This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Selections of roughly equal length have been included from the Greeks, the Bible, Augustine, Bodin, Vico, Herder, and Hegel. Polybius is the best represented of the Greeks; excerpts from Thucydides total only a page and a half. Tillinghast admits to being an historian rather than a philosopher, and his introductions to each set of readings are seldom profound. While one may lament the necessary brevity of all the selections and dispute some of the choices, the editor has succeeded in (...) producing a reasonably balanced, inexpensive volume for beginners in the philosophy of history.--W. L. M. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 4, Page 434-444, May 2022.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography by Ali ShobeiriElizabeth. L. CoxPlace: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography BY ALI SHOBEIRI Leiden, The Netherlands: Leiden University Press, 2021In his most recent work, Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography, Ali Shobeiri skilfully demonstrates both the importance of, and fluid ways in which, place plays a dynamic role in the understanding and stories nestled within the seeing and evaluating of photographs and (...) photography. Bringing together the worlds of photography, geography, and philosophy to create an interdisciplinary theoretical understanding of place in relation to photography, Shobeiri has expertly unearthed a nuanced, exciting way of considering the photographic process and images.Shobeiri, an Assistant Professor of Photographic Studies and Visual Arts Theory at Leiden University, brings his knowledge and expertise of visual culture, photographic theory, human geography, and philosophy to the fore in his latest publication. His knowledge, passion, personal interest in photography, and his critical thought come through nicely in his writing, and it is clear that the development of Shobeiri’s ideas and framework have been given a lot of thought, time, and energy. This book meaningfully speaks to those interested in a discussion of place within the realm of photography, evidenced through the depth of knowledge and sheer detail explored within this book.Inspired by his own experience as a photographer and influenced by Edward Casey’s “delimited” definition of place, Shobeiri explores how place is never simply presented or fixed (11). It is here that he expertly uses photography to do this across six different yet clearly complimentary chapters. Critically, there is no way to give a succinct overview of the chapters of this book without losing meaning and diluting Shobeiri’s message; the book is rich, deeply detailed, embedded within philosophical thought, and is nuanced throughout, which is important to remember when reading this non- fiction piece of work.In the first chapter, Shobeiri provides a phenomenological exploration of the importance of the photographer’s body both as a lived experience and a physical entity. He then juxtaposes this duality to the lived [End Page 136] place of the photograph, returning to the notion of fixedness and using the idea of belonging to explore the photographer’s body and the photographic experience as a lived place. The next chapter discusses spatiality and time, and the way in which space is temporalized, using key influences such as Roland Barthes and Susan Collins to illustrate the argument. Central to this is the idea that a photograph captures time, but also aims at space, which raises questions about what this means for the space before the lens. In chapters 3 and 4, the author argues that the photograph itself travels through space, and highlights the importance of the photographic place, allowing us to “bestow meaning upon that space on the photograph’s surface” (67). Interestingly, Shobeiri points to philosophy to help the reader understand this, such as Jacques Derrida, and uses more familiar images and scholarly thought from NASA to discuss blind field and the liminality of photographic place. Chapter 5 moves away from location and journeys the reader to a discussion of places viewed as moment of encounter, specifically considering the spectator and the photograph. This evolves further in the sixth and final chapter insofar as it explores the transition and translation of the photographed place to the communication of the content of the image and the agency of the photograph. Shobeiri finishes with a simple yet engaging epilogue, several helpful notes, and a plethora of references which are useful for further reading.Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography is genuinely interesting, centred within academic scholarship, and employs the thought of theorists that readers of Environment, Space, Place will undoubtably recognise. Scholarly figureheads such as Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, and Michel Foucault, space and place authorities such as Tim Cresswell, Tim Ingold, and Doreen Massey, and art aficionados such as Roland Barthes, Susan Collins, and John Berger frequent the pages. Familiar artistic names are also drawn upon, including Ansel Adams, Gert Jan Kocken, and Gerhard Richter, which soften the strong academic tones that this book voices. This work is clearly sophisticated in terms of lexicon and ideas, however... (shrink)

There are differences in caregivers’ literacy and health literacy levels that may affect their ability to consent to children participating in clinical research trials. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness, and caregivers’ understandings, of the process of informed consent that accompanied their child’s participation in a dental randomized control trial (RCT). Telephone interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of ten caregivers who each had a child participating in the RCT. Pre-tested closed and open-ended questions were used, and the (...) findings were produced from an inductive analysis of the latter and a descriptive analysis of the former. Participants had limited understanding of the purpose of the RCT and rated the readability of the consent form more highly than they rated their understanding of the research. All felt that informed consent was vital, but some caregivers had not read the consent documents. Some caregivers enrolled their child in the RCT because they trusted the researchers, and the majority wanted to improve dental care for children. The informed consent process was not always effective despite high readability of the informed consent documents. Researchers must consider the health literacy of the study group, and actively engaging with caregivers to achieve meaningful informed consent may be challenging. Future research could explore participants’ perspectives of informed consent in populations with low health literacy and assess whether an underlying expectation not to comprehend health-related information may be a barrier to informed consent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 107-124 [Access article in PDF] Shakespeare and Political Philosophy John D. Cox Though Shakespeare has been praised as one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, he has no standing in the history of Western philosophy, being at best a footnote to the derivative neo-Platonists and skeptics of the late Renaissance. He died in 1616, more than twenty years before Descartes's Discourse on Method (...) heralded the autonomous rationalism of the Enlightenment, and Shakespeare did not achieve a reputation as a deep thinker until the nineteenth century, as a consequence of admiration for his characters. People seemed to think that a reflective and witty prince who could say to his friend, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" must be the product of a keenly philosophical intelligence—never mind that Hamlet is referring to the "antique Roman" philosophy he so admires in Horatio, i.e., Stoicism, which by 1599 was little more than an oft-repeated set of moral and social platitudes. 1 To assert that there are more things in heaven and earth than late Renaissance Stoicism is not to assert very much.But other ways of thinking about Shakespeare philosophically are more promising than character analysis. He was indeed a thoughtful playwright, and though he had no university education, he was a voracious and incisive reader, so the influences on his plays and poems include many writers who have some standing in the history of philosophy. More complex than discerning historical philosophical influences on Shakespeare is what might be called the hermeneutical approach, i.e., the interpretation of the plays and poems with particular philosophers and philosophies in mind, regardless of their possible historical influence in the sixteenth century. To survey the range of philosophical influences and hermeneutical approaches is impossible [End Page 107] in a single essay, but a manageable example of Shakespeare's thinking is his political philosophy, where both ways of understanding him can be discerned. The most influential interpreter of Shakespeare's history plays for the second half of the twentieth century, for example, was E. M. W. Tillyard, who purported to excavate the neo-Platonic assumptions of Shakespeare's political culture: order, degree, hierarchy, and obedience. 2 Though questions were increasingly raised concerning Tillyard's assumptions and documentation, the decisive challenge to his authority was issued in the 1980s by New Historicists and Cultural Materialists, whose allegiance was more or less explicitly Marxist, and who therefore interpreted Shakespeare in light of a particular nineteenth-century philosophy. 3 A clearer example of the difference between history and hermeneutics in understanding Shakespeare is hard to imagine.The clarity of the difference, however, does not mean that the two approaches are mutually exclusive. Tillyard construed Shakespeare's emphasis on hierarchical order as an advocacy of divine-right monarchy, and much in the plays of Shakespeare supports this construal. Despite his sympathetic portraits of particular characters, including commoners, remarks in his plays about commoners taken together ("the people") are always slighting and mistrustful—often indeed scornful—and the proportion of upper-class to lower-class characters reflects their perceived social importance, for the former invariably outnumber the latter, even in the comedies, whereas the aristocracy were a tiny fraction of the total population in Shakespeare's England. Shakespeare's portrayal of pre-imperial Rome, in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, shows little understanding of, and less sympathy with, republican alternatives to one-person rule. Shakespeare was not responsive to Calvin's spirited defense of the "poor common people" against rapacious kings (even, or especially, under godly magistrates), and Shakespeare's plays offer no support to the nascent republicanism of those who took arms against the king of England in the mid-seventeenth century, largely inspired by Calvinism. 4 Shakespeare, in short, was no Milton.This is not to say, however, that he was an uncritically idealizing royalist, as we can see from his first venture into writing about English history: his four early plays on the civil unrest of the fifteenth century. Three of these plays... (shrink)

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1621-1631.

Ethics and Sustainability: Guest or Guide? On Sustainability as a Moral Ideal Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9322-6 Authors Franck L. B. Meijboom, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13a, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands Frans W. A. Brom, Ethics Institute, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13a, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Realism & Anti-Realism: John Dewey and the NeopragmatistsAndrew W. HowatDavid L. Hildebrand Beyond Realism & Anti-Realism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003. xii + 241 pp.In this book David Hildebrand provides a spirited defence of the philosophy of John Dewey, a defence he claims is faithful to his actual views and contrary to those of the "neopragmatists," specifically Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. (...) Hildebrand rejects the neopragmatist assumption that Dewey's oeuvre can support one or other side of the realism/anti-realism debate, at least without obscuring some of Dewey's vital insights. In particular, he thinks Rorty and Putnam miss the centrality and significance of Dewey's "Practical Starting Point" for philosophy and his understanding of key concepts such as "knowledge," "experience" and "inquiry." He argues that when taken together these insights show that Dewey transcends traditional debates about realism, and that this was the essence of his pragmatism.The first two chapters set out Dewey's views in the context of his contemporaries (especially the New and Critical Realists). They emphasise the radical nature of Dewey's position; that it aimed to supplant the well-established philosophical dualisms and debates of the day. Chapters Three and Four recount and criticise how Rorty and Putnam employ Dewey's insights to support near-opposite ends of the realism/anti-realism debate. The final chapter summarises and recapitulates the central themes and arguments of the book.Hildebrand describes his motivating worries as "pedagogical" and "political." If contemporary pragmatists serve as authorities on the subject, [End Page 296] this threatens to occlude the significance of classical texts for new students. This would be unfortunate, as those original texts are beautiful pieces of philosophy. Moreover, there is the danger that contemporary 'authorities' on pragmatism are mistaken, or have their own distorting agenda. It is thus vital that students and professionals continue to study original texts, gaining a grasp on this subtle and rewarding era of philosophy first-hand.Hildebrand's argument is immediately plausible, given that misinterpretations and caricatures of classical pragmatism are sadly common and familiar. It is also novel however, as it asserts pragmatism's foremost contemporary representatives are also guilty of misinterpretation. Hildebrand courts controversy, concluding his introduction by saying the neopragmatists "misuse central epistemological and metaphysical views of classical pragmatism for their own ends, all the while sustaining dualisms that the classical pragmatists fought to dissolve." This book may polarise opinion about Hildebrand's success, if so contemporary debate about pragmatism should be enriched.Readers may enjoy the novel account of New and Critical Realism in Chapter One, movements of which I knew nothing before reading the book. Hildebrand uses these movements to locate Dewey historically and dialectically amid the popular realism & idealism of his time. He demonstrates Dewey's views clearly diverged from those of his contemporaries, despite some of their best efforts to assimilate them for their realist or idealist cause. His main argument concerns Dewey's view that New Realists were responsible for hypostatising the faculties of knowledge and perception and conflating their products, resulting in paradoxical psychophysical dualism. They claimed that knowledge "can be simply had, in an instant," while Dewey insisted that "knowledge is an achievement, the eventual, alembicated product of inquiry," and that contrary to the way New Realists made it sound "Knowledge is never received like manna from heaven." Dewey's work on the reflex arc illustrated that perception is similarly an active or participatory process, though its products are distinct from those of knowledge. Hildebrand argues Dewey was trying to show how such mistakes created two crippling problems for New Realism: the problem of illusion and relapse into the very idealism the movement was designed to refute.Chapter Two concerns aspects of Dewey's views which realists (New and Critical) considered at odds with their own, implying too close an affinity with idealism. Like its predecessor this chapter would benefit from more (or better) examples to help elucidate Dewey's sometimes oblique prose. The dialectic is often highly abstract, focusing on such notions as the given (versus Dewey's preferred "taken"), Dewey's unusual understanding of temporal epistemology (knowledge of past... (shrink)

Although American scholars sometimes consider European legal scholarship as old-fashioned and inward-looking and Europeans often perceive American legal scholarship as amateur social science, both traditions share a joint challenge. If legal scholarship becomes too much separated from practice, legal scholars will ultimately make themselves superfluous. If legal scholars, on the other hand, cannot explain to other disciplines what is academic about their research, which methodologies are typical, and what separates proper research from mediocre or poor research, they will probably end (...) up in a similar situation. Therefore we need a debate on what unites legal academics on both sides of the Atlantic. Should legal scholarship aspire to the status of a science and gradually adopt more and more of the methods, (quality) standards, and practices of other (social) sciences? What sort of methods do we need to study law in its social context and how should legal scholarship deal with the challenges posed by globalization?" -- Page i. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 60-62.

Like many recent works in legal theory, especially those focusing on the apparently conflicting schools of legal positivism and natural law, Waluchow’s Inclusive Legal Positivism begins by admitting a degree of perplexity about the field; indeed, he suggests that the field has fallen into “chaos”. Disturbingly, those working within legal theory appear most uncertain about what the tasks of their field are. Legal philosophers often seem to suspect strongly that at least their colleagues in the field are confused about those (...) tasks. As a result, many recent books in legal theory are in large part exercises in legal metatheory, devoting many pages to attempts to define the purposes and goals of the field. Waluchow follows this trend and begins by expressing a desire to clarify the issues that separate those trying to give an account of the nature of law. His ultimate goal is to defend a version of legal positivism, inclusive legal positivism, that he thinks is at least implicit in H. L. A. Hart’s work. (shrink)

Les Dialectes Doriens, Phonétique et Morphologic. Thèse d'Agrégation presentée á la Faculté de Philosophic et Lettres de l'Université de Bruxelles, par Émile Boisacq, Docteur en Philosophie et Lettres. Paris, Érnest Thorin, 1891. 220 pages.Der Dialekt Megaras, und der Megarischen Colonien Friedrich von Köppner.—Besondere Abdruck aus dem achtzehnten Supplementbande der ‘Jahrbücher für classische Philologie.’ Leipzig, Teubner, 1891. Pp. 530–563. 1 Mk.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The following notes refer constantly to E. R. Dodds' Bacchae , which forms a valuable basis for study of the play; the passages discussed are those where I find myself in disagreement with Dodds' notes or with some new conjecture to offer, but everywhere my debt to the material he has assembled is very great. Recently W. S. Barrett's Hippolytos has illuminated a number of dark corners, providing a wealth of Euripidean parallels, metrical and linguistic; not least valuable is the (...) light it throws on the variants of a better-transmitted play, and on the ancestry of our texts. I am grateful to my colleague J. W. Roberts for help and encouragement with the first draft of these notes. Subsequently Professor D. L. Page was kind enough to read parts of my manuscript, clarifying a number of metrical problems for me and adding several invaluable suggestions. Both he and Professor K. J. Dover have saved me from many errors; for those that remain the blame is mine alone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Mettle of Moral Fundamentalism: A Reply to Robert Baker*Tom L. Beauchamp (bio)AbstractThis article is a reply to Robert Baker’s attempt to rebut moral fundamentalism, while grounding international bioethics in a form of contractarianism. Baker is mistaken in several of his interpretations of the alleged moral fundamentalism and findings of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. He also misunderstands moral fundamentalism generally and wrongly categorizes it as morally (...) bankrupt. His negotiated contract model is, in the final analysis, itself a form of the moral fundamentalism he declares bankrupt.Robert baker’s imaginative and incisive articles on international bioethics (Baker 1998a & b) are rich in history and philosophy, but they are as profoundly misguided as they are misdirected. In this comment, I will concentrate both on a pivotal interpretation and criticism that he offers of the Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE 1996) and on his philosophical thesis that a moral fundamentalism of principles and rights is bankrupt. Baker seriously misinterprets the ACHRE report, distorts and fails to refute moral fundamentalism, and ultimately embraces a form of the very fundamentalism that he declares bankrupt. These three topics are connected in that Baker’s misconceptions of the ACHRE report launch his critique of moral fundamentalism and his mistaken understanding of moral fundamentalism drives his critique of the ACHRE report. 1 [End Page 389]Some Misunderstandings of the Human Radiation CommitteeBaker proclaims a conflict between ACHRE’s moral fundamentalism and multiculturalism. He presents this conflict as primarily a factual issue regarding whether different cultures and eras accept different moral principles—“the difference claim,” in his vernacular (Baker 1998a, pp. 208–9). This interpretation eventuates in a critique of the work of both ACHRE and Ruth Macklin:[W]hen Macklin and the Radiation Committee consider the challenge of multiculturalism, they construe this challenge, not as dispute about anthropological fact, but as a dispute about philosophical theory. More specifically, they treat any assertion of the difference claim as a form of “ethical relativism.”... They thus respond to the multiculturalist’s factual observations—even to factual observations by anthropologists—as if they were philosophical analyses.(Baker 1998a, p. 209)Baker thinks that a factual question has been fallaciously transformed into a philosophical one. However, this false dilemma is a figment of his fancy. He provides no citation to ACHRE to show that it holds this view, and for an understandable reason: This position is neither stated nor presumed in the Report. ACHRE is quite clear that relativism involves both an anthropological (I would prefer to say historical) dispute about fact and a philosophical dispute about value—and that they are not the same.The Committee and its staff proceeded as follows: They first collected a large body of historical documents and facts about the practices, policies, and values that prevailed during the period they were studying. Chapters 1 through 3 and 5 through 13, 12 of the Report’s 18 chapters, display the results of this empirical work. The Committee concluded, on this basis, that research investigators and government officials were aware of the obligations generated by universal principles. The ACHRE report specifically lists six “basic” moral principles and maintains that these principles were pervasively recognized at the time of the radiation experiments (ACHRE 1996, pp. 114ff, 124). ACHRE received testimony, conducted interviews, and compiled documents that indicated how deeply these principles were woven into the fabric of American culture at the time, so deeply that no responsible research investigator could have been unaware of them. ACHRE did not move beyond its list of six principles to a broader thesis about the (factual) universality of other principles and did not examine other cultures or periods of history; such work would [End Page 390] have exceeded ACHRE’s mandate and would have done more to obscure than to further its arguments.ACHRE also found that some government officials had attempted to hide their wrongdoing—a clear indication that these officials were aware of the relevant moral principles and knew that they should not have been treating persons as they did (ACHRE 1996, pp. 152–53; Chapman 1946). These factual findings were not armchair philosophy or empirical guesswork... (shrink)

Professor P. Bernays has kindly drawn my attention to the fact that the assignment of Godel numbers to formulas described on page 295 of volume I of this Journal, is not correct. Under this assignment, different formulas may obtain the same Godel number and therefore the argument given on page 296 under (i) is not cogent. The correct assignment would give, for the formula considered as an example, the Godel number 28. 320. 514. 782 The correction to be (...) made on page 294, L 20 is obvious. (shrink)

Professor P. Bernays has kindly drawn my attention to the tact that the assignment of Gödel numbers to formulas described on page 295 of volume I of this Journal, is not correct. Under this assignment, different formulas may obtain the same Gödel number and therefore the argument given on page 296 under (i) is not cogent. The correct assignment would give, for the formula considered as an example, the Gödel number 23. 329. 514. 732 The correction to be (...) made on page 294, l. 20 is obvious. (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a foreclosed (...) home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Refusals of Treatment and Requests for DeathTom L. Beauchamp (bio)It would be hard to overestimate the importance of two decisions on physician-assisted suicide delivered recently by the Ninth and Second Circuit Courts (Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc), aff’g 850 F.Supp. 1454 (W.D. Wash. 1994), rev’g 49 F.3d 586 (9th Cir. 1995); Quill v. Vacco, 80 F.3d 716 (2nd Cir. (...) 1996). They are the highest courts yet to render an opinion on this subject, and their decisions have set the stage for the U.S. Supreme Court to take one of two paths: It will either say that (1) all citizens have a liberty interest in physician-assisted suicide, or that (2) each state may set its own policy on such matters. Whichever path is elected, a right to request physician-assisted suicide is a virtual certainty, at least in some states.These opinions are later segments of an evolving legal history in which courts have held that no criminal liability exists for withholding or withdrawing a life-sustaining treatment when physicians are directed to do so by a patient or an authorized surrogate (see Alan Meisel 1992). The decriminalization of suicide and the right to refuse a life-sustaining treatment now appear to be evolving into a rule that a patient has a legal right to control his or her death, or at least to obtain a lethal prescription. We are at a delicate point in this evolving history. Neither in law nor in bioethics is the justification of physician assistance in suicide the received opinion at the present time, but support for physician assistance in dying could soon become the received opinion in both disciplines.The leading edge of the wedge producing these changes has been widespread acceptance of an extensive right to refuse treatment. This right is today axiomatic in even conservative quarters of bioethics, but 20 years ago it was far from axiomatic that all patients have a right to refuse treatment. Few at that time judged that it would be both immoral and illegal for a physician not to forgo treatment in the face of a competent, authoritative refusal of any form of medical service or treatment.The justification for assistance in bringing about death in medicine is an extension of the justification for letting patients die. Letting a patient die by accepting a valid refusal to continue in life is directly analogous to helping a patient die by accepting a valid request for help. The high value we place on [End Page 371] rights of autonomy thereby spills over from the right to refuse to the underexplored right to request active assistance. 1 As the autonomy interest in this choice increases, denial of help to the patient becomes more burdensome.Those who defend the view that euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are morally prohibited typically assume that assistance involves an act of killing, that acts of killing are impermissible, and that a defensible distinction exists between killing and letting die. However, this distinction has proved difficult to explicate, and the category of killing often seems distant from the problem at hand. For example, it is an eccentric view that a physician who prescribes a lethal medication to a patient thereby kills the patient (or, for that matter, lets the patient die) when the patient voluntarily ingests the medication and dies. So poor are the conceptual understandings of “killing” and “letting die” that conceptual confusion abounds as to which term to use in almost all morally difficult and controversial cases.A common view is that “letting die” is a matter of “ceasing useless treatments” after which patients die (Gaylin, Kass, Pellegrino, and Siegler 1988). This account is attractive, but too narrow. “Letting die” occurs in medicine under at least two circumstances: cessation of treatment because it is useless and cessation of treatment because it has been refused (which can occur even with useful treatments). Neither conceptually nor morally is “ceasing useless treatment” the proper way to state the condition under which many “letting-die” cases occur. It follows that the type of action—killing or letting... (shrink)

At the time of writing L'Être et le Néant, Sartre intended both to give a new account of human experience and action, and, subsequently, to offer a ‘new morality’. It is clear that he wished to keep the two enterprises separate, the former not entailing the latter but also that they would together form an integrated Weltanschauung, as he puts it. But Sartre's philosophical account of human life cannot, I shall argue, be integrated with any morality whatsoever, since his account (...) really entails the impossibility of the moral life. It is not surprising that doubts about what remains of morality, once the Sartrean picture has been accepted, are prominent in the last pages of L'Être et le Néant; I intend to show that they deserve more serious attention than some commentators have thought, and that the major problem over Sartre's moral philosophy is not the interpretation of authenticity but the investigation of his account of moral choice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 317-322 [Access article in PDF] On Wolfgang Blankenburg, Common Sense, and Schizophrenia Aaron L. Mishara Introduction In its increasing openness to neuroscience (Cowan, Harter, and Kandel 2000) and other of its neighboring disciplines, mainstream biological psychiatry has allowed psychopathology, philosophy, and philosophical approaches to psychopathology to play an increased role in current research interests. Given this new openness, and the acknowledgment of the (...) severity of one of psychiatry's most debilitating, costly, and intractable disorders, 1 the translation of W. Blankenburg's 1969 article concerning the psychopathology of common sense does not merely serve historical interest. It is an exceptional example of a not well-known trend in German- and French-speaking psychiatry to apply philosophical phenomenology and existentialism to psychopathological research. This trend, which reached a peak in the late 1950s and was strong well into the 1970s, has dwindling, but nevertheless, current representatives in Heidelberg and Zurich and is scattered in a few other places in Europe, Japan, the United States, and South America. The view of the Zeitgeist—which may sound astonishing, even antiquated to contemporary readers—was highly ambitious: Conceptual approaches, such as philosophical ("transcendental") phenomenology, were expected to supply knowledge about the structure of consciousness and its disturbance in various mental disorders.Following the lead of Binswanger and Szilasi, who viewed schizophrenia as an "experiment of nature" that enables us to view underlying processes otherwise hidden to "natural, everyday consciousness," Blankenburg believed that it may be possible to map the formal properties of the psychopathology of schizophrenia—precisely in the loss of common sense—as a disturbance to the basic organization of conscious experience. Any attempt to summarize this rather abstract and complex approach in a brief commentary would be ill advised. In passing, rather, I will remark that such efforts could have profound relevance to the current research of schizophrenia and its underlying neurobiology. This research has gradually acknowledged the importance of taking the patient's subjective experience of the disorder into account (Mishara, Parnas, and Naudin 1998). In this commentary, I will first give an account of the biographical and clinical reasons that led Blankenburg to turn to the problem of common sense and its relevance for schizophrenia. I will then explore what implications [End Page 317] his work may have for more recent findings concerning schizophrenia. Blankenburg's Intellectual Development Born in 1928, W. Blankenburg, the son of a Lufthansa pilot who pioneered transatlantic commercial flights, began his studies in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1947. While at Freiburg, Blankenburg heard lectures in philosophy given by E. Fink (the former assistant to Husserl) and Max Mueller, and in psychology, by R. Heiss and others. After three years, Blankenburg turned to the study of medicine, producing a dissertation in 1956 on an application of Daseinsanalysis (Heidegger and Binswanger) to a case of paranoid schizophrenia. Binswanger wrote the forward to the publication. Between 1956 and 1958, Blankenburg studied internal medicine in Heidelberg with the accomplished phenomenologist of bodily experience (Leibphaenomenologer) and student of V. von Weizsaecker Herbert Pluegge. He spent one semester in Goettingen where he attended lectures by the ontological philosopher Nicolai Hartmann, who provided for Blankenburg a more useful approach to the problem of nature and natural science than Heidegger's primary emphasis on the question of Being. During his Freiburg years, Blankenburg attended small seminars led by Heidegger in the Schwarzwald forest. (Heidegger had been forbidden to teach after the end of World War II.) Blankenburg recalls that the participants would sit on logs in an open field as if to invoke Heidegger's concept of the clearing (Lichtung) of Being. While not entirely sympathetic with Heidegger's philosophy, Blankenburg learned to carefully "listen"—as Heidegger would repeatedly emphasize—to language, not merely poetic or philosophical language, but the language of the patients he would meet in clinical practice.During this time, Blankenburg heard lectures by W. Szilasi, the philosopher-scientist who held Husserl's and Heidegger's chair in the department of philosophy. Szilasi collaborated with the phenomenological psychiatrist, L. Binswanger. Their effort to apply concepts from Husserl's... (shrink)

Historienne américaine, Joan Scott est connue en France pour ses travaux d'histoire ouvrière française et pour la réflexion qu'elle a développée depuis les années 1980 sur l'écriture de l'histoire des femmes et du genre. Théoricienne du gender nourrie de philosophie française (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida) et de critique littéraire féministe, elle a introduit dans l'écriture historique les positions post-structuralistes qui considèrent toutes les catégories d'analyse comme contextualisées,...

Historienne américaine, Joan Scott est connue en France pour ses travaux d'histoire ouvrière française et pour la réflexion qu'elle a développée depuis les années 1980 sur l'écriture de l'histoire des femmes et du genre. Théoricienne du gender nourrie de philosophie française (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida) et de critique littéraire féministe, elle a introduit dans l'écriture historique les positions post-structuralistes qui considèrent toutes les catégories d'analyse comme contextualisées,...