The article argues that by the 17th century, despite the increased intellectual exchanges of the time, two different kind of individualism were developing across the Channel — one labeled here as ‘centripetal’, the other one as ‘centrifugal’. On the French side, one witnesses a focus on forum internum, as the only site of uniqueness and authenticity. On the British side, the emphasis switched to forum externum and the equality of wills. The article explores the consequences of these different self-apprehensions of (...) the individual in terms of different understandings of political representation. I claim that, despite today’s general consensus, representing ‘the people’ was not naturally assimilated with an ascending theory of representation. ‘The people’, understood as a whole, was apprehended in France as still higher than its representatives — kings, Estates, or Parlements. The idea of individuals willingly delegating their rights and/or authority to a representative remained for more than a century a peculiar British development. The consequences of this ascending understanding of representation are to be seriously reevaluated. (shrink)

This chapter will pin down the most outlandish image of Confucius in Chinese history, which comes from a corpus particular to the intellectual and political context of the first two centuries CE China, the apocrypha (chenwei 讖緯). The corpus developed the image of Confucius from earlier ones, such as a thinker, a sage, and an unsuccessful politician. Moreover, apocrypha reflect the intellectual and political changes of the time, especially a growing enthusiasm for an ideal society based on the Five Classics (...) and the restoration of the Han dynasty. The image of Confucius fluctuates in accordance with these changes and becomes that of a prophet and messenger of Heaven who not only encoded his political teaching in his work, the Annals of Spring and Autumn, but also foretold the ascendance of the ruling Liu family. His seemingly outlandish image was rooted in knowledge shared amongst scholars of that time. (shrink)

The ascendency of executive power in the presence of weak parliamentary and societal control has given rise to a need for deliberative forms of diplomacy in international relations. As Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden regularly include members of parliament, party representatives, and representatives of civil society in their delegations to the General Assembly of the United Nations, does this imply that a Nordic model exists? This book reviews the practice of these countries and finds that the role of societal (...) representatives has diminished from participating members of delegations to mere observers. The Nordic examples illuminate the difficulties of achieving international governance through the practice of deliberative democracy. Table of Contents List of figures, images, and tables List of abbreviations Preface 1. Introduction The problem Why do the General Assembly and Norden matter? Theory and methodology Prior research 2. Challenges and traditions Delegation and representation at the United Nations Democracy and dilemmas at the UN General Assembly Nordic diplomacy at the League of Nations Unisex state actors and the representation of women 3. Parliament and UN delegations The Scandinavian model: Denmark An anachronism and parliamentarian stronghold: Norway Routine, squeeze-out, routine: Sweden Between Lilliputian and full-scale representation: Iceland Metamorphosis or parliament lost: The Finnish Sonderweg 4. The participation of civil society Scandinavian model revisited: Denmark The return of the body-snatched: Norway Corporatism and double universalism: Sweden Short stories: Finland and Iceland 5. Conclusions: On the way to deliberative diplomacy Archives Bibliography Author Index About the Author(s)/Editor(s) Norbert Gotz, Dr. phil. (2001) in Political Science, Humboldt University Berlin, Docent (2007) in Political History, University of Helsinki, habil. (2009) in Modern History and International Relations, University of Greifswald, is Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History, Sodertorn University, Sweden. His publications include the edited volume Regional Cooperation and International Organizations: The Nordic Model in Transnational Alignment (Routledge 2009). (shrink)

The human brain has long been misunderstood in its features. It is up to neuroscience to have shown that all its activities are connected, and understand each other only in this relationship between its different instances. To ascend, to merge, to connect are the basis of the organization of our psyche, including in its most elaborate symbolic productions. This is precisely the system highlighted by the Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary by Gilbert Durand, brilliant precursor.

In this paper, we introduce and defend the recurrent model for understanding bodily spatial phenomenology. While Longo, Azañón and Haggard (2010) propose a bottom-up model, Bermúdez (2017) emphasizes the top-down aspect of the information processing loop. We argue that both are only half of the story. Section 1 intro- duces what the issues are. Section 2 starts by explaining why the top- down, descending direction is necessary with the illustration from the ‘body-based tactile rescaling’ paradigm (de Vignemont, Ehrsson and Haggard, (...) 2005). It then argues that the bottom-up, ascending direction is also necessary, and substantiates this view with recent research on skin space and tactile field (Haggard et al., 2017). Section 3 discusses the model’s application to body ownership and bodily self-representation. Implications also extend to topics such as sense modality individuation (Macpherson, 2011), the constancy- based view of perception (Burge, 2010), and the perception/cognition divide (Firestone and Scholl, 2016). (shrink)

In the course of the last thirty years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively “post-Marxist”culture- and identity-based conceptions. Reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double-edged. On the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity, and difference. Yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving to less to enrich struggles for redistribution than to (...) displace the latter. I aim to resist that trend. In this essay, I propose an analysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. I also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. I conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously. (shrink)

Consciousness is defined as operating with the meanings of representations, which are what arises in mind under the influence of a stimulus (primary representations) as well as what arises as a result of their transformation (secondary, combined representations). In a first approximation, a representation is expressed by words. The concept of “representation” is a special case of the concept of “information-certainty”, which is the result of distinction. Any distinction is a distinction by a specific attribute and representation (...) is the value of the attribute. In relative ontology, distinction is an essential condition of being that is formalized quantitatively through the operation of ontological subtraction, which is a quantitative expression of representation in relation to consciousness. The finite set of representations for one attribute can always be sorted in ascending order of this attribute values. In the order constructed, each representation corresponds to an attribute number, the only difference of which from a number in mathematics is that the one is always associated with a specific attribute, and the other is not associated with any attribute. The meaning of a representation expressed by an attribute number has a place in an ordered quantitative series of other representations of the same attribute, which is the basis of distinction. Operating with meanings is operating with attributive numbers-meanings. This method of the meaning describing is called the relative method. All operations with the meanings of representations are performed in a multidimensional cognitive space. Each axis of the cognitive space corresponds to an attribute by which representations differ. On each axis there are attribute numbers corresponding to the meanings of representations for the attribute. This approach is a quantitative method of describing of all experimental processes of consciousness, which allows to build a scientific, i.e. quantitative, theory of consciousness with laws written down in a quantitative way. Based on this, it is possible to construct a quantitative calculation of this theory predictions. Such a prediction allows to make an accurate (unambiguous) experimental verification. Due to the quantitative way of describing the operation of meanings, such a theory of consciousness is easily modeled in information technologies, since the latter are also based on the numerical nature of all their processes. The main difference between the relative method and the vast majority of methods using information technologies for text processing is that the relative method, firstly, is not statistical, and secondly, conveys the meaning of the text fully and most adequately. The relative method is effective in operating not only with text data, but also with any data of a different nature, for example, with video data, audio data. (shrink)

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

In the course of the last 30 years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively ‘post-Marxist’ culture-and identity-based conceptions. Reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double edged. On the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity and difference. Yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving less to enrich struggles for redistribution than to (...) displace the latter. Thus, instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, feminists appear to have traded one truncated paradigm for another – a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. This article aims to resist that trend. I propose an anaysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. I also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. I conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously. (shrink)

Although scientific and commercial excitement about genomic biobanks has subsided since the biotech bust in 2000, they continue to fascinate life scientists, bioethicists, and politicians alike. Indeed, these assemblages of personal health information, human DNA, and heterogeneous capital have become and remain important events in the ethics and politics of the life sciences. For starters, they continue to reveal and produce the central scientific, technological, and economic paradigms so ascendant in biology today: genome, infotech, and market. Biobanks also illustrate what (...) might be called the new distributive politics of biomedical research. Within those politics, the commodification of persons – or at the very least, of their informational representations – has challenged the ontological, ethical, and political underpinnings of the social contract between researchers and their human research subjects. In brief, biobanks are unsettling relations between genes, tissue, medical records, and persons. But it is also clear that these relations are increasingly being restructured by new rights of control, access, exclusion, and use known as “property,” both material and intellectual. (shrink)

If successive, brief visual images are exposed for recognition or for psychophysical ratings, various effects and phenomena of fast dynamics of conscious perception such as mutual masking, metacontrast, proactive enhancement of contrast, proactive speed-up of the latency of subjective visual experience, the Fröhlich Effect, the Tandem Effect, attentional facilitation by visuospatial precuing, and some others have been found. The theory proposed to deal with these phenomena proceeds from the assumption that two types of brain processes are necessary in order to (...) consciously recognize visual stimuli: fast, specific processes of encoding that allocate and reactivate the stimulus representation which is based on the activity of selected cortical neurons and relatively slower processes of facilitation of the activity of this specific representation that are mediated by the excitatory modulation of the EPSPs of those selected cortical neurons by the ascending input from nonspecific thalamus. Theperceptual retouchconstruct is proposed in order to characterize and analyze the interaction of and . The neurophysiological characteristics of this bifunctional system of afference help to put forward several predictions that are found to be consistent with the empirical regularities of the above-described perceptual-attentional phenomena. These data form a body of converging evidence that is consistent with the predictions of the perceptual retouch approach. (shrink)

The books of Pascal Quignard present themselves as a hunt for the invisible. The ambition that lies at their heart seems particularly compatible with a phenomenological approach. Indeed, this literary intuition – this “suspicion” in the words of Quignard – hinges on the nature and value of representation. This article tries to read the entire work of Quignard through the phenomenological lens. The elucidation of phenomenality is accomplished here through the steps of a process that leads to the very (...) condition of vision. Once the essence of representation is established as a “predation”, the literary writing of the author reveals it as related to an absent, invisible prey. Through the successive and ascending figures of idolatry, love, art and contemplation, can then start a route to invisibility, which is a true pedagogy of seeing. This quest, conceivable as a learning process through which literature finds its ultimate aim, finally leads to a renewed understanding of the concept of representation. (shrink)

Ambiguity in the athlete’s perception and description of pain that opens the door to a series of reinterpretations of athletic experience and events that argue the development of an increasingly inauthentic relation to self and others on the part of those who consume performance as third parties (spectators) and ultimately those who produce it first hand (athletes). The insertion of the spectator into the sport situation as a consumer of the athlete’s activity and the preference given to spectator interpretation shift (...) control of meaning away from the athlete and encourage a demand for athlete suffering in aid of the spectator’s own need for meaning. Through discussions of the function of narrative in sport spectacle, the witnessing role of spectators, and the phenomenon of vicarious substitution, I discuss the representation of the athlete as a character ideal and moral exemplar. At a more developed level of external interpretation, the athlete (or team) becomes the champion of the spectator, the role model or focal point of civic pride whose victory asserts the ascendence of my team and town over yours; and finally, the athlete or team is the intentional object of fan identification: my team is me. I conclude that the existential commitment of the spectator as devoted fan is an inauthentic one. (shrink)

Book Description -/- Edmund Burke (1730-1797) was a friend and advocate of America during the political crisis of the 1760s and the 1770s, and he spoke out eloquently and forcefully in defense of the rights of the colonial subjects of the British empire—in America, Ireland and India alike. However, he is often best remembered for his extremely critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. The present volume is based on classic Burke, including his most famous writings and speeches on the (...) American Crisis. Though his efforts at conciliation with the American colonies ultimately failed, Burke is widely remembered, studied and venerated by liberal and conservative thinkers alike, for his elucidation and criticism of the excesses of empire and political excesses generally. Irish-born, Burke made his career as a British Whig statesman and Member of Parliament, but he was also a powerful writer of philosophical works in high literary style. -/- In the present volume, Burke’s ideas, ideals and arguments are explored and set in their original historical and political context. The volume places the reader in a position to understand the similarities and contrasts between the political philosophy of the Whig ascendancy in British politics and the republican political philosophy of the American founders. What comes to the fore is Burke’s twin emphasis on continuity and justice, the anti-rationalism of his opposition to directly applying abstract political theory to policy decisions, the pluralism of peoples and public mores within the empire, the crucial roles of political representation in good government, and the fundamental importance of the consent of the governed. -/- Was Burke a friend of a foe of revolution? Was he a “liberal” or a “conservative”? To what degree did he accept the political ideals of the American founders? How could he both defend the American protests and reject the claims of the French Revolution? Thomas Jefferson’s “Summary View of the Rights of British America” is included in the volume for comparison and contrast. This book presents a deeper understanding of Burke’s political thought by exploring the similarities and contrasts with founding ideals of America’s republican tradition. (shrink)

Ambiguity in the athlete’s perception and description of pain that opens the door to a series of reinterpretations of athletic experience and events that argue the development of an increasingly inauthentic relation to self and others on the part of those who consume performance as third parties (spectators) and ultimately those who produce it first hand (athletes). The insertion of the spectator into the sport situation as a consumer of the athlete’s activity and the preference given to spectator interpretation shift (...) control of meaning away from the athlete and encourage a demand for athlete suffering in aid of the spectator’s own need for meaning. Through discussions of the function of narrative in sport spectacle, the witnessing role of spectators, and the phenomenon of vicarious substitution, I discuss the representation of the athlete as a character ideal and moral exemplar. At a more developed level of external interpretation, the athlete (or team) becomes the champion of the spectator, the role model or focal point of civic pride whose victory asserts the ascendence of my team and town over yours; and finally, the athlete or team is the intentional object of fan identification: my team is me. I conclude that the existential commitment of the spectator as devoted fan is an inauthentic one. (shrink)

In this paper we examine optimal bidding without the independence axiom in a unified framework which allows for a clear graphical representation. Thus, we can show very simply the independence axiom to be a necessary and sufficient condition on preferences for strategical equivalence of the two first-price and second-price auctions, respectively, and for the second-price sealed-bid auction to be demand revealing. The analysis reveals that the betweenness property is necessary and sufficient for the ascending-bid auction to be demand (...) revealing while optimal bids exceed (are less than) bidders' valuations, iff preferences are quasiconcave (quasiconvex). Furthermore, it can be shown that fanning out (fanning in) leads to a higher (lower) selling-price in open than in sealed-bid auctions. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

Political Cartooning Mocking Mussolini's Opposition: The Left Targeting Itself The paper discusses the socialist/leftist political humour during Mussolini's ascendance to power. I am especially concerned with the part of political satire that was drawn by the Left mocking the Left itself. This type of political satire has a specificity very challenging and interesting at the same time. It makes evident the limits of the fascist censor and draws the line between political satire and crude political propaganda. I will analyse political (...) cartoons of the aforementioned period and Gramsci's theory of hegemony will shed light both to the reading of this humorous discourse and the left's political practices. The paper is divided into four sub-themes discussing the representation of socialism with the bourgeoisie, the Biennio Rosso, the Socialist fragmentation and the Aventino. The narrative across these major events reveals the counter-hegemonic project of the Left to the fascist ascendance together with their share of responsibility for the latter's power. (shrink)

The usefulness of “analogy” as an epistemological tool was at the center of a Victorian debate over the nature of historical knowledge. While researching one of her novels, George Eliot combined her obsession with historical veracity with a belief in the efficacy of analogical reasoning in the generation of historical knowledge to create a method of imaginative representation that was meant to advance our understanding of the past. Her work, along with that of her companion, G.H. Lewes, constituted a (...) rejection of the ascendant view that history needed to become an austere, inductive science, advanced by J.S. Mill, H.T. Buckle, and William Stubbs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why the Phenomenology Remains FoundationalRobert Harland (bio)Keywordspsychology, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), phenomenology, psychiatry, depressionDemian Whiting in his paper criticizes an exclusively cognitive approach to the treatment of emotional problems. There is no doubt that the cognitive model of the mind has been recently in the ascendancy and therapies based on it are to be found in almost every subspecialty of psychiatry. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in particular is "discovered" as being (...) effective in everything from posttraumatic stress disorder to psychosis. The heartland of the approach is and remains anxiety and depression, the two most common emotional states that psychiatrists and psychologists are asked to deal with. As Dr. Whiting describes, leaving aside the behavioral aspects, the basic principle is about eliciting and challenging distorted cognitions. Cognitive theory suggests that distorted cognitions are the cause of, the substance of, and the maintaining factors in most if not all depression and anxiety.The author accepts that in certain cases distorted cognitions lead to an experience that is represented contra to reality. He suggests that in certain circumstances a cognitive therapist could help a patient to reappraise the world they find themselves in and by gathering evidence with the therapist, to challenge these distortions. So in depression, a patient sees themselves as worthless and their therapist suggests they gather evidence that helps them form a more balanced perspective. The cognition "I am worthless" is shown empirically to be a distortion. Whiting argues, correctly in my opinion, for the limitation of this approach. In doing so he argues against a growing psychological hegemony, one that sees itself as developing evidence-based practice that should be applied (on the back of national guidelines) to many presentations before or exclusively of others such as medication or alternative psychotherapeutic approaches.Whatever the outcome in the clinic, as opposed to the randomized controlled trials, many clinicians and health care managers are attracted to CBT because of its pragmatic, short-term, problem- and consumer-orientated nature. It has an approach tailored for most disorders and therefore fits very well within the organization of modern mental health services. With this background, nonclinical readers may more readily appreciate the potential target of Dr. Whiting's critique.Whiting suggests three examples where eliciting cognitions can at best be seen as secondary [End Page 247] to the problem in hand: First, where a drug (e.g., alcohol) or state (e.g., tiredness) directly causes an emotion; second, where an emotion causes a mistaken understanding of a situation; and third, where the representation is accurate but the response defective (e.g., the pedophile in his article, or more routinely a person particularly sensitive to anxiety). The phenomenology, before the prism of analysis, is that in all three cases the patients find themselves in an emotional state where any putative cognitive etiology is at best post hoc and at worst tautological. Furthermore, as the author states, in the cases where accurate representations elicit the wrong kinds of emotions, the question why cannot be answered by referring back to the person's representations.To answer the question of why someone is particularly sensitive to anxiety or gets aroused by children, Dr. Whiting points to several possibilities that all impact on treatment: First, the influence of noncognitive desires and emotions; second, physical contamination; third, an idiosyncratic or abnormal constitution; and fourth, a defective emotional acculturation. In all these cases, suggesting that the patient's problems will be resolved through altering eliciting cognitions seems illogical.The paper then preempts two criticisms from the cognitive approach. The first again rightly expands that, if a higher order evaluative level is proposed, this in no way answers a noncognitive critique. Either the higher level of evaluation is simply an unnecessary (or unpredictable) cognitive confirmation of a negative (or positive) representation, or the evaluation is a cognitive foil for an emotional reaction that is simply not cognitive; when someone says they are worthless they are merely giving voice to their depressed emotional state. Second, that retreating to a position where the cognitive approach is used to challenge distorted representations that are secondary to, and yet maintain, an inappropriate emotion may have a role, but does not mean that... (shrink)

A new theory of the mind, the predictive processing model, is ascendant in recent work in cognitive science. According to this theory, all the mind ever fundamentally does is make hypotheses about the environment, generate prediction-errors by comparing its predictions with its sensory data, and use these prediction-errors to update its representation of the world. The theory of motivation and action to which the predictive processing model is committed has been the subject of lively debate in the literature. However, (...) the upshots of the predictive processing model for the theory of practical reason have received relatively scant attention. Here I investigate how proponents of predictive processing should conceive of practical reason. The predictive processing model has it that the practical attitudes – desires and intentions etc. – reduce to certain theoretical attitudes – in particular, to beliefs and predictions. I argue that this psychological reduction precipitates a broader normative reduction, in which practical reasoning reduces to a kind of theoretical reasoning about what you will do, and in which practical normativity turns out to really be a species of epistemic normativity. In other words, that practical reason reduces to theoretical reason. If I am correct, the predictive processing model of the mind is committed to – what I am dubbing – a ‘radical cognitivism about practical reason’. (shrink)

Vivons-nous dans un monde " désenchanté " ? Constater l'emprise de la rationalité instrumentale, voire procédurale, ne devrait pas nous faire oublier que modernité et processus de rationalisation ne se sont imposés, au travers de changements lexicaux notables, qu'après avoir remplacé par d'autres les plus anciennes représentations relatives à la condition humaine. D'hier à aujourd'hui, l'imaginaire n'est donc pas moindre. En revanche, nos capacités d'imaginer se sont dangereusement amenuisées, en même temps que l'imagination est devenue suspecte, sinon coupable, de nous (...) détourner de l'action responsable. Do we live in a " disenchanted " world ? Once we note the ascendancy of instrumental and even procedural rationality, we should not forget that modernity and the process of rationalisation have prevailed only after having replaced the oldest representations of the human condition, and moreover through important lexical changes. This implies that the imaginary has not decreased overnight. On the other hand, our capacities of imagination have diminished dangerously, whereas in the same time imagination is suspected or even accused of turning us away from responsible action. (shrink)

L’identité européenne peut être examinée dans sa dimension objective, comme projet descendant tout comme processus ascendant de construction d’une forme authentique de communauté transpolitique, et dans sa dimension subjective, liée à l’identification des individus et des groupes – les Européens –, avec cette nouvelle communauté politique en plus de l’identification déjà établie avec tel ou tel État-nation. La troisième dimension, liée aux modèles interprétatifs pertinents – approche ethno-culturelle/eurosceptique, patriotisme constituionnel européen, approche pluraliste/multiculturelle – fut également un facteur important dans la (...) construction de l’identité européenne. Un nouveau type de communauté politique amène de nouvelles questions : cette Europe est-ce une nation, une Europe de citoyens, une Europe à construire sur des pratiques communes, une Europe chrétienne, ou une Europe des civilisations qui se correspondent et se croisent, une Europe laïque ou une Europe d’héritage religieux chrétien et/ou de religions diverses. Les traités fondateurs définissent l’identité européenne politiquement, à commencer par le slogan « Unité dans la diversité ». Cependant, ce slogan est interprété différemment par les communautaristes/euro-nationalistes, ethno-nationalistes/eurosceptiques, libéraux et républicains/ patriotes constitutionnels européens. Le caractère controversé de l’identité politique doit toujours être gardé à l’esprit. La politique d’identité, l’abus du concept d’identité pensé ethniquement avec ses conséquences guerrières, a représenté l’un des potentiels les plus destructeurs de la politique contemporaine, incluant une région d’Europe . D’un autre côté, les communautés politiques ne peuvent survivre sans force homogénéisante d’une identité commune, ce qui est particulièrement valable pour les communautés démocratiques proposées telles que l’Union européenne. Lorsque il est question de l’identité européenne, le plus important est de définir sa signification dans un sens qui renforcera les capacités démocratiques de l’Union européenne et qui contribuera à surmonter le déficit démocratique ainsi qu’à échapper aux tendances et aux penchants particularistes, xénophones, eurosceptiques. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 297-327 [Access article in PDF] Liberal Irony A Program for Rhetoric James P. McDaniel [Figures] Seeing like a state Perhaps these famous yet simple pictures display not so much the virtuosity of photography or photographers as they statically represent fragments of Mahatma Gandhi's theosophical and political dynamism, his uncanny blend of calm and charisma, thought and play. The compositions are technically simple yet thematically (...) rich. The great leader being led by a boy, the public figure reflecting quietly in private over news reports: these modest representations key awareness of the place of overturning in Gandhi's thought, words, and deeds. A man who encouraged non-violent resistance (ahimsa) to British Imperialists, Gandhi submitted his body to great harshness (himsa). A witness to incredible atrocities committed against his people, Gandhi exhorted his followers to present their bodies before armed imperialist soldiers with full knowledge that they would be brutalized, many killed. Legally prohibited from doing so, Gandhi made salt. Exhausted and hungry, Gandhi walked hundreds of kilometers without rest and fasted for long stretches of time. Hated and feared, Gandhi loved. Perpetually reversing the "logic" of the world he knew, overturning its values to find and clarify truer values, insisting that choices be made between the received and the [End Page 297] promised, the "is" and the "ought," the actual and the possible, Gandhi was an ironist.Each picture can also be seen as an allegory, or taken together as an allegorical complex of mutually illuminating signs, and Gandhi as a political allegorist of human relations for early twentieth-century India and the globe. Allegory's signature inscriptions are everywhere about these simple photos. Personification of virtue, a stock technique of allegorical composition, abounds: Humility becomes Gandhi. Each photograph personifies humility uniquely: sparseness of setting, simplicity of garb, and other visual cues for self-abasement adorn the one; richness of natural setting, playfulness, childlikeness, and such ornament the other. Both images suggest the presence of the eternal in the temporal, but in different ways, another key fixture of allegorical design: Gandhi's stillness sitting near his spinning wheel, itself an image of eternal circuitousness, in the one, and his vigorous exertion against a vast, seemingly static, natural landscape, both "frozen" in time thanks to the technology of photography, in the other. Likewise, time's flow seems in a sense reversed in a manner that mirrors symmetrical ontological reversals: the older follows the younger, the man the boy, and the wise follow the inexperienced. Further allegorical decoding could be endeavored, for instance rearticulating the two texts on four tiers of signification: literal, figural, historical, and anagogical—the "four-level" allegorical hermeneutic initially developed for application to sacred texts and later ascendant as a critical method from the Middle Ages to some versions of poststructuralism in recent years (e.g., Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious, Frederick Dolan's Allegories of America,Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading). Each tier reveals a unique dimension of discourse: its textual surface (literal), its embedded significations (figural), its reflexive display of placement in time and society (historical), and its alignment with archetypal or ultimate patterns of existence (anagogical).As two approaches to the same texts, irony and allegory are more complementary than exclusive. Neither renders the other invalid or uninteresting, nor do they deplete their common rhetorical resources, yet each features distinctive fixations. The first perspective fixates on a single strategy reflected in the texts and explores the ramifications of that strategy: dialectical reversal. The second fastens on and traverses across myriad textures and patterns of discursive technique displayed in the texts: allegorical personification (e.g., Gandhi as humility), temporality (e.g., fusing of public, private, and eternal time), paratactic association of images (i.e., interplay between visual signs not necessarily regulated by a single code [End Page 298] of meaning), and cosmic ornamentation (e.g., the spinning wheel that, by the way, is not spinning; like Gandhi, it is sitting still in a world of tumult, as if mirroring a moment of individual and universal arrest). Ironic strategizing and inventorying, in this light... (shrink)

Given that the Obama administration still relies on many strategies we would think of as sitting on the side of secrecy, it seems that the only lasting transparency legacy of the Obama administration will be data-driven or e-transparency as exemplified by the web interface ‘data.gov’. As the data-driven transparency model is exported and assumes an ascendant position around the globe, it is imperative that we ask what kind of publics, subjects, and indeed, politics it will produce. Open government data is (...) not just a matter concerning accountability but is seen as a necessary component of the new ‘data economy’. To participate and benefit from this info-capitalist-democracy, the data subject is called upon to be both auditor and entrepreneur. This article explores the implications of responsibilization, outsourcing, and commodification on the contract of representational democracy and asks if there are other forms of transparency that might better resist neoliberal formations and re-politicize the public sphere. (shrink)

2010 Reprint of 1932 Edition. This book consists for the most part of conversations between Milton Sills and Ernest Holmes. According to Holmes, it represents a good representation of Sill's belief about the continuity of the human soul. This was the subject of the extended conversations presented in this work. Sill's nature was deeply spiritual, highly intellectual and bordered on the mystical. He possessed one of the most brilliant and well-trained minds Holmes had ever known. He believed in emergent (...) evolution, ever ascending, but never reaching a final goal. Hence, eternity meant to him an everlasting progress in which the individual never loses those elements essential to the continuation of a definitely individualized entity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Close Enemies: The Relationship of Psychiatry and Psychology in the Assessment of Mental DisordersPhilippe Le Moigne, PhDAs Peter Zachar rightly points out in his comment, the assessment of mental disorders underwent new developments with the release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V in 2013 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Whereas in 1980, the manual had been thought of in a rigorously categorical way, on the basis of (...) distinct and closed syndromic entities, this new version advocated the development of a radically dimensionalist approach, with the diagnosis aiming this time to restore the whole symptomatological picture of the patient on a spectrum of ratings are supposed to cover the entirety of psychiatric semiology (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).For its part, my article aimed to show how standardized assessment, guided by the return of psychiatry’s authority and the assertion of its legitimacy in the diagnostic field, gave the ascendancy in the 1980s to the classificatory tradition and thus to the categorical model, to the detriment of personality approach and test psychology which offered a competing solution here. This perspective, historically dated, may have led the reader to think that there is an antagonism that cannot be overcome here. Rather, it should be seen as a form of structuring opposition, or even a “complementarity inscribed in rivalry,” between psychiatry and psychology, which is naturally susceptible to change over time.Indeed, the reversal operated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V is not total because it cannot be total. The defense of the dimensionalist approach, dear to the psychological testing tradition, was intended here to allow the identification of co-morbidities, present in most patients but poorly apprehended by the categorical approach, and to open up diagnosis to prevention by screening for minor manifestations of psychopathology when they suggest the [End Page 259] development of a manifest episode of the disease in the more or less long term. The risk here is that we end up with overdiagnosis and thus an over-representation of false positives (Wakefield, 2015). In other words, this type of approach does not escape the obligation to determine threshold scores, likely to indicate the lower limit of the disorder, and thus to resort to a categorical approach. There is a first affinity between the two perspectives which obeys, beyond the divergences in principle, a technical requirement.But the two approaches have even more in common when we look at their epistemological background: they share the idea that the representation and the intervention on mental disorder, to use Ian Hacking’s expression (1983), must be based on the model proposed by the physical and natural sciences. And as Greta Kaluzeviciute aptly points out in her comment, this orientation leads to the idea of measuring mental disorder in particular to conduct elaborate quantification operations to determine, for example, whether two entities are statistically distinct or whether a drug has a significant effect on the evolution of a pathology.This is in fact an old question that can be formulated as follows, to use the expression of the psychometrician Joel Michell (1999): are psychological dimensions metric? In other words, if we want to apply the language of numbers to mental disorders, they must share its properties, two of which seem essential: it must be possible to establish that each mental disorder, in the same way as qualities attributable to length for example, has a zero and can be divided by means of gradients (or degrees of intensity) whose interval is constant (Le Moigne, 2018; Michell, 1999). For lack of space, let us only address the second condition. This one has already been denied by many, starting with Bergson at the end of the nineteenth century (1889). He does not believe in the quantification of psychological expressions, starting with sensations. What is the common point, he wrote, between the feeling of a mild pain, as one feels a stiffness, and the sensation of a needle being hammered into your flesh? For him, one and the other of these intensities are incomparable, so that they do not belong to a similar register of sensations that one could stage from a 0 toward a... (shrink)

Il s’agira ici de faire apparaître la régressivité — possibilité perpétuelle d’adjoindre un degré supplémentaire à l’énoncé — comme le principe même de l’ironie, ce qui conduit à la concevoir non comme une grille sémiotique et axiologique, mais comme une dynamique.La réflexion part de la cellule de base qu’est le signe ironique en tant que structure hiérarchisée à deux degrés, selon la conception traditionnelle. Cette dualité est d’abord analysée du point de vue sémantique, dans le cadre tropologique, puis sur les (...) plans axiologique, actantiel et énonciatif, ce qui aboutit à l’hypothèse de l’ironie comme trope métadiscursif, cumulant l’usage et la mention . Dans ce cadre, l’ironie se conçoit comme une représentation de représentation, comme un processus d’auto-duplication agissant par réflexivité critique et comique, et donc capable de se perpétuer virtuellement à l’infini puisque, s’appliquant à lui-même, il peut toujours ajouter un degré au précédent, sans pour autant l’annuler : le signe à deux niveaux ne constitue que la réalisation minimale de l’ironie, dont le second degré peut lui-même être réfléchi par un troisième, etc. Le « pouvoir réfléchissant » de l’ironie fait ainsi sa « force ascensionnelle » régressive, selon deux expressions empruntées à Proust.Interne au signe, ce dynamisme permet aussi, à l’échelle d’une oeuvre, de greffer différentes sortes d’ironie les unes sur les autres : la puissance créatrice du processus régressif conduit à envisager son rôle dans l’oeuvre d’art, en l’occurrence À la recherche du temps perdu, dont le texte multiplie de façon exemplaire et retorse les strates d’ironie. La Recherche, qui aura préalablement servi de support à toutes les analyses, permettra, par l’intermédiaire de Bergotte — écrivain ironiste dont le génie consiste dans le « pouvoir réfléchissant » et l’énergie créatrice dans la « force ascensionnelle » —, de poser la question de l’actualisation de la régressivité ironique dans l’oeuvre littéraire.Regressivity, as the perpetual possibility of adding a further degree to an utterance is the very principle of irony, which is thus conceived not under a semiotic and axiological grid, but as a dynamics.Reflection starts from the ironic sign as the basic cell and as a two tiered hierarchical structure, according to the traditional conception. This duality is first analysed from a semantical point of view, within the tropological framework, then on the axiological, actancial and utterance theoretic levels. This leads us to the hypothesis that irony is a metadiscursive trope, bringing together use and mention . Within this framework, irony is a representation of representation, an auto-duplicative process which acts through critical and comical reflectivity, and which is liable to perpetuate itself indefinitely, since, being auto-applicative, a new degree can always be added to the previous one, without cancelling itself : the two tiered sign being only the minimal realisation of irony, whose second degree can itself be reflected through a third, and so on. The “reflective power” of irony thus produces its “ascending force”.This mechanism internal to the sign allows also, at the level of the work, to plug different kinds of ironies onto each other : the creative power of the regressive process allows us to envisage its role in the work of art, in the case at hand in Remembrance of Things Past, whose text multiplies the various layers of irony. Proust’s work, which is here the basis of all our analyses, allows Bergotte — the ironist writer whose genius consists in the “reflective power” and in the “ascending force” — to raise the question of the actualisation of the ironical regressivity of the literary work. (shrink)

Le regard ethnologique, porté par l'auteur sur les pratiques de circulation entre la France et le Portugal de jeunes d'ascendance portugaise et de jeunes Portugais de France, révèle l'agencement de ressources matérielles et symboliques plurielles. Au-delà de la dimension économique et politique dans lesquelles s'insèrent ces pratiques, le processus identitaire dans lequel elles s'intègrent pose des questions, notamment dans le contexte de l'Union européenne. L'auteur montre ici comment, en puisant des éléments de l'histoire migratoire familiale, de l'histoire nationale et de (...) la culture portugaise, des descendants de migrants économiques européens tentent de dépasser le dilemme identitaire que représente la « double culture », ainsi que les contraintes sociales et culturelles imposées par leurs aînés. (shrink)

Biological sciences have strived to adopt the conceptual framework of physics and have become increasingly quantitatively oriented, aiming to refute the assertion that biology appears unquantifiable, unpredictable, and messy. But despite all effort, biology is characterized by a paucity of quantitative statements with universal applications. Nonetheless, many biological disciplines—most notably molecular biology—have experienced an ascendancy over the last 50 years. The underlying core concepts and ideas permeate and inform many neighboring disciplines. This surprising success is probably not so much attributable (...) to mathematical and statistical approaches in molecular biology, but rather to the preponderance of qualitative approaches, especially visualization. Visualizations can be afforded by quantitative research, but usually they rely on both, quantitative and qualitative research. I claim the following three features to be responsible for the unceasing zeal for using visualizations: visual representations facilitate reasoning, images can be cognitively processed in a “fast” manner, and abstractions of visual representations prompt conceptual advances. In summary, visualizations have largely contributed to the success of molecular biology by conveying its concepts to other disciplines, and at the same time, eclipsing mere quantitative approaches. However, visualizations also bear the risk of misinterpretation when traversing neighboring disciplines and even more so when pervading nonscientific domains. (shrink)

Le concept organisateur de ce que représente l'Ancien Testament pour Herder est tout entier contenu dans l'idée de poésie hébraïque. Aussi n'est il pas illégitime de considérer Herder comme théologien : la théologie herdérienne surgit notamment à travers les concepts de l'origine, du hiéroglyphe et de la Révélation, le mystère des origines pouvant être décrypté dans un monde déchiffrable. Ces éléments de « lecture » du monde se concentrent dans une conception originale de la Bible, lieu du poème par excellence, (...) la Bible se donne comme la manifestation de la poésie hébraïque, la plus ancienne, celle qui nous fait remonter à Dieu lui-même. Si le poète peut être considéré comme celui qui « enseigne la Révélation » c'est qu'il participe de l'œuvre de Dieu lui-même.Herder's organizing concept that represents the Old Testament is completely contained in the idea of Hebraic poetry. Consequently, is it not illegitimate to consider Herder also as a theologian: the Herderien theology basically arises through the concepts of the origin, of the hieroglyph, and of Revelation: the mystery of the origins able to be deciphered in a decipherable world. These elements of “reading” the world are concentrated in an original conception of the Bible, the place of the poem where God speaks the language of men. Being the poem par excellence, the Bible offers itself as the manifestation of the most ancient Hebraic poetry, that which allows us to ascend to God Himself. If the poet can be considered as he who “teaches Revelation,” it is because he participates in the work of God Himself. (shrink)

This essay explores the Chinese imagination and “logic” that construct both literal and figurative ways of ascending to heaven from the mythic or imaginary facts to the pragmatic and spiritual practice. Many Taoist philosophers and alchemists draw on figurative language and allegories to demonstrate abstract notions and wisdom. This figurative mediation is reminiscent of Plato’s approach in staging Socrates as a “teller of myth”. The present study thus resorts to the theory of the imaginary to better illuminate the underlying (...) symbolism and the universal imaginary in Chinese texts and thought. The Taoist imagination of celestial ascension evolves from the mythic figures, to the rhetorical figures of metaphysics, through to theoretical and literary alchemy. This imaginary actualization is possible through the spatial and temporal passages offered by mountain caves and animal rides. Cet article explore l’imaginaire et la « logique » qui construisent dans la pensée chinoise les moyens littéraux et figuratifs de monter au ciel, depuis les faits mythiques ou imaginaires jusqu’à la pratique spirituelle et pragmatique. De nombreux philosophes et alchimistes taoïstes s’appuient sur le langage figuratif et allégorique pour rendre compte de notions abstraites et de la sagesse. Cette médiation figurative n’est pas sans rappeler l’approche de Platon qui représente Socrate comme un « conteur de mythe ». La présente étude recourt ainsi à la théorie de l’imaginaire pour mieux éclairer le symbolisme sous-jacent et l’imaginaire universel dans les textes et la pensée chinoise. L’imagination taoïste de l’ascension céleste évolue à partir des figures mythiques, jusqu’aux figures rhétoriques de la métaphysique, via l’alchimie théorique et littéraire. Cette actualisation imaginaire est rendue possible par les passages spatio-temporels offerts par les grottes montagneuses et les montures animales. (shrink)

Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to acknowledge (...) the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly, they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople, many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and—in their bizarre way—decorous.At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd, the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. “On stage,” writes de Certeau, “there are no longer human beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone—only roles” . And these “roles” in turn are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has been vanquished by Jesus Christ. 1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun, Collection Archives Series, no. 37 ; all further references to this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text . On the relationship between exorcism and theater in this period, see also Henri Weber, “L’Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, » Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 1 : 79-101. Stephen Greenblatt, the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and the poetics of culture. “Marlow, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

Research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Law has maintained an emphasis on knowledge representation and formal reasoning during a period when statistical, data-driven approaches have ascended to dominance within AI as a whole. Electronic discovery is a legal application area, with substantial commercial and research interest, where there are compelling arguments in favor of both empirical and knowledge-based approaches. We discuss the cases for both perspectives, as well as the opportunities for beneficial synergies.

Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important (...) to stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science (e.g. the scientific realism debate). This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature. (shrink)

Drawing together the ideas, practices, and techniques associated with the subject, this book puts them in historical context and demonstrates their relevance to ...

_Pragmatism Ascendent_ is the last of four volumes on the contribution of pragmatism to American philosophy and Western philosophy as a whole. It covers the period of American philosophy's greatest influence worldwide, from the second half of the 20th century through the beginning of the 21st. The book provides an account of the way pragmatism reinterprets the revolutionary contributions of Kant and Hegel, the significance of pragmatism's original vision, and the expansion of classic pragmatism to incorporate the strongest themes of (...) Hegelian and Darwinian sources. In the process, it addresses many topics either scanted or not addressed at all in most overviews of the pragmatism's relevance today. Noting the conceptual stalemate, confusion, and inertia of much of current Western philosophy, Margolis advances a new line of inquiry. He considers a fresh conception of the human agent as a hybrid artifact of enlanguaged culture, the decline of all forms of cognitive privilege, the pragmatist sense of the practical adequacy of philosophical solutions, and the possibilities for a recuperative convergence of the best resources of Western philosophy's most viable movements. (shrink)

Mimesis as Make-Believe is important reading for everyone interested in the workings of representational art.

The point of Hegel's dissatisfaction with Kant -- Rethinking Peirce's fallibilism -- Pragmatism's future : a touch of prophecy.

In this paper I provide a framework—what I refer to as ‘development theory’—for Ulanowicz’s ascendency theory of ecosystem development. Development theory is based in thermodynamics and information theory. A prominent feature of development theory is an understanding of senescence.

Development is a process whereby a relatively unspecified system comprised of loosely connected lower level parts becomes organized into a coherent, higher-level agency. Its temporal corollaries are growth, increasingly deterministic behavior, and a progressive reduction of developmental potential. During immature stages with relatively low specification and high potential, development is largely controlled by local interactions from the “bottom-up,” whereas during more highly specified stages with reduced potential, emergent autocatalytic processes exert “top-down” control. Robert Ulanowicz has shown that this phenomenology of (...) ascendency follows thermodynamic principles and can be described quantitatively using information theory, providing a general theory of development. However, the theory has not found a wide audience among developmental biologists, as genetic determinism encourages the popular reductionistic perception that ontogeny is controlled entirely by molecular mechanisms that exert efficient causality from the bottom-up. Nonetheless, measurements of metabolic rates and mRNA complexity in developing embryos, as well as functional analyses of gene regulatory systems, indicate that ontogeny fits the paradigm of developmental ascendency. Beyond informing biomedical research and the interpretation of large datasets obtained by systems-biological approaches, developmental ascendency helps explain the origin of life, and, being independent of scale, provides an overarching explanation for phylogenetic change that contextualizes Darwinian evolution. (shrink)

The letter to the Ephesians employs various communicative strategies in responding to the rhetorical situation of its implied recipients. Focusing on the recipients' new identity and ethos έν Χριστώ [in Christ], the text emphasises supernatural elements such as resurrection, ascension, heavenly places, revealed mystery, Spirit and power. At the same time, it adopts a rich mosaic of traditional materials, inter alia echoing the Hebrew Scriptures, Hellenistic traditions and early-Christian liturgical traditions. This article explores the dynamic yet complex intertextual fusion and (...) reappropriation of (mainly Jewish) traditions in Ephesians as the author's experience and understanding of the ascended Christ. Special attention is given to the probable functioning of Psalm 68:18 (LXX 67:19) in Ephesians 4:1-16. In conclusion, the essay investigates the intended rhetorical effect of material from the Hebrew Scriptures in the letter - as construction of Christian identity in continuation with the story of Israel and from within the context of Empire. (shrink)

For nearly thirty years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been photographing girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Pinney’s work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood, but also the informal passages of girlhood and adolescence. With each view—from solitary subjects in pensive moments to complex family and social situations—the audience gains a richer understanding of the connections between a daughter and her parents, grandparents, and the larger world of (...) friends and society. The pictures also reflect the ways in which a girl’s world in 2010 differs from the world Pinney knew growing up in the 1960s, and the ways in which the making of a person can transcend time and place. Girl Ascending is a sequel to Pinney’s widely praised first book, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls. Of that previous book Janina Ciezaldo wrote in Aperture, “Pinney brings compositional integrity, knowledge of color, and a Midwestern richness of light to her inquiries.” This second volume is even more accomplished, mature, and stylistically consistent. As David Travis writes in his introduction, “Pinney has regained that sense of wonder, making her view of girls ascending into young women both believable and enchanting.” Pinney’s photographs are powerful and insightful. As social and artistic documents, they reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity as it is expressed in American places and spaces, both private and public. (shrink)