda has thus been construed as politically quietist and inherently conservative. 3 Yet the term “formalism,” used as a charge of conservatism, has been applied more broadly to poststructuralist criticism as well. Paul Lauter, for instance, uses the term “formalist” to describe deconstruction as an avatar of New Criticism: both emphasize textual relations to the exclusion of extratextual considerations. Poststructuralism, Lauter and others have argued, continues an aestheticization of literature which turns literary criticism over to an elitist and ultimately irrelevant “priesthood.” ‘“Formalist,’” writes Lauter, “suggests that the whole enterprise of literary theorizing subsists behind dense academic walls, where de Man speaks only to Heidegger, and Heidegger speaks only to God” [138]. While Lauter bases his analogy between poststructuralism and New Criticism on the charge of hermeticism as well as a lack of historical engagement, the notion of “form” as it appears in poststructuralism is nonetheless significantly different than the “form” that animated New Critical endeavors. Where New Critical “form” concerns specifically literary structures—irony, metaphor, tension, unity—the poststructural referent for these rhetorical terms is often the “form” of language or subjectivity itself. Accordingly, the meaning of “form” (and, indeed, “formalism”) undergoes a marked shift from specific rhetorical articulations to larger theoretical claims about language and identity.This second, broader articulation of form has been critiqued less for hermeticism or quietism than for its implied universalism—that is, for fashioning subjects and discursive forces in uniform shapes without regard for political and historical specificity. Stuart Hall, for example, whilst defining the practice of Cultural Studies, warns against theories of the subject (in this case psychoanalysis) that tend toward universalism: “The manner in which this ‘subject’ of culture is conceptualized is of a trans-historical and ‘universal’ character: it addresses the subject-in-general, not an historically-determinate social subject, or socially determinate particular language” [Hall 70]. On this reading, formalist theories of poststructuralism... (shrink)

A growing, interdisciplinary field of cognitive linguistics has developed in recent decades, bringing together research from many fields to explore the ways that metaphors provide structure and semantic content to thought and language. In this article, the American public school disability emotional/behavioral disorder (E/BD) is examined in regard to the primary metaphors that frame the basic concepts of the disorder. The metaphors of 2 versions of E/BD, psychodynamic and behavioral, are investigated. A series of critical questions about the E/BD (...) construct are posed, and possibilities for new metaphors are proposed. (shrink)

This book aims to revise the traditional interpretation of William Golding's fiction.

Society has historically not taken a benign view of genetic disease. The laws permitting sterilization of the mentally re tarded~ and those proscribing consanguineous marriages are but two examples. Indeed as far back as the 5th-10th centuries, B.C.E., consanguineous unions were outlawed (Leviticus XVIII, 6). Case law has traditionally tended toward the conservative. It is reactive rather than directive, exerting its influence only after an individual or group has sustained injury and brought suit. In contrast, state legislatures have not been (...) inhibited in enacting statutes. Many of their products can be characterized as hasty, unnecessary, ill-conceived, and based on the heart rather than the head. Moreover the lack of expert consultation sought has also been remarkable. One state legislature, for example, has advocated immunization for sickle cell anemia! Many others have enacted laws for the screening of inborn errors of metabolism, e.g., phenylketon uria, but have poorly defined the lines of responsibility to secure compliance. A spate of specific disease-related bills has emerged in the u.S. Congress, each seeking recognition and appropriations. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, Cooley's anemia and Tay-Sachs disease have been among the front-runners for support. Finally, in 1975, Congress has begun to examine an omnibus bill concerning all forms of genetic disease. The bill, termed the National Genetic Diseases Act is, however, still far from being enacted. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us (...) to reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din KashaniKiki Kennedy-DayThe Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani. By William C. Chittick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 360. Hardcover.Are you tired of feeling that the scientifically quantifiable world is not all there is, but that most books about philosophy are (...) airy-fairy or pie-in-the-sky? Then The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-Knowledge in the Teachings of Afdal al-Din Kashani by William C. Chittick has something to say to you. Chittick succinctly analyzes the limitations of scientism in his preview of the ends of Islamic philosophy (especially pp. 34-37). One could not make a better argument for exploring the Real beyond appearances than Chittick does.As we look around ourselves in the wreckage of the world-abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, "ghost" prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, tens of thousands of refugees at Darfur-we may feel that the world could use more philosophy. Since traveling in our current direction is leading to spiritual bankruptcy in our souls, perhaps a solid spiritual understanding of the universe would help?The author's stated goals are to introduce the major themes of Islamic philosophy and to introduce the Persian philosopher Afdal al-Din Kashani in English translation. The book consists of two parts: part 1 an overview of Islamic philosophy and part 2 the writings of Baba Afdal. In part 1 Chittick moves from the particular to the general, here from Afdal al-Din Muhammad ibn Hasan Kashani (d. A.H. 610 / A.D. 1213-1214) to the perspective of Islamic philosophy and the perspectives of philosophy in general. Chittick sketches al-Kashani's life, moving from his tomb in Maraq, Iran, to recalling highlights of the philosopher's life. When one considers the near-contemporaries of al-Kashani they are so illustrious as to make one's head spin: Ibn Rushd, Ibn al-'Arabi, and Nasir al-Din Tusi. More than any other details, these scholars place al-Kashani in the intellectual major leagues. Chittick also mentions that al-Kashani believes in philosophy as a praxis, a way of life to be implemented as well as an exercise of reasoning. He sees philosophy as training the soul with the knowledge of the mind.Chapter 2 forms an excellent introduction to Islamic philosophy for the curious reader. He begins by nailing some of the current problems in studying Islamic thought. He mentions everything from considering the dogmas of religion beneath [End Page 180] study to the refusal to accept what philosophers say at face value. Basically it is our own prejudices and views that prevent us from being able to understand their perspectives. The specific issues of Islamic philosophers that Chittick discusses are understanding God, the meaning of prophecy, and the "Origin and Return"-how the world came to be and our return to God after death.Chittick also provides a much-needed antidote to the tendency of many modern scholars to over-Hellenize Islamic philosophy, while at the same time, failing to refer to either the Qur'an or Islamic civil society. He locates the problem with modern thought in an inability to grasp any notion that refers to quality rather than quantity. (This can be seen even more vividly in recent attempts by American economists to give a dollar value to happiness on the success chart.) While quantification is necessary in analytic science, it stifles thought in symbolic, metaphorical, or religious discovery.In part 2, the Writings section actually begins with relevant background texts, including Aristotle, pseudo-Aristotle (The Treatise on the Apple), Hermes, and Ghazali (The Alchemy of Felicity). Then we move on to the Baba Afdal's own writings, including quatrains, essays, letters, and others. These writings show the range of Afdal al-Din Kashani's interests: moving from the practical (chapter 5) to the theoretical (chapter 6). Among the writings in chapter 5 we find his letter to Majd al-Din. It shows al-Kashani's clear-sighted understanding of human nature when he says... (shrink)

There are two main senses of ‘mechanism’, both deriving from the metaphor of nature as a machine. One sense refers to contrivance or design, as in ‘the plant’s mechanism of attracting butterflies’. The other sense refers to cause or law process, as in ‘the mechanism of heredity’. In his work on evolution, Charles Darwin showed that organisms are produced by a mechanism in the second sense, although he never used this language. He also discussed contrivance, where he did use the (...) language of mechanism. This discussion relates metaphor in general and Darwin’s use of the machine metaphor in particular to the problem of the nature of science, concluding that one use of the metaphor reinforces the objective nature of science and the other use reinforces the subjective nature of science. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. (...) Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

Perhaps no work which describes the American people is so comprehensive as Toqueville's Democracy in America. Bellah et. al. rely heavily upon Toqueville in Habits of the Heart in exploring how the mores of the American people have helped to shape national character. More particularly, they are interested in how Americans attempt “to preserve or create a morally coherent life” (p. 275). But unlike Toqueville for whom the issue of equality was central, Bellah and his co-authors focus (...) their attention on American individualism which “may be destroying those social integuments that Toqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities” (p. viii). (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the vernacular science periodical emerged as a key medium for building science-literate publics in colonial South Asia. This article argues that the Hindi science monthly Vigyan became a discursive laboratory for experiments with language, literary genres, narrative plots, and settings to create culturally grounded science lessons for Hindi readers in the mid-1910s. I focus on the writings of Prem Vallabh Joshi, a pandit, science graduate, and small town teacher, who experimented with distinct literary genres to (...) create a sensibility for science – an experimental temper – amongst Vigyan’s readers. Through his strategic use of scientific experiments in the “history of” a particular branch of knowledge, detective mysteries, and the genre of the fictionalized dialogue, Joshi inducted colonial readers into experimental culture and global scientific modernity. As a reflexive participant in the ongoing confrontation between “Western” science and Hindu śāstra in colonial society, Joshi staged a fictional encounter between the experimental demonstration of the iconic air-pump and the textual authority of śāstra. This article examines the encounter between sastric commitments and scientific sensibilities and their conjoined mobilization in Vigyan in the era of linguistic nationalism. In this colonial vernacular publishing culture, the serial possibilities of the periodical and the history of science itself became critical resources in the ontological confrontations between experimental science and traditional authority. (shrink)

At the heart of our experience of literature is the idea that fiction can show us new possibilities for the world in which we live. I open up fictional worlds’ hermeneutic dimension by investigating the intersection of Roman Ingarden’s analytic phenomenology of the literary work with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Reading Ingarden together with Gadamer, I understand a fictional world as an orientation towards a fictional environment whose foundation is our capacity for language, showing how the reciprocal relationship (...) in which we discover its fictional objects and states of affairs is of the same kind that exists between language and world, so that fiction can be understood to orient us towards the happening of language. By thinking on the relationship between language and experience, I suggest that Ingarden and Gadamer propose to understand a fictional world as an orientation towards our very capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. (shrink)

In American Sign Language (ASL) narratives, signers map conceptualized spaces onto actual spaces around them that can reflect physical, conceptual, and metaphorical relations among entities. Because verb tenses are not attested in ASL, a question arises: How does a signer distinguish utterances about past events from utterances within a present conversational context? In narratives, the story-teller’s past-event utterances move the story along; accompanying these will often be subjective comments on the story, evaluative statements, and the like, that are (...) geared, in the present, to the conversational partner. This usage-based study looks at how the ASL signer integrates past and present spaces in a narrative and specifically, integrates the viewpoints associated with each. Blending past and present spaces, while a conceptual notion, is in ASL played out in utterance structure and also in the fact that signed language articulation takes place in a three-dimensional space upon which both the signer and addressee have embodied, perspectivized views. Past and present conceptual spaces both occupy the physical space of articulation, and so the blends are at once conceptual and perceivable. (shrink)

The authoranalyzes the types of metaphors that are used to describe the Internetin issues of Wired magazine from before and after the dot-com collapse to understand the perceptions and expectations of some of the actors involved in the shaping of the Internet. In addition, the metaphors deployed in economics and geophysiology are used to demonstrate how metaphors can influence public debate, policy, and theory. The author argues that metaphors do not simply have a descriptive function but that they also carry (...) normative connotations. Language, alongside social practices and material objects, is an important tool in attempts to construct the future. Six overlapping metaphorical themes are identified: revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the “American dream.” A critical analysis of these metaphors, informed by a critique of the metaphors used in economics and geophysiology, leads the author to challenge the universalist claims made by some Internet enthusiasts for the inclusive potential of the Internet. (shrink)

Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood pursues three main questions: What role does literature play in the constitution of a human being? What is the connection between the language we see at work in imaginative fiction and the language we develop to describe ourselves? And is something more powerful than just description at work -- that is, does self-descriptive or autobiographical language itself play an active role in shaping and solidifying our identities? This adventurous (...) book suggests that interdisciplinary work interweaving philosophy and literature can answer these questions. Main sections investigate the relational model of the self derived from American pragmatism, the sense of rightness that can attach to descriptions of ourselves and our actions, the analogy between interpreting works of art and the interpretation of persons, the special power of literature as a self-compositional tool and the "architecture" of self-narratives and the corresponding growth of self-understanding, what we can learn from cautionary tales concerning the tragic lack of self-knowledge, the possibility of "rewriting" and "rereading" the self, and overall, the assembly of real-life structures of self-definition through our reflective engagement with literature. Throughout, the book develops a model of active, self-constitutive literary reading that provides language for, and sharpens, self-individuation and sensibility. Conjoining a relational conception of selfhood to a narrative conception of self-understanding, Living in Words makes a powerful claim that aesthetic experience and our engagement with the arts is a far more serious matter in human life and society than it in some quarters is taken to be. (shrink)

Since the methods employed during teacher-learner interchange are constrained by the internal structure of a discipline, a study of the interaction amongst verbal language, technical language and structure of disciplines is at the heart of the classic problem of transfer in teaching-learning situations. This paper utilizes the analytic method of philosophy to explore aspects of the role of language in mathematics education, and attempts to harmonize mathematical meanings exposed by verbal language and the precise meanings expressed by the mathematics (...) register (MR) formulated in verbal language. While focusing on the integration of language use and meaning construction in mathematics education, the paper explores the relationship between the conceptual understanding revealed by the mathematics register and the procedural knowledge that refers to the mathematical content through ordinary discourse. (shrink)

An exploration of the influence of Scottish Common Sense Philosophy on early nineteenth century American attitudes toward fiction and the imagination. Martin first shows the great appeal of this movement, which became a semi-official philosophy in America. He suggests that it was attractive to Americans because "it stabilized, it was safe, it discouraged undue speculation." In reaction to this stolid philosophic outlook emerged a quest for a free, more dynamic concept of the imagination.--G. E. S.

Kaurna, the language of the Adelaide Plains, is an awakening language undergoing revival since 1989 (Amery 2016). Though little knowledge of Kaurna remains in the oral tradition and no sound recordings of the language as it was spoken in the nineteenth century exist, a surprising number and range of emotion terms were documented. A great many of these involve thetangka‘liver’ followed bykuntu‘chest’,wingku‘lungs’,yurni‘throat’ andyurlu‘forehead’, whilstmukamuka‘brain’ andyuri‘ear’ are involved in cognition. The role ofpultha‘heart’ is minimal. But these are not the only (...) means to talk about emotions.Muiyu‘pit of the stomach’, a more elusive term, which may or may not be located in a body part andyitpi‘seed’ are also central to emotions. These three termstangka‘liver’,muiyu‘pit of the stomach’ andyitpi‘seed’, appear to be viewed byTeichelmann & Schürmann (1840)and especiallyTeichelmann (1857)as seats of emotion. In addition, there are a range of other means to express emotion, simple verbs and interjections.This paper will discuss in detail the historical documentation, its interpretation and the ways in which this documentation is used today. In the context of re-introducing a reclaimed language, such as Kaurna, how to talk about emotions can become the topic of serious and sometimes unresolved debate. The title of a book of poetry (Proctor & Gale 1997) ended up having two translations, one involvingtangka‘liver’ and the otherpultha‘heart’. Historical phrases expressing emotions are often co-opted in names, speeches, poetry and written texts. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente artículo se evidencia la vinculación que establece Rama entre lengua/literatura y espacio/poder en La ciudad letrada. Este nuevo paradigma ha permitido pensar y repensar la literatura latinoamericana y los estudios culturales, sin embargo, entraña contradicciones dentro del mismo pensamiento del uruguayo. La tajante división que el autor establece entre ciudad real y ciudad letrada hace imposible pensar el rol de la literatura fuera de la esfera del poder institucional, al mismo tiempo que relega ontológicamente la realidad (...) de esta última a una meramente instrumental. Nuestra propuesta es leer a la luz del concepto de transculturación esta oposición, para establecer una dialéctica que permita considerar la politicidad propia de la ciudad real y su rol activo en la expresión de una literatura de resistencia política. Abstract: In the present article we show the relationship that Rama establish between language/power and space/power in the Ciudad Letrada. This new paradigm has allowed us to think and rethink Latin American literature and cultural studies, non the less, it also brings out contradictions inside the own thinking of the Uruguayan author. The strong division that the author establishes between the real city and the literate city does not allow one to think of the role of literature outside the field of institutionalized power, at the same time that he relegates the ontological reality of the latter to a merely instrumental one. Our proposal is to read this opposition in the light of the notion of transculturation, establishing a dialectic that allows us to consider the very policy of the real city and its active role in the expression of a political resistance literature. (shrink)

Work on the relation between figurative language and the law is a fairly recent trend, within legal discourse studies, linguistics, and semiotics. The work in conceptual metaphor theory, for example, is starting to unpack the underlying metaphorical and metonymic structure of legal language, producing some new and important insights into the nature of this language. Missing from this emerging line of inquiry are the views of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was the first to understand the power of (...) figurative language in the creation of symbolic systems, like language and the law. His tripartite evolutionary model of language shows that there is not one language of the law, but three “languages.” By integrating Vico’s model with the work in conceptual metaphor theory it will be possible to penetrate the underlying conceptual structure of legal discourse and thus lead to a more insightful science of this discourse. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner's final book, first published in 1998, is a synoptic interpretation of the thought of Wittgenstein and Malinowski.

Part personal documentary, part exercise in medical semantics, this essay brings the analytical tools of a linguist and the human perspective of a patient receiving treatment in the American health care system to bear on the language we use—for the most part unconsciously—to talk about illness and disease. Topics to be explored include linguistic ramifications of the illness/disease distinction; referring expressions for health disorders; the “linguistic construction” of disease (what's in a name?); the “translation” of biomedical information from (...) the specialists' dialect into everyday idiom; and the metaphoric/symbolic dimension of body-parts and their afflictions. (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

Pascal, in his Pensées, applies philosophy to a theological problem: reconciling (a) Christianity’s demand for absolute faith with both (b) the motives of credibility’s inability to justify absolute faith on their own and (c) the moral obligation to avoid superstition. This reconciliation hinges upon distinguishing two cognitive faculties: reason, and the heart. I will first discuss Pascal’s view of the difference between reason and the heart, and specifically how they each relate to evidence and certainty: reason discursively and (...) probabilistically, the heart holistically and with certitude. Then I turn to Pascal’s view of the role which the heart plays in religious faith, and apply this view to the problem of basing absolute assent on limited evidence. Finally, I will examine Pascal’s view of reason’s important supporting role in faith, and apply it to the obligation to avoid superstitious belief. (shrink)

This article investigates the clothing metaphor in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at remark 4.002. I consider the antecedents and origins of 4.002, in particular, of the fourth paragraph that contains the metaphor, and also suggest and argue for potential source texts for the third and fourth paragraphs. In particular, early sources for the Tractatus, such as the Notes on Logic and the Notebooks 1914–1916, letters, and other manuscripts and early drafts are considered, especially MS104 and the Prototractatus where the metaphor appears (...) at remarks 4.0014 & 4.00141. The place of the metaphor among the context of the elucidations of these early manuscripts is discussed. I also consider similar uses of the metaphor that are present in the work of Hertz, Boltzmann, Frege, Kraus, and others. Some of these texts and potential influences are more compelling than those previously adduced or recognised in the literature. The appearances of the metaphor in the work of these authors and their potential influence upon Wittgenstein’s work is discussed. (shrink)

Metaphors of medicine are common, such as war, which is evident in much of our language about health‐care where patients and healthcare professionals fight disease, or the game, which is one way to frame the nurse–doctor professional relationship. This study analyses six pilot episodes of American (Grey's Anatomy, Hawthorne, Mercy, Nurse Jackie) and Australian (All Saints, RAN) medical television programmes premiering between 1998 and 2009 to assess one way that our contemporary culture understands and constructs professional relationships between nurses (...) and doctors. Analysis shows that these popular television programmes frequently depict conflict, with games, civil war and mutiny between nurses and doctors over patient safety rather than professionals working collaboratively in teams to deliver health‐care. Although the benefit of this televised conflict is the implication that nurses are knowledgeable, skilled professionals, the negative connotations include a dysfunctional and dangerous healthcare system, and also ongoing power struggles. Given that popular culture can sometimes influence the public's understanding of real‐life nursing practice, it is important to explore what these metaphors of conflict are communicating about the nurse–doctor relationship. (shrink)

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory (...) is that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzi's classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of realism in relationship to contemporary serial fiction. Drawing on The Bureau, it argues that spy TV series are “realistic” not because they correspond to reality but because of their impact on reality. It begins by giving an overview of the many ways in which “realism,” in the ordinary sense of a resemblance with reality, served as the working framework for The Bureau’s team. It then identifies three distinct types of realisms in the series. (...) The first is a “fictional realism,” namely the ability of The Bureau to conform to the aesthetic and narrative conventions of realistic fictions. The second type of realism, which I qualify as “ordinary,” refers to the possibilities offered by the show’s aesthetics and the enmeshment of The Bureau with viewers’ ordinary experience. The third type of “performative realism” refers to the series’ impact on shared representations and reality. By providing a common language about the secret activities of the state, The Bureau has gone from being a framed version of reality to being one of the defining frameworks through which state secrecy is experienced both individually and collectively, by insiders and the public at large. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. (...) The book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. (...) The book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper compares the concept of the heart in the works of Max Scheler and María Zambrano. Both authors use the heart as a metaphor for distinct human affective phenomena that have a central anthropological, epistemological, and ontological significance. The comparison between authors’ use of the metaphor is organised around three main topics: the order of the heart; the idea of a primordial feeling and its place in the affective life; and the primacy of love in relation (...) to negative affective attitudes. Our aim is twofold: to investigate the influence of Scheler on Zambrano’s thought and to demonstrate how Scheler’s phenomenology of affectivity transformed in Spanish philosophy and, in particular, in Zambrano’s work. After introducing the topic (section 1), the paper focuses on Scheler’s model of affectivity (section 2), presents an overview of Scheler’s reception in Spain focusing on Zambrano’s knowledge of his works (section 3), and examines Zambrano’s notion of the heart tracing parallelisms in Scheler’s works (section 4). The paper concludes with a discussion on Zambrano’s extension and transformation of the metaphor of the heart in the context of Spanish philosophy. (shrink)

Sixteen American college students spent a month in India with His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa. Together, they discussed topics ranging from food justice to gender identities to sustainable compassion. The Karmapa's teachings in this book are the product of those meetings. For those who wish to take up its challenge, this book can serve as a guide to being a friend to this planet and to all of us who share it. The Karmapa describes how to see the world (...) as a global community, in which people are linked by their shared concerns for humanity--and their wish to bring about real change. While acknowledging the magnitude of this undertaking, the Karmapa shows us how to go about it, using the inner resources we have already. (shrink)

This introductory chapter presents the reader with various ways of approaching the topic ‘Wittgenstein and the creativity of language’. It is argued that any serious account of the questions arising from this joint consideration of, on the one hand, this great genius of philosophy and, on the other, the varieties of speech, text, action and beauty which go under the heading ‘the creativity of language’ will have to appreciate the potential of both, in terms of breadth as well as depth. (...) First, the chapter points out a way of understanding Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following in relation to meaning and normativity which, in virtue of respecting Wittgenstein’s own creativity as a writer, does not fall prey to a widespread source of misunderstanding. Next, Wittgenstein’s uses of language receive some additional attention (i.e. his use of analogies, metaphors, punctuation and other literary and rhetorical devices), before a glimpse is offered of an unravelling of the knot that is Wittgenstein and the creativity of language. The multiple interrelated threads here lead into areas of human concern ranging from the philosophy of language and logic through to ethics, aesthetics and politics. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of the contents of the book from the perspective of its editors. (shrink)

In The Distant Relation Eoin Thomson presents innovative readings of canonical philosophic and literary texts, focusing on the distance that mediates the relation between word and thing, past and present, I and you. Through a novel convergence, itself arising from a field of philosophic and literary experimentation, he challenges previous traditions while demonstrating that his strategy is appropriate to the texts considered. The Distant Relation breaks down the artificial division between philosophy and literature by weaving contemporary philosophic arguments through close (...) readings of Carpentier, Rulfo, Paz, and Garcia Marquez. Thomson draws the reader into the largely uninhabited space between philosophy and literature, providing new critical strategies that allow text and reader to respond to the very distance they share. These strategies involve a reconceptualisation of distance that recognises the productive and affirmative nature of separation. The Distant Relation will attract anyone interested in the ongoing struggle to overcome conventional interpretations of language, time, and identity within the broader context of philosophical trends and Spanish American studies. Eoin S. Thomson is an independent scholar who has taught in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. (shrink)