Social robots are marketed as human tools promising us a better life. This marketing strategy commodifies not only the labor of care but the caregiver as well, conjuring a fantasy of technoliberal futurism that echoes a colonial past. Against techno-utopian fantasies of a good life as one involving engineered domestic help, I draw here on the techno-dystopian television show Humans (stylized HUMⱯNS) to suggest that we should find our desires for such help unsettling. At the core of my argument is (...) a return of the “uncanny valley” problem, from its reformulation as an engineering/design problem to its origins as a psychosocial symptom of an unresolved, traumatic past. I conclude that our sense of the uncanny may be best understood as a moral capacity that should be honed rather than evaded. (shrink)

This article examines perceptions of tax partners and non-partner tax practitioners regarding their CPA firms’ ethical environment, as well as experiences with ethical dilemmas. Prior research emphasizes the importance of executive leadership in creating an ethical climate (e.g., Weaver et al., Acad Manage Rev 42(1):41–57, 1999; Trevino et al., Hum Relat 56(1):5–37, 2003; Schminke et al., Organ Dyn 36(2):171–186, 2007). Thus, it is important to consider whether firm partners and other employees have congruent perceptions and experiences. Based on the responses (...) of 144 tax practitioners employed at CPA firms, the results show that tax partners rate the ethical environment of their firms as stronger than non-partner tax practitioners, particularly among those who describe a self-identified ethical dilemma. Tax partners also report having encountered more of the common examples of researcher-provided ethical dilemmas than non-partner tax practitioners, although non-partners perceive that certain ethical dilemmas occur at a higher rate than partners do. Overall, this study provides evidence of a disconnect between tax partners and non-partner tax practitioners with respect to perceptions of organizational ethics. Suggestions for potential remedies are offered. (shrink)

Localist networks represent information in a very simple and straightforward way. However, localist modelling of complex behaviours ultimately entails the use of intricate “hand-designed” connectionist structures. It is, in fact, mainly these two aspects of localist network models that I believe have turned many researchers off them (perhaps wrongly so).

The article discusses the meaning and content of the concept of nothingness introduced by S.S. Neretina in the book "The Earth Hums with a metaphor". Philosophy and Literature" (short story "Lermontov: the semantics of repetitions"). The author identifies five main characteristics in this view: nothing as freedom (where freedom is understood by Neretina "as peace, silence, silence, love and – as "I"); nothing as balancing on the verge of being and non-being; as an opportunity to express this reality in poetry, (...) while philosophy makes it impossible to think of anything"; nothing as a denial of everything, including life; finally, nothing is set as a reality opposed to culture. In this interpretation, nothing is a rather complex semantic formation, but generally understandable, if we keep in mind the task that Neretina solves: on the one hand, she finds out the relationship between literature and philosophy, on the other, she thinks through Lermontov's dramas. Neretina claims that Lermontov, like Goethe, was a special poet – poet-philosopher, he, as a thinking person, following such Russian thinkers and poets as, for example, Chaadaev and Pushkin, tried to understand why an honest, educated person "woe from wit", why he often ends up badly. The article discusses Lermontov's dual position as a poet and a latent thinker (philosopher), as well as the work of a modern writer who thinks through the existential problems of time in an artistic form. The author comes to the conclusion that the nothingness introduced by Neretina and attributed to Lermontov differs from the nothingness of St. Augustine, is given by the five listed characteristics, and represents a problem as an independent reality and whole. (shrink)

Buku karya Fatkur Rohman Nur Awalin yang berjudul “Falsafah Jawa” yang hadir di tengah-tengah pembaca ini, rasanya bagai perahu yang disediakan untuk membawa penumpang mengarungi aliran air yang deras. Pembaca bisa melihat secara lebih jernih dan komprehensif kedalaman filsafat Jawa sampai pertemuan filsafat Jawa dan Tasawuf Islam yang rumit. Kajian khusus tentang kelebihan dan kewaskithaan orang Jawa disajikan dengan apik dan jelas, bahwa orang Jawa yang memahami filsafat Jawa akan tampil sebagai manusia yang waskitha, limpad, dan wicaksana. Mungkin mendekati manusia (...) Kamil (insanul kamil ‘manusia pilihan’). Lebih dalam lagi, buku ini mengajak pembaca belajar filsafat sejak awal, yaitu menggali pemikiran-pemikiran filsuf Jawa tulen, seperti Abdullah Ciptoprawiro, Sri Muljono, sembari dipadukan dengan pemikiran filsuf asing seperti Zoetmulder, dan Louis O. Katsoff. Dr. Mulyana, M.Hum. - Kaprodi S2 Pendidikan Bahasa Jawa Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta (UNY). (shrink)

Buku yang ditulis oleh Dr. A. Setyo-Wibowo (SW) dan Haryanto Cahyadi, M. Hum. (HC), dua-duanya dosen filsafat, yang satu di Jakarta, yang satu di Jayapura, ini betul-betul memperkaya pustaka tentang filsafat dalam bahasa Indonesia. Platon tetap salah satu filosof terbesar, kalau bukan filosof terbesar segala zaman. Dalam buku ini para penulis mengantar pembaca ke jantung filsafat Platon. Mereka melakukannya dengan membawa pembaca ke dalam teks-teks kunci Platon. Yang mereka angkat adalah pemikiran Platon tentang pendidikan. Pendidikan bukan salah satu bidang pemikiran (...) Platon, melainkan intinya. Seluruh filsafat Platon, seperti setiap filsafat sejati, akhirnya hanya punya satu tujuan: ia mau mencerahkan. Ya mencerahkan kita. Menunjukkan ke mana kita harus mengarahkan dan mengembangkan kita agar kita menjadi manusia yang mutu. Buku ini membuat kita betul-betul mengerti Platon, tidak hanya seperti dalam buku-buku “ringkasan sejarah filsafat”, melainkan secara mendalam. Namun buku SW dan HC ini mempunyai nilai lebih. Mereka tidak hanya membawa kita ke Platon, melainkan mengangkat aktualitas pemikirannya. Platon mau mendidik pemimpin negara. Ia tidak berfilsafat dalam udara kosong, melainkan pada zaman di mana demokrasi Athena sudah kacau balau karena disandera oleh elit-elit korup. Dalam situasi ini Platon mengembangkan konsepsinya tentang suatu pendidikan yang bisa melahirkan pemimpin negara yang baik. SW dan HC menunjukkan bahwa pemikiran Platon 2500 tahun lalu sekarang di Indonesia pun masih pantas diperhatikan. Buku ini bukan bacaan gampang. Uraiannya tidak secara esai omongan ringan, melainkan betul-betul ngilmu, memakai metode-metode analisa filosofis, mengutip dari teks-teks Platon sendiri, dengan mengacu pada pustaka para ahli Platon yang state of the art. Bahasa pun tidak menggampangkan. Untuk tetap rapat dengan teks, mereka suka memakai kata-kata kunci dalam bahasa Yunani. Ambil misalnya judul ini: "Paideia Kaum Sofis: Penciutan Aisthesis-Arete dan Dominasi 'Empeiria'". Pembaca mana langsung akan tahu apa kiranya akan dibahas. Pembaca barangkali sering harus mencari dalam daftar istilah (yang, sayang, tidak lengkap) apa arti suatu kata, misalnya logistikon atau Iliados, kemudian lupa lagi, cari lagi dst. Tetapi bagi pembaca yang bertahan ganjarannya besar. Ia akan masuk ke dalam pemikiran Platon yang asli, rinci, sangat menarik...................... Masih satu catatan tentang cita-cita manusia yang kaloskagathos, elok nan baik. Membaca uraian bagus para penulis saya terdorong untuk bertanya apakah bukan sudah waktunya cita-cita Yunani kuno yang dalam etika kontemporer sama sekali hilang itu perlu diangkat kembali. Paham manusia mutu sebagai manusia elok nan baik berhasil melepaskan etika dari moralisme sempit (searah dengan MacIntyre – After Virtue – yang mengangkat kembali paham "keutamaan" Yunani yang kuat dan utuh terhadap paham mandul-moralistik istilah "keutamaan" dalam budaya Barat). Begitu pula etika Jawa memahami kebaikan manusia yang mantap dan utuh dalam keterkaitan antara kebaikan etis dan kebaikan estetik. - Catatan kecil: Dalam indeks seharusnya tidak dimuat nama yang terdapat dalam daftar pustaka. Buku Setyo Wibowo dan Haryanto Cahyadi ini bukan hanya pandu kompeten ke jantung filsafat Platon, melainkan memberikan rangsangan-rangsangan baru untuk pemikiran filosofis. (Franz Magnis-Suseno, Program Pascasarjana, Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Driyarkara, Jakarta). (shrink)

re s u m o O pre s e nte artigo se inic ia com uma cláusula interna à filosof ia de l e u z e a na, a de que todo pens a me nto pode ser carc t e r i z a do pelo grau de ima n ê nc ia que o me s mo realiza. O pens a me nto de Hu me, como “e m p i r i s mo superior”, segundo ex (...) p ressão de Deleuze, pro mo v e r ia a ima n ê nc ia, ou seja, ele não se re nde r ia a ne n hum tra ns c e nde nt e. Ao me s mo tempo, como s u p e r i o r, se trata de um empirismo que não se pre nde ao ime d ia - t a me nte da do, como suporia um “e m p i r i s mo ing ê nuo”. Por isso, o empirismo seria um p e ns a me nto da ima n ê nc ia que apre s e nta certa alçada tra ns c e ndental, permitindo a Deleuze falar em “e m p i r i s mo tra ns c e nde nt a l ”. A complexa fórmula filosófica re s u m ida nessa ex p ressão de l e u z e a na será por nós, aqui, tratada sob o ponto de vista Hume, de mo do que o ceticismo humeano será tomado como um operador de imanência que of e - rece ao empirismo sua dimensão transcendental. Tal tra t a mento será levado a cabo em duas etapas, quais sejam: a) ceticismo e pro b l e ma da disjunção inclusiva na int e ra ç ã o das fa c u l da des ; b) ceticismo e tra ns c e ndent a l ida de dos juízos empíric o s. palavras-chave Ceticismo; Empirismo; Hume; Deleuze; Transcendental; Imanência. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

re s u m o O pre s e nte artigo se inic ia com uma cláusula interna à filosof ia de l e u z e a na, a de que todo pens a me nto pode ser carc t e r i z a do pelo grau de ima n ê nc ia que o me s mo realiza. O pens a me nto de Hu me, como “e m p i r i s mo superior”, segundo ex (...) p ressão de Deleuze, pro mo v e r ia a ima n ê nc ia, ou seja, ele não se re nde r ia a ne n hum tra ns c e nde nt e. Ao me s mo tempo, como s u p e r i o r, se trata de um empirismo que não se pre nde ao ime d ia - t a me nte da do, como suporia um “e m p i r i s mo ing ê nuo”. Por isso, o empirismo seria um p e ns a me nto da ima n ê nc ia que apre s e nta certa alçada tra ns c e ndental, permitindo a Deleuze falar em “e m p i r i s mo tra ns c e nde nt a l ”. A complexa fórmula filosófica re s u m ida nessa ex p ressão de l e u z e a na será por nós, aqui, tratada sob o ponto de vista Hume, de mo do que o ceticismo humeano será tomado como um operador de imanência que of e - rece ao empirismo sua dimensão transcendental. Tal tra t a mento será levado a cabo em duas etapas, quais sejam: a) ceticismo e pro b l e ma da disjunção inclusiva na int e ra ç ã o das fa c u l da des ; b) ceticismo e tra ns c e ndent a l ida de dos juízos empíric o s. palavras-chave Ceticismo; Empirismo; Hume; Deleuze; Transcendental; Imanência. (shrink)

Early in his Essays on Intellectual Powers, Reid draws a distinction between mental power, mental operation, and mental capacity (EIP 21). To the untrained eye, these terms could probably be used interchangeably, and Reid believes this is correct, up to a point. He argues that, if we are interested in understanding exactly how the human mind works, we must use these terms with more precise meanings. This is part of his more general strategy of trying to always use the words (...) with their common meanings, as much as possible, but also pointing out that certain philosophical distinctions are needed to carry out the project of laying out the foundations of the science of the mind. This paper explains what the distinction between power, operation, and capacity is, according to Reid, with the goal of understanding why it is important to draw such a distinction, not only for the Reidian project, but for action theory, more generally. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

Each of the following papers gives an account of a different UK clinical ethics committee. The committees vary in the length of time they have been established, and also in the main focus of their work. The accounts discuss the development of the committees and some of the ethical problems that have been brought to them. The issues raised will be relevant for other National Health Service (NHS) trusts in the UK that wish to set up such a committee.

Bringing Flowers HomeWe try to put a bandage on the wound,offering a vague apology:Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.Towers turn out to have been built on sand.Regimes collapse. No use in asking whywe ripped the bandage off that bleeding wound.An earthquake followed by a hurricane,fires, floods: they've passed some of us by.Us. And who is we? And what is home?Last week an enormous yellow moonhung low in a corner of the sky.Beauty is no bandage for the wound,hole in (...) the future much too big to mendor even to imagine, though we tryto camouflage it, bringing flowers home.You said, when we were talking of the end,that no one teaches us to say goodbye,or how to ease the bandage from the wound.Forgive me, death. I brought these flowers home.Moving the PianoCompact, gleaming, black and white,this sturdy Yamaha uprightstood staunchly in one room for yearsuntil, maneuvered through several doorstoday by two young slender menand up a ramp into their van,it ventured briefly out into the world again.The change of space, the space of change:the walls look naked, empty, strange.Heavy has given way to light.Habitual soliditytoo familiar to seeyields to possibilitytoo unfamiliar to see.Late and early, early, late,end, beginning—all are swirledinto a mist that veils the world.The black and white of status quoblends to a color I don't know,transition that I cannot name,but I salute it all the same.Goodbye, piano, and hello.So where is the piano going?Where will it find another life,music and memories unpackedin an unfolding second act?North Carolina, near a riverwhose stream, like time, is always flowing.My son lives there with his wife.Beloved, nothing is forever.You can't step twice into this life.Nap at Stony PointMy cousin and my friendon their respective recent deathbedsslid from my mind. I noticedthe scarlet splash of a cardinal perched on a cannonon a bluff above the Hudson.I lay down on a picnic table,sun on my face, five turkey vulturescircling overhead, and closed my eyes.And when I opened them I felt as pleasedas if I had completed some needful taskinstead of having forgottenhow my friend in January and my cousin in March,both of them alert and wry and tranquil,had faced what each of them clearly saw approaching—more, had recognized and greeted it,instead of ignoring it by looking through it,the way some people, even iftheir office is two doors down the hall,look right through you, pretending not to see you.Or maybe they don't see youany more than one envisions deathon a sunny April afternoon.The Last Lecture HallTheaters that were never ours,classrooms empty and refill.Nor do the trees belong to us.We cross the stage and disappearor venture in among the treesand lose ourselves there.Feverish categories blur.Genre distinctions: what for?The empty theater becomesa lecture hall. A classroom morphsinto a forest murmuringwith voices. Words pelt down like rainor rise like mist and dissipate.The rustling trees swell to a roar.But they were never still.Theater, classroom, maple, fir:feverish categories blur,presences pressing through the veilof the phenomenal;a leopard padding down the aisle.Tiger-masked students fill the seatsof the amphitheater.The old professor, looking outover the upturned faces, said“You are all allegoricalfigures to me. I will not learnyour names.” Did the students laugh?Tragedy, satire, comedy:genres are deciduous.Modes blur, leaves spin and fall.The leaves of memory seemed to makeA mournful rustling in the dark(Longfellow, “The Fire of Driftwood”).Lights go on in the theater.Class is over. We stumble out.The GatesWhen I woke up I had walked through a gate.I looked around the room—trickle or torrent, stepping into time—and bent my head to drink at a black stream.I look around a roomthick with the dust of after and before.Am I meant to drink from this black stream?My lips are dry,thick with the crust of after and before,gate of ivory and gate of horn.My lips are dry, I'm thirsty.Heat, cold, fire, snow, sun.Gate of ivory and gate of horn:to cross a threshold ends one story(firelight; snow squeaking; winter sun)and begins another.To cross a threshold ends one story(ever after? or a transformation?)and begins anotherthere is no law compelling us to enter.Ever after or a transformation.Torrent, trickle: we set foot in time,but there's no law compelling us to enterstory once we've latched the gate of dream.FilamentsYour past is thickening. You can seeits filaments, as carefullyyou begin to part the strands(they're all connected) with both hands,and clear a path. Now warilyenter the web—not all the way,but toward some kind of clarity.We have been rightly taught that wecan't finish, but must do, the work.Partway through the leafy murk,crisscrossing dapple of the trees,so tough and so precarious,you find yourself in the dawn air,the circle's center everywhere.Along the PromenadeReading a book about transitioningin the twenty-first-century meaning of the wordblends with plans for my son's upcoming weddingand scraps of conversation overheardat the Japanese-themed street fair today.Somnambulists along the promenadefloat in the warm currents of Broadway,eat talk look linger in the sun and shade.Then to the park: October leaves still green(climate change or merely Indian summer?).Snatched memories, I catch them on the wing:Samos Septembers, pomegranate tree,lemon tree, okra, a chameleon,the little summer of Saint Dimitri,they called it. All this happened; but to me?Streams of conversation flowing by.The sound artist described his work like this(if work is the right word): “Accidentallyuploading seemingly private messages,”which describes, also, dreams and poetry,the drifting crowd, incessant carousel,city and weather, time and holiday,all lived, palped, tasted, tested, overheard.Somnambulists along the promenadehave set up booths, their dreams... Bookending my dawn dream: symmetricalsoaking sponges dripping... DNA?Destiny, temperament, personality:the cards we're dealt and that we have to play,except we now can change them gradually.Transition: he or she or rather they,constructed, deconstructed, rearranged,the tarot spread of genealogy,inheritance as aleatoric play.We walked west to Eleventh Avenue,drawn by rumors of Ad Reinhardt's blue,which buzzed and throbbed. Stand still: my head was spinning.Allusions to water or to sky,dense, deep, alarming, ending or beginning... I sat awhile and watched the crowd glide by,enchanted promenaders all drawn inon the exhibition's last dayby the silence's cerulean humming.And then they climbed the stairs, and so did we,to lighter textures on an upper floorwhere Ruth Asawa's baskets in midairweightlessly demonstrated gravity,twigs, trees, crowns, bubbles dancing in white space.Next week my class will read “On Being Ill.”“Blogs,” I'll tell them, is the word we nowuse, not “essay,” for the moving mind,that saunterer who takes note and leaves behindand doubles back and ponders and regretsamidst the wash of vision, the flowand tidal pull of what we see and know,what we've dreamed, what we have said and heard,the thrumming colors and the floating crowd,as if the bubbly brew of sunny dayand anxious dreams could somehow all be caughtup in one enormous, one all-encompassing word. (shrink)

Discuto neste artigo o fragmento de Protágoras sobre a existência dos deuses e a sua coerência teórica com outras teses do sofista. Primeiramente, utilizo dados históricos e biográficos para iluminar o subjetivismo da primeira linha do fragmento. Em seguida, discuto os obstáculos epistemológicos mencionados por Protágoras e sugiro uma nova tradução para o termo brachýs, um dos conceitos centrais que ele propõe. Na seção 2, analiso o ataque à transcendência que distingue suas ideias sobre a matemática e a percepção sensível. (...) Finalmente, na seção 3, mostro como a sua postura teológica está de acordo com a tese do homo-mensura e com a sua abordagem antilógica. A conclusão ressalta a unidade do pensamento de Protágoras e a sua posição no Iluminismo grego. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

The corn wolf : writing apotropaic texts -- Animism and the philosophy of everyday life -- The stories things tell and why they tell them -- Humming -- Excelente zona social -- I'm so angry I made a sign -- Weeks in Palestine : my first visit -- A go slow manifesto -- Iconoclasm dictionary -- The obscene in everyday life -- Syllable and sound -- Don Miguel.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:526 BOOK REVIEWS learned how to integrate satisfaction into love (91, 113, 119, 124, 136, 186, 192, 198; cp. 37). Indeed, it is Aquinas's gradual integration of satisfaction as a motive for the Incarnation subordinate to love (166) that enables Aquinas aptly to locate satisfaction within the Christian life (cp. 47, 136, 142, 166) and accounts for Cessario's subtitle. Third, I am not clear on Ccssario's (or my own!) (...) stand on how we ought sort out the respects in which Thomas's and our perspectives merge (cp. xiv). In his conclusion Cessario is cautious, suggesting that "if the term ' satisfaction ' cannot be restored to current usage, then certainly the substance of Saint Thomas's understanding of satisfaction can and should be." (256). But, given Cessario's own persuasive display of the way satisfactio pervades the very texture of Aquinas's theology, I am not sure we can have the "substance" without the term-or vice-versa. Clearly Cessario thinks the merging is substantive. But he himself teaches us that supporting this claim involves supporting claims for exegetical, liturgical ecclesial, and other practices. Those of us who think that satisfactio is a description rather than "the guiding model or key notion" (xx, my emphasis) for thinking Christ crucified will need to see such support worked out in relation to the competing sotcriologies Cessario mentions (267) as well as ecumenical discussions of justification which were understandably outside the scope of this book (151). But a single book can only accomplish a single thing-and this book clearly succeeds in showing us how Thomas can be brought to bear on contemporary theological issues. All students of Aquinas and/or soteriology ought to read this text. Loyola College in Maryland Baltimore, Maryland JAMES J. BUCKLEY How We Know. Edited by MICHAEr, SHAFTO. San 1!1rancisco: Harper & Row. 1985. Pp. xv and 171. $14.95. How We Know is a collection of six papers delivered in 1984 at the twentieth Nobel Conference, held at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Two words that came to my mind as I worked through the papers were "fascinating" and "frightening". The Conference dealt with cognitive science and a number of the authors have come up with interesting, provocative, and often orig'inal observations about how the human mind operates when it hies to remember and to understand. In his Introduction Michael Shafto, who is a Scientific Officer in the Personnel and Training Research Programs of the United States Office of Naval Research, notes that cognitive science as the work of a coalition of thinkers is barely a decade old, and he reminds the reader that the methods BOOK REVIEWS 59.7 of cognitive science are those of experimental psychology, physiology, and computer science. Though the Confermce was supposedly aimed at nonspecialists, the reader unfamiliar with cognitive science might find some of the papers a bit difficult. Certainly the backgrounds of the authors are very impressive. The first four papers in the collection are by Gerald Edelman, Brenda Milner, Roger C. Schank, and Herbert A. Simon respectively. Edelman is the Director and Scientific Chairman of the Neurosciences Research Program at Rockefeller University; Milner is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Neurology at McGill University: Schank is Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Yale; and Simon is Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University. Calling his theory of the hum:m brain "Neural Darwinism," Edelman claims that the brain is Darwinian. Taking Darwin's theory of natural selections and applying it to the brain, Edelman argues that during ontogeny and behavior those groups of neurons are chosen that are adaptive for the organism. Milner explores the neurophysiological basis of that special moment when a new experience affects the brain. Insisting that memory is not merely a passive reproi!ucer but rather actively selective, Milner, relying on her studies of patients. with loss of memory, suggests that the frontal lobes of the brain hnve a special role in memory. Interested in the interface of mcmory anil percr-ption, Schank notes that, because human memory is dynamic and the memory of the computer is not, the -programming of the intelligent functions of... (shrink)

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

As business and society is an inherently multi-disciplinary scholarly area, the book will draw from work in areas outside of business and management, such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, religious studies, economics and other related fields, as well as the natural sciences, education, and other professional areas of study.

1. Escritos fundmentales -- 2. Escritos sobre educación y sobre el humanismo hispánico -- 3. Escritos sobre historia de la filosofía: vol. 1. Libros ; vol. 2. Artículos y ensayos.