“The sins of the fathers are to be laid upon the children.”Just after midnight on March 21, 2003, a drunk stood on a footbridge over a motorway in a village in Surrey in southern England. After eight pints of beer, he was drunk enough to decide to drop a brick from the overpass into traffic to see if he could hit something; unfortunately, he was not so drunk that he missed. The brick crashed through the windshield on the driver's side (...) of a truck. It hit the driver, Michael Little, in the chest, triggering a fatal heart attack. He stayed conscious long enough to pull the truck safely to the side of the road, thereby perhaps saving other motorists; then he died. The crime was widely publicized, as was the driver's role in preventing any further accidents. (shrink)

The authors examine the scientific possibility and the legal and ethical implications of using DNA forensic technology, through partial matches to DNA from crime scenes, to turn into suspects the relatives of people whose DNA profiles are in forensic databases.

This article draws on two Mencian illustrations of human goodness: the example of the child in the well and the metaphor of the continually deforested mountain. By reconstructing Mencius’ two novel ideas within the framework of a phenomenological thought-experiment, this article’s purpose is to explain the validity of this uncommon approach to ethics, an approach which recognizes that subjective participation is necessary to achieve any ethical understanding. It is through this active phenomenological introspection that the individual grasps the goodness (...) of human nature, whilst simultaneously coming to realize one’s own degree of closeness (or estrangement) to this universal nature, depending on the success of the thought experiment. Despite the apparent logical circularity of reformulating Mencius in such fashion, this article further maintains that no theoretical premises need be taken up prior to reenacting the Mencian thought-experiment. On the contrary, this article explains that knowledge of human nature manifests itself in the very moment of the proposed epistemic act. (shrink)

The Sator square is a widespread palindrome: It may be read like a grid from left to right and vice versa, from top to bottom and vice versa. For nearly 2,000 years, it has been serving above all for magic purposes, among other things for healing sick persons, furthermore as a magic fire extinguisher. The sequence of letters was a riddle and invited contradictory attempts to solve it. The author pleads for not taking it only as a challenge for the (...) riddle-solving mind, but also for reading it in the bustrophedon way, i.e. bidirectionally, as the ox turns when ploughing. Doing so, a swaying rhythm would result. The cruciform middle as a cosmological cross, however, would symbolise absolute stability, and thus the complex unity would lead to "mountains moving" faith. In research with the random generator working with Strontium 90, the Schmidt-machine, resulted that such a mental state is indeed favourable for psychokinetic effects . So far, magic can be accompanied by science today. But the mystic consciousness expressed by the central TENET remains out of the positivistic science's reach and demands a different kind of religious psychology for its articulation. (shrink)

This is a daybook inspired by the parable of ox herding, the search for one's true self. For a long time, writers, artists, and students of Buddhism have found spiritual guidance in the herding of the ox. This metaphorical ox herding is a guide for a year of living and observing, arriving at awareness and understanding. In _Ox Herding in Wisconsin_, Richard Quinney writes meditatively about his experiences of everyday life. In the course of the seasons of a year, he (...) carefully notes the daily news, seasonal changes in nature, family history, personal health and aging, poetry and music, and spiritual development. The observations and writings of classical and contemporary writers enrich the book, offering insights and epiphanies for the Wisconsin ox herder. Illustrated with images both found and newly created, _Ox Herding in Wisconsin_ provides sustenance for the contemplative journey close to home. (shrink)

Come along with David Hinton on a series of walks through the wild beauty of Hunger Mountain, near his home in Vermont—excursions informed by the worldview he's imbibed from his many years translating the classics of Chinese poetry and ...

The insight that scientific theories are “practice-laden” has animated scholarship in the history of science for nearly three decades. This article examines a style of geographical thought that was, I argue, movement-laden. The thought-style in question has been described as a “vertical consciousness that engulfed science in the early nineteenth century,” and is closely associated with the geographical vision of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt’s science spanned nature’s horizontal and vertical axes, from Saxon mines to Andean summits, and from the (...) currents of the ocean to those of the aerial ocean. In probing the origins of Humboldt’s vertical thinking, this article opens up a broader history about the industrial practices and travel cultures that originally animated it. Humboldt’s “global physics” first emerged within a context of vertical travel, up mountains and into mines and caverns. Rhythms of the body—lethal for some, “sublime” for others—became rhythms of the mind. A view of nature as set of vertically complementary spaces rippled through mining culture, Romantic art, and the geographical sciences. To trace the earliest routes of Humboldt’s science is to acknowledge the many actors—some celebrated, most unsung—who took part in the making of a vertical consciousness. (shrink)

Do mountains exist? The answer to this question is surely: yes. In fact, ‘mountain’ is the example of a kind of geographic feature or thing most commonly cited by English speakers (Mark, et al., 1999; Smith and Mark 2001), and this result may hold across many languages and cultures. But whether they are considered as individuals (tokens) or as kinds (types), mountains do not exist in quite the same unequivocal sense as do such prototypical everyday objects as chairs or (...) people. (shrink)

Photographs and essays by leading authorities in the field provide diverse perspectives on the aesthetics of mountains and mountain climbing.

Central to Confucian teachings in the Analects is the ideal of self-cultivation—in particular that of the junzi 君子 (“gentleman” “nobleman”) ideal. At the same time that Confucius recommends that individuals follow such an ideal, he also places limits on who actually might attain it. By examining statements involving such terms as the junzi, the “petty man” ( xiao ren 小人), and the “masses” ( min 民, or zhong 眾), or common people, this essay highlights the sociopolitical and gender restrictions informing (...) one of the most basic, yet lofty, ethical goals of the text. A new means is also offered of discussing these socially delimited discrepancies in moral cultivation by referring to leading, or self-determining agency in association with junzi on the one hand, and to conformist agency for women and common people on the other. (shrink)

In order to address sociological concerns with embodiment and learning, in this article we explore the ‘weathering’ body in a currently under-researched physical-cultural domain. Weather experiences, too, are under-explored in sociology, and here we examine in depth the lived experience of weather and, more specifically, ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’ in one of the most extreme and corporeally challenging environments on earth: high-altitude mountains. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and an interview-based research project with 19 international, high-altitude (...) mountaineers, we investigate weather as lived and experienced both corporeally and cognitively. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing and theorizing the ways in which embodied beings relate to the environment through different aspects of their being. The novel concepts of ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, we argue, provide salient examples of the mind-body-world nexus at work, as an embodied practice and mode of thinking, strongly contoured by the physical culture of high-altitude mountaineering. (shrink)

Amusement, diversion, fun. This was the definition of sport offered by the first dictionary I consulted in preparation for this lecture, and if we accept it then there is at least a sporting chance that we will all be able to agree: mountaineering is a sport. But it is not a definition that sits easily with much of what sport is currently thought to be. This talk is part of a series on Philosophy and Sport timed to mark the London (...) Olympics, and amusement and fun are probably not the first words to spring to mind there, certainly not for the competitors. They may be a part of it, but I don't think it unreasonable to think more immediately of commerce, competition, achievement. So this evening I need to consider mountaineering within that context. I also want to make clear at the outset that I shall take mountaineering to mean not just the climbing of high snow-covered peaks, but mountain travel and exploration, and simply recreational mountain walking. There doesn't need to be anything technical involved. At the same time, I must include rock-climbing within my brief, and for at least two reasons. One is that rock-climbing and mountaineering are closely connected historically. In it's early years, alpine climbing often led to rock climbing, the latter being seen as geographically convenient training for ‘the real thing’ – namely, the annual alpine holiday. When I was a teenager in the 1970s the influence went the other way: I began with rock-climbing in the Lake District, and proceeded to alpine climbing. And secondly, rock-climbing and mountaineering are administratively and politically connected. I suspect that the former, which in Britain as often as not doesn't take place in mountains at all, now absorbs the major part of the public funds devoted to these matters. And it is predominantly on the British experience that I want to draw. (shrink)

I attempt to provide a new answer to the enduring question of why people take the acute risks of climbing mountains. In so doing, I aim to explain, but not necessarily justify, participation in suc...

Prior research on the psychology of retribution is complicated by the difficulty of separating retributive and general deterrence motives when studying human offenders . We isolate retribution by investigating judgments about punishing animals, which allows us to remove general deterrence from consideration. Studies 2 and 3 document a “victim identity” effect, such that the greater the perceived loss from a violent animal attack, the greater the belief that the culprit deserves to be killed. Study 3 documents a “targeted punishment” effect, (...) such that the responsive killing of the actual “guilty” culprit is seen as more deserved than the killing of an almost identical yet “innocent” animal from the same species. Studies 4 and 5 extend both effects to participants' acceptance of inflicting pain and suffering on the offending animal at the time of its death, and show that both effects are mediated by measures of retributive sentiment, and not by consequentialist concerns. (shrink)

This note points out a conflict between some common intuitions about metaphysical possibility. On the one hand, it is appealing to deny that there are robust counterfactuals about how various physically impossible substances would interact with the matter that exists at our world. On the other hand, our intuitions about how concepts like MOUNTAIN apply at other metaphysically possible worlds seem to presuppose facts about ‘solidity’ which cash out in terms of these counterfactuals. I consider several simple attempts to (...) resolve this conflict and note they all fall short. (shrink)

I examine Amie Thomasson’s account of the metaphysics of mountains and their boundaries, from her “Geographic Objects and the Science of Geography.” I begin by laying out a puzzle about mountains that generates some pressure towards accepting that we are somehow responsible for their having the boundaries that they do. As a foil for Thomasson’s own account, I present two competing theories of geographic objects—one on which they are thoroughly mind-dependent, and one on which they are thoroughly mind-independent—neither of which (...) yields a fully satisfying solution to the puzzle. I then turn to Thomasson’s intriguing suggestion that, although the geographic objects themselves are mind-independent, the boundaries of those objects are not. Finally, I examine whether Thomasson’s account is equipped to solve the puzzle, and I explore how her account interacts with her plenitudinous ontology. (shrink)

In the last decade there has been an upsurge in the popularity of electric mountain bikes. However, opinion is divided regarding the implications of this emerging technology. Critics warn of the dangers they pose to landscapes, habitats, and ecological diversity, whilst advocates highlight their potential in increasing the accessibility of the outdoors for riders who would otherwise be socially and/or physically excluded. Drawing on interview data with 30 electric mountain bike users in England, this paper represents one of (...) the first attempts to empirically explore the experiential, ecological and socio-cultural implications of this activity. Utilising Stiegler’s (2013a) account of the pharmakon, in which technology is positioned as both remedy and poison, we suggest that the e-mountain bike’s role in the promotion of social and environmental responsibility is both complex and contradictory. Specifically, findings indicate that while this assistive technology can play a key role in facilitating deeper connections between riders as well as an ethic of care towards others, it can, at the same time, generate more individualised and automated experiences of recreational mobility in outdoor environments. (shrink)

In the 19th century, a gradual reform of art education began, which achieved its peak in the 1930s. This process manifested itself in the form of schools with an explicit anti-academic spirit – the Bauhaus in Europe and Black Mountain College in the United States. In this paper, I contend that such attempt at reform has never repeated again after the Black Mountain College case, where the combination of John Dewey’s educational principles, Josef Albers’ peculiar conception of art (...) instruction, and the college founders’ ideas concerning the essentiality of art for contemporary democratic societies created a unique environment for the development of an experimental form of art education. Examining this innovation with regard to the current situation of teaching art and the humanities, I argue that - despite a process of reform lasted more than a hundred years - art education still manifests residues of the old, conservative academic spirit, while art schools show features of exclusivity or even elitism. The pursuit for a wholesome social position of art, on the other hand, was the most striking endeavour of many brilliant thinkers in 19th and 20th century, something that art educators and art theoreticians of the 21st century must take this into a serious consideration. (shrink)

In the 19th century, a gradual reform of art education began, which achieved its peak in the 1930s. This process manifested itself in the form of schools with an explicit anti-academic spirit – the Bauhaus in Europe and Black Mountain College in the United States. In this paper, I contend that such attempt at reform has never repeated again after the Black Mountain College case, where the combination of John Dewey’s educational principles, Josef Albers’ peculiar conception of art (...) instruction, and the college founders’ ideas concerning the essentiality of art for contemporary democratic societies created a unique environment for the development of an experimental form of art education. Examining this innovation with regard to the current situation of teaching art and the humanities, I argue that - despite a process of reform lasted more than a hundred years - art education still manifests residues of the old, conservative academic spirit, while art schools show features of exclusivity or even elitism. The pursuit for a wholesome social position of art, on the other hand, was the most striking endeavour of many brilliant thinkers in 19th and 20th century, something that art educators and art theoreticians of the 21st century must take this into a serious consideration. (shrink)

In the 19th century, a gradual reform of art education began, which achieved its peak in the 1930s. This process manifested itself in the form of schools with an explicit anti-academic spirit – the Bauhaus in Europe and Black Mountain College in the United States. In this paper, I contend that such attempt at reform has never repeated again after the Black Mountain College case, where the combination of John Dewey’s educational principles, Josef Albers’ peculiar conception of art (...) instruction, and the college founders’ ideas concerning the essentiality of art for contemporary democratic societies created a unique environment for the development of an experimental form of art education. Examining this innovation with regard to the current situation of teaching art and the humanities, I argue that - despite a process of reform lasted more than a hundred years - art education still manifests residues of the old, conservative academic spirit, while art schools show features of exclusivity or even elitism. The pursuit for a wholesome social position of art, on the other hand, was the most striking endeavour of many brilliant thinkers in 19th and 20th century, something that art educators and art theoreticians of the 21st century must take this into a serious consideration. (shrink)

In the 19th century, a gradual reform of art education began, which achieved its peak in the 1930s. This process manifested itself in the form of schools with an explicit anti-academic spirit – the Bauhaus in Europe and Black Mountain College in the United States. In this paper, I contend that such attempt at reform has never repeated again after the Black Mountain College case, where the combination of John Dewey’s educational principles, Josef Albers’ peculiar conception of art (...) instruction, and the college founders’ ideas concerning the essentiality of art for contemporary democratic societies created a unique environment for the development of an experimental form of art education. Examining this innovation with regard to the current situation of teaching art and the humanities, I argue that - despite a process of reform lasted more than a hundred years - art education still manifests residues of the old, conservative academic spirit, while art schools show features of exclusivity or even elitism. The pursuit for a wholesome social position of art, on the other hand, was the most striking endeavour of many brilliant thinkers in 19th and 20th century, something that art educators and art theoreticians of the 21st century must take this into a serious consideration. (shrink)

Recent studies of Michael Oakeshott have stressed the mutually constitutive importance of Hobbes to Oakeshott, arguing in part that Oakeshott's Hobbes largely reflected his own concerns and broader philosophical project. This article does not dispute this, but proposes a complementary account: Oakeshott's interpretation of Hobbes was also formed in large measure by both his sympathy for Leo Strauss's account and by his perception of it as the principal rival to his own. To demonstrate the existence of such a formative engagement, (...) a close reading of Oakeshott's essay The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes is undertaken. Not only is Oakeshott found to have absorbed much of Strauss's interpretation (surprisingly including Strauss's distinction between esoteric and exoteric doctrines), the key impetus of the essay is shown to be a refutation of Strauss's characterization of Hobbes as a 'moralist of the common good'. (shrink)

Whereas much has been written about the aetiology of transient mystical experiences, there has been too little analysis of the nature of the longer term and permanent shifts known generally as enlightenment, moksha, nirvana, or sometimes Christ Consciousness. This paper identifies two major and relatively common phases of such shifts. The Dualistic Mystical State is a permanent interior stillness that is maintained while one is either at rest or engaged in thought or activity. Five reasons are offered for the hypothesis (...) that the novel aspect of this state is not shaped, mediated, or formed by language, cultural beliefs, or expectations. In the second phase, the Unitive Mystical State , the felt boundaries between self and other have disappeared, and everything one encounters is experienced as connected with the stillness that previously was encountered as only interior. In addition to the five reasons offered previously, three additional factors militate for the hypothesis that language, expectations, or assumptions are unlikely to construct this unitive sense of non-differentness. Finally, the paper suggests that because of the change in social structure, in the future mystical teachers and leaders are likely to become more practical and connected with the everyday world and relationships than the traditional monkish and distant models. (shrink)

Using mountain climbing as a metaphor for building meaningful relationships with others, the author examines such topics as risk, facing fears, trust, asking for support, and letting go.

Black Mountain College is remembered as an artistic utopian alternative to institutional learning. Its faculty and students included some of the most important creative thinkers of the 20th century. Its foundation was built on the philosophy of “learning by doing.” But what made Black Mountain such a dynamic educational environment? Today, the financial burden of higher education places a lasting strain on students that inhibits creative growth. Does the educational structure of the college system impede our learning? Black (...) Mountain was a legendary educational experiment, which offers a model for contemporary art education. (shrink)

Mountain Mandalas: Shugend? in Ky?sh?, by Allan G. Grapard. Bloomsbury. 2016. 320 pp. Hb. £90. ISBN–13: 9781474249003. Pb. £31. ISBN-13: 9781350044937. Ebook £34.54. ISBN-13: 9781474249027.

ArgumentThe discovery of the Alps in the second half of the eighteenth century spawned an aesthetics of sublimity that enabled overwhelmed beholders of mountains to overcome their confusion symbolically by transforming initial speechlessness into pictures and words. When travelers ceased to be content with beholding mountains, however, and began climbing them, the sublime shudder turned into something else. In the snowy heights, all attempts to master symbolically the challenging landscape was thwarted by vertigo, somnolence, and fatigue. After 1850, physiologists intervened, (...) using the Alpine terrain as a laboratory landscape that was ideally suited to examine one of the most threatening concerns offin de siècleindustrial societies: fatigue. This essay examines how the picturesque voyage turned into an experimental physiology of fatigue, and how the “wordless subjectivity” of romantic travelers turned into the “wordless objectivity” of life scientists. (shrink)