ASHÉ: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic is a collection of interdisciplinary essays contributed by international scholars and practitioners. Having distinguished themselves across such disciplines as Anthropology, Art, Music, Literature, Dance, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and conjoined to construct a defining approach to the study of Aesthetics throughout the African Diaspora with the Humanities at the core, this collection of essays will break new ground in the study of Black Aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners, and (...) students interested in tracing African heritage identities throughout the African Diaspora through close examination of a variety of discourses directly connected to expressive elements of cultural production and religious rituals. (shrink)

ASHÉ: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic is a collection of interdisciplinary essays contributed by international scholars and practitioners. Having distinguished themselves across such disciplines as Anthropology, Art, Music, Literature, Dance, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and conjoined to construct a defining approach to the study of Aesthetics throughout the African Diaspora with the Humanities at the core, this collection of essays will break new ground in the study of Black Aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners, and (...) students interested in tracing African heritage identities throughout the African Diaspora through close examination of a variety of discourses directly connected to expressive elements of cultural production and religious rituals. (shrink)

This intimate account of how ideas get turned into artwork—including dance performance, film, sound installation, sculpture, and painting—looks at how the material thinking that art embodies produces new understandings about individuals, their histories, and the cultures they inhabit. Discussing the philosophy of signs (images, text, and their interaction), the psychology of visual perception, and the overarching notion of mythopoeic place-making, this intellectually wide-ranging and anecdotally narrated primer provides a fresh perspective to the concept of inventing. All active practitioners in the (...) fields of performance, media, film, museum, painting, sculpture, and cultural studies will benefit from this look at how artists participate in the conceptual invention of their world. (shrink)

In this remarkable and often dazzling book, Paul Carter explores the conditions for sociability in a globalized future. He argues that we make many assumptions about communication but overlook barriers to understanding between strangers as well as the importance of improvisation in overcoming these obstacles to meeting. While disciplines such as sociology, legal studies, psychology, political theory, and even urban planning treat meeting as a good in its own right, they fail to provide a model of what makes (...) meeting possible and worth pursuing: a yearning for encounter. The volume's central narrative-between Northern cultural philosophers and Australian societies-traverses the troubled history of misinterpretation that is characteristic of colonial cross-cultural encounter. As he brings the literature of Indigenous and non-Indigenous anthropological research into dialogue with Western approaches of conceptualizing sociability, Carter makes a startling discovery: that meeting may not be desirable and, if it is, its primary objective may be to negotiate a future of non-meeting. To explain the phenomenon of encounter, Carter performs it in differing scales, spaces, languages, tropes, and forms of knowledge, staging in the very language of the book what he calls "passages." In widely varying contexts, these passages posit the disjunction of Greco-Roman and Indigenous languages, codes, theatrics of power, social systems, and visions of community. In an era of new forms of technosocialization, Carter offers novel ways of presenting the philosophical dimensions of waiting, meeting, and non-meeting. (shrink)

Druma-kinnara-ra ja-pariprccha-sutra: A critical edition of the Tibetan text based on eight editions of the Kanjur and the Dunhuang Manuscript Fragment. Paul Harrison., The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 5-3-23 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo 105, 1992. lvii, 360 pp.

Foregrounding the extent to which 'place' remains resistant to the politics and poetics of 'network culture', this essay approaches place as a boundary ecology rather than as an instance of cultural invariance. It calls on readers to think about attempts to actively recycle cultural 'debris' or 'waste' through an ethics of passage instead of the kind of instrumentalist statics that prevents the development of an ontology of mobility. Con-tending that such a capacity to inhabit passage is compromised by the eschatological (...) language used to communicate the implications of environmental disaster, as well as by languages of consultation that empty place of any creative power to incubate alternatives – events, modes of relation –, the essay stresses the mythopoetic techniques that produce places as knots or nodal points within a network of passage. The designer's task is to create the hinge mechanisms that render such boundary ecologies inhabitable imaginatively, and by materialising the nexus between creativity and change to alter our position vis-a-vis our ethical responsibilities as citizens of a shared biosphere. (shrink)

Data platforms represent a new paradigm for carrying out health research. In the platform model, datasets are pooled for remote access and analysis, so novel insights for developing better stratified and/or personalised medicine approaches can be derived from their integration. If the integration of diverse datasets enables development of more accurate risk indicators, prognostic factors, or better treatments and interventions, this obviates the need for the sharing and reuse of data; and a platform-based approach is an appropriate model for facilitating (...) this. Platform-based approaches thus require new thinking about consent. Here we defend an approach to meeting this challenge within the data platform model, grounded in: the notion of ‘reasonable expectations’ for the reuse of data; Waldron’s account of ‘integrity’ as a heuristic for managing disagreement about the ethical permissibility of the approach; and the element of the social contract that emphasises the importance of public engagement in embedding new norms of research consistent with changing technological realities. While a social contract approach may sound appealing, however, it is incoherent in the context at hand. We defend a way forward guided by that part of the social contract which requires public approval for the proposal and argue that we have moral reasons to endorse a wider presumption of data reuse. However, we show that the relationship in question is not recognisably contractual and that the social contract approach is therefore misleading in this context. We conclude stating four requirements on which the legitimacy of our proposal rests. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to evaluate auditors’ perceived responsibility for fraud detection. Auditors play a critical role in managing fraud risk within organizations. Although professional standards and guidance prescribe responsibility in the area, little is known about auditors’ sense of responsibility for fraud detection, the factors affecting perceived responsibility, and how responsibility affects auditor performance. We use the triangle model of responsibility as a theoretical basis for examining responsibility and the effects of accountability, fraud type, and auditor type (...) on auditors’ perceived fraud detection responsibility. We also test how perceived responsibility affects auditor brainstorming performance given the importance of brainstorming in audits. A sample of 878 auditors participated in an experiment with accountability pressure and fraud type manipulated randomly between subjects. As predicted, accountable auditors report higher detection responsibility than anonymous auditors. We also find a significant fraud type × auditor type interaction with external auditors perceiving the most detection responsibility for financial statement fraud, while internal auditors report similar detection responsibility for all fraud types. Analysis of the triangle model’s formative links reveals that professional obligation and personal control are significantly related to responsibility, while task clarity is not. Finally, the results indicate that perceived responsibility positively affects the number of detection procedures brainstormed and partially mediates the significant accountability–brainstorming relation. (shrink)

Art in Theory 1648-1815 provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Across the world, pain is under-treated in emergency departments. We canvass the literature testifying to this problem, the reasons why this problem is so important, and then some of the main hypotheses that have been advanced in explanation of the problem. We then argue for the plausibility of two new hypotheses: pain's under-treatment in the ED is due partly to an epistemic preference for signs over symptoms on the part of some practitioners, and some ED practices that themselves worsen pain (...) by increasing patients' anxiety and fear. Our argument includes the following logic. Some ED practitioners depart from formal guidance in basing their acute pain assessments on observable features rather than on patient reports of pain. This is potentially due to an epistemic preference for signs over symptoms which aims to circumvent intentional and/or unintentional misrepresentation on the part of patients. However, conducting pain assessments in line with this epistemic preference contributes to the under-treatment of pain in at least three respects, which we detail. Moreover, it may do little to help the practitioner circumvent any intentional misrepresentation on the part of the patient, as we explain. Second, we examine at least four ED practices that may be contributing to the under-treatment of pain by increasing patient anxiety and fear, which can worsen pain. These practices include failing to provide orienting information and partially objectifying patients so as to problem-solve along lines pre-established by modern medical science. We conclude by touching on some potential solutions for ED practice. (shrink)

Mahāyāna sūtras are obviously texts in the conventional sense of the word, but how they work as texts, the purposes they serve, and the manner in which they are constructed have so far attracted comparatively little sustained theoretical attention of the sort that goes beyond specific examples. This paper addresses itself to two well-known formal features of this voluminous genre which have yet to receive the critical reflection they deserve. The first is a pervasive self-referentiality, taking various forms, some of (...) them fairly straightforward, even banal, others highly challenging and paradoxical in their effect. The second feature is the use of formulas and lists, not singly, but in combination, in a way which expands a theme along two or more axes or vectors concurrently. These two features, while by no means exhaustive of all the things that make Mahāyāna sūtras the distinctive type of scripture they are, provide evidence of a passion for complexity which seems to be part of their DNA. Intensely generative of ever greater amounts of text, these features blur and even erase the boundaries between the creators of texts, the writers and speakers, and their consumers, the readers and hearers. In this paper they are explored with special reference to a small number of sūtras, some of which are demonstrably early productions of the Mahāyāna movement. (shrink)

This study examines the form and function of gestural depictions that develop over extended stretches of concept explanation by a philosopher. Building onStreeck’s (2009)explorations of depiction by gesture, we examine how this speaker’s process of exposition involves sequences of multimodal, analogical depiction by which the philosophical concepts are not only expressed through gesture forms, but also dynamically analyzed and construed through gestural activity. Drawing on perspectives of gesture as active meaning making (Müller 2014,2016,Streeck 2009), we argue that the build-up of (...) gestures in depiction sequences, activated through a multimodal metaphor (Müller & Cienki 2009), engages the wider philosophical standpoint of the speaker. Using video analysis supported by interview data, we demonstrate how examination of gestures within and across discourse can lead to understanding of how dynamic, embodied, and subjective processes of conceptualization contribute to philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nonviolence—A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures by John Howard YoderCarter AikinNonviolence—A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures John Howard Yoder Edited By Paul Martens, Matthew Porter, and Myles Werntz Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010. 150 pp. $29.95This helpful collection of lectures, delivered during a 1983 Polish Ecumenical Council (PEC) conference in Warsaw, displays John Howard Yoder’s emerging conviction that nonviolent action is not only a faithful response (...) but also an anthropologically natural and effective instrument of social change. Yoder constructively narrates the joining of theological and philosophical clarity about the importance of nonviolence with realizations of its social effectiveness as this connection blossomed in the turmoil of the twentieth century.The introduction nicely situates these lectures in their original social and ecumenical contexts, both of which turn out to be tremendously important. Yoder gave these lectures just weeks before Pope John Paul II met with the PEC for the first time and during the period when the US Catholic Bishop’s letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” was being formed. Additionally, in 1983 the vulnerable Polish Communist Party was trying to suppress the rising Solidarity Movement, the country’s first noncommunist trade union. The movement’s protests and strikes had only recently gained media attention [End Page 216] and had, thus far, stopped short of violence. In its setting alone, the collection offers a Yoder rarely seen through his modern interpreters: Yoder is socially relevant in the highest degree, concerned with the effectiveness of non-violence as a means of change, more than willing to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian masters, and attentive to the response of the entire church catholic. Here Yoder is no more the resident alien than Martin Luther King Jr. was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.Yoder begins with a three-lecture equation: Tolstoy + Gandhi = MLK. Tolstoy’s corrective interpretations of the Gospels—emphasizing the personhood of Jesus and “the ‘key’ to the Scripture message: the cure for evil is suffering” (21)—used nonviolence and the suffering of the persecuted as the fabric of moral progress. Gandhi “moves with Tolstoy, but beyond him” (24); he sees the power of truth and suffering as a natural force of good. Martin Luther King Jr. becomes Tolstoy + Gandhi, championing the power of love and non-violence as faithful but also practical and metaphysically natural. Much of the book provides theological, scriptural, socioanthropological, and historical arguments for why this is the case. Yoder’s treatments of the “powers” (chap. 8), just war (chap. 4), and the political nature of Jesus (chap. 7) are all paralleled elsewhere, but their inclusion is important to the modern reader who wishes to trace the logic of Yoder’s present argument and the evolution of his overall thought.In the closing chapters Yoder turns to flourishing nonviolence movements in Roman Catholicism that exhibit a “restoration of original Christianity” (120). He highlights several facets of Catholic nonviolent spirituality including the valuing of the cultivation of virtues (and the people who best exhibit them), the growth of the nonviolence movement among American Catholics, and the emergence of the Catholic Worker movement. In the final two chapters, Yoder brings into conversation a few Western theologians, the “increasingly important” products of American bishops (especially in their argument for the limits of just war thinking in the nuclear age), and two prophetic Latin American theologians: Dom Hélder Câmara and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. Together this assembled chorus expresses the unique and hope-giving character of modern Catholic theologies of nonviolence: “love, not violence... will have the last word in history” (145).As a collection these lectures represent a part of Yoder’s emerging hope in the natural logic of nonviolence and its potential for effective social change. The fact that these lectures were delivered in such a highly charged setting provides a courageous and pastoral backdrop for what amounts to a rich metaphysics of nonviolence. [End Page 217]Carter AikinHastings CollegeCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

"In this study, James R. Harrison compares the modern cult of celebrity to the quest for glory in late republican and early imperial society. He shows how Paul's ethic of humility, based upon the crucified Christ, stands out in a world obsessed with mutual comparison, boasting, and self-sufficiency." --.

Reviews : John Rawls, Political Liberalism, ; Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des deomkratischen Rechtstaats, ; Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moraliscben Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, ; Philosophy of Mind: Theory and Practice, ; Gunnar Skirbekk, Rationality and Modernity: Essays in Pbilosopbical Pragmatics, ; Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition".

Can popular Christian apologetics be public philosophy? This paper argues that it can be partly because the criteria for what counts as public philosophy are so vague but also partly because popular Christian apologetics parallels much that counts as public philosophy both in terms of its historical roots in Socrates but also how public philosophy is practiced now. In particular, there are parallels on the role of amateurs vs. professionals, the sorts of topics, the quality of the discussions, and the (...) passion vs. the neutrality of its practitioners. (shrink)

Reviews : John Rawls, Political Liberalism, ; Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des deomkratischen Rechtstaats, ; Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moraliscben Grammatik sozialer Konflikte, ; Philosophy of Mind: Theory and Practice, ; Gunnar Skirbekk, Rationality and Modernity: Essays in Pbilosopbical Pragmatics, ; Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition".

This paper is about two topics: metaepistemological absolutism and the epistemic principles governing perceptual warrant. Our aim is to highlight—by taking the debate between dogmatists and conservativists about perceptual warrant as a case study—a surprising and hitherto unnoticed problem with metaepistemological absolutism, at least as it has been influentially defended by Paul Boghossian as the principal metaepistemological contrast point to relativism. What we find is that the metaepistemological commitments at play on both sides of this dogmatism/conservativism debate do not (...) line up with epistemic relativism nor do they line up with absolutism, at least as Boghossian articulates this position. What this case study reveals is the need in metaepistemological option space for the recognition of a weaker and less tendentious form of absolutism, what we call “environment relativism”. On this view, epistemic principles are knowable, objective, and they can serve as the basis of particular epistemic evaluations, but their validity is relative to the wider global environment in which they are applied. (shrink)