Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive insight into (...) the present moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

The rubber hand illusion is one of the most commonly used paradigms to examine the sense of body ownership. Touches are synchronously applied to the real hand, hidden from view, and a false hand in an anatomically congruent position. During the illusion one may perceive that the feeling of touch arises from the false hand, and that the false hand is one's own. The relationship between referral of touch and body ownership in the illusion is unclear, and some articles average (...) responses to statements addressing these experiences, which may be inappropriate depending on the research question of interest. To address these concerns, we re-analyzed three freely available datasets to better understand the relationship between referral of touch and feeling of ownership in the RHI. We found that most participants who report a feeling of ownership also report referral of touch, and that referral of touch and ownership show a moderately strong positive relationship that was highly replicable. In addition, referral of touch tends to be reported more strongly and more frequently than the feeling of ownership over the hand. The former observations confirm that referral of touch and ownership are related experiences in the RHI. The latter, however, indicate that when pooling the statements one may obtain a higher number of illusion ‘responders’ compared to considering the ownership statements in isolation. These results have implications for the RHI as an experimental paradigm. (shrink)

This book takes the contentious issue of designer babies and argues against the liberal eugenic current of bioethics that commends the logic and choice regimes of selective reproduction. Against conceptions of Procreative Beneficence that trade on a disregard for the gifts of maternal bodies, it seeks to recover a thought of maternal giving and a more hospitable ethic of generational beneficence. Exploring themes of responsibility, gift and natality, the book refigures the experience of reproduction as the site of an ethical (...) response to future generations, where refusal to choose one's children is one virtuous response. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in reproductive ethics, feminist thought and those seeking principled grounds for resisting the technologies of choosing children. (shrink)

This book argues that identified weaknesses in recent theological engagement with New Materialism can be successfully addressed by incorporating insights from Relational Christian Realism. Central themes are those of the relational and the apophatic as they represent different but essential strands of a materialist theology. The relational refers to the work of Deleuze and its influence upon key New Materialist thinkers such as De Landa, Bryant, and Braidotti but supplemented from Relational Christian Realism by Latour and Badiou and with reference (...) to the concept of the apophatic as found in Keller and Kearney. Examining the concepts of transcendence, human agency, and a New Enlightenment, the book moves into more practical areas of aesthetics and technology concluding with a response to the contemporary apocalyptic of climate change. Being "beyond in the midst" requires developing spaces of faithful dissent and holding the tension between the relational and the apophatic in theology.<. (shrink)

In its concern to evoke in its readership an appropriate response to the challenge posed by the contemporary environmental crisis, the recent papal encyclical Laudato Si': On Care for our Common Home differentiates between the task of human education, on the one hand, and the deeper and more abstract task of motivating the human will for change and action, on the other. What must take place, it asserts, is the creation of nothing less than an ‘ecological citizenship’. To describe (...) how this might be brought about, the encyclical employs the theological language of ‘conversion’. However, the rationale for this suggestion, and the implications it would entail for the way in which educational programmes on the environment might be pursued, is developed only minimally in the encyclical itself. The objective of this article is to take up and develop this hint by offering some philosophical and theological perspectives on the idea of human motivation towards care for the environment, and by exploring the current state of affairs in environmental education in light of it. The article therefore aims to develop the encyclical's brief and unthematized suggestion regarding an ‘ecological citizenship’ in a practical and applied direction.© 2018 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. (shrink)

This article discusses the implementation of the reader-response theory and approach in the context of a literature course taught to students enrolled at the Department of English Language and Literature, who are preparing to be future teachers of English language. This article aims to examine the benefits and values of the reader-response theory applied in the described context, as well as potential drawbacks. The basic postulates of the reader-response theory and reader-response approach (...) in class emphasize the crucial role of the reader on the literary and aesthetic experience when reading a literary text. The reader’s way of understanding and perceptions of a literary text, as well as the experience of the reader, influence the interaction between the reader and a text. This interaction contributes to the development of interpretation of the text and reconstruction of the ideas expressed in the text. The article examines the possible ways of implementing the reader-response theory in a literature class, including written assignments, personal responses to a literary text and in-class discussions. The research focuses on qualitative data collection and on analyzing students’ responses to these activities. Furthermore, the research aims to provide a clearer picture of students’ attitudes, observations and personal reactions when interacting with a literary text. One of the aims of the article is to provide recommendations and suggestions regarding reader-response theory application in teaching literature courses at tertiary level, in addition to designing course curricula and selecting appropriate in-class activities. (shrink)

Tentative conclusions from this study of readers' responses to a series of "You Be The Editor" features suggest that divergences in ethical attitudes and values may be due to differences in moral sensitivity and motivation, as outlined in James R. Rest's "Four Component Model." In the majority of cases in which editors and readers were on opposing sides, many readers seemed unaware of the professional and institutional considerations that motivated the editors. The editors, on the other hand, were much less (...) disposed than readers to be guided by their human sympathies and sensitivities. (shrink)

In this study we test how the composition of crime news articles contributes to reader perceptions of the moral blameworthiness of vehicular homicide offenders. After employing a rigorous process to develop realistic experimental vignettes about vehicular homicide in Minnesota, we deploy a survey to test differential assignments of suggested punishment. We find that readers respond to having very little information by choosing neutral or mid-point levels of punishment, but increase recommended punishment based on information about morally charged conduct. By (...) contrast, information about the perpetrator’s immigration status caused respondents to split into two groups on whether the offense deserves neutral or increased punishment. We find that political ideology strongly influences recommendations for more severe punishment when the immigration status of the perpetrator is revealed. We argue that this difference represents a moral dimension to punishment and blameworthiness that incorporates factors outside the active offense and therefore reveals the social influence of differential reporting in shaping public perception. (shrink)

Recent Plato scholarship has grown increasingly comfortable with the notion that Plato’s art of writing brings his readers into the dialogue, challenging them to respond to deliberate errors or lacunae in the text. Drawing inspiration from Stanley Fish’s seminal reading of Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost, this paper considers the narrative of Timaeus as deliberately unreliable, and argues that the actively critical reader is “the missing fourth” with which the dialogue famously begins. By continuing Timaeus with Critias—a dialogue that (...) ends with a missing speech—Plato points to the kind of reader he expects: one who can answer Critias’ question : ὡς μὲν γὰρ οὐκ εὖ τὰ παρὰ σοῦ λεχθέντα εἴρηται, τίς ἂν ἐπιχειρήσειεν ἔμφρων λέγειν. (shrink)

The writer starts with vision and ends with words. The reader, however, starts with the writer’s words and ends with vision.Reading comprehension is like an eye. It requires focus and concentration on how a mode is interpreted. Eyes are shaped by cultures; a Western norm considers it polite to hold one’s gaze and maintain eye contact when dialoguing, while other cultures find it aggressive or confrontational. Similarly, reading is culturally shaped through the lens of the reader, as interpretation (...) is correlated to context. Reading is also temporal and perpetually shifting, just like the processes of a human eye. You can never look at the same thing twice. Reading allows the reader to frame an object’s color, shape... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 183-205.

In a fashion that might have surprised him, Wyclif s principles of interpretation anticipate and interact with the hermeneutical reflections of our own time.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader ResponseCathleen M. BauschatzThe Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response, by Ellen J. Esrock; xii & 241 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $36.50.Ellen Esrock’s The Reader’s Eye is a call for greater attention to the process of visual imaging in the study of readers and reading. Much of the book summarizes earlier research, (...) showing the bias against readerly imaging on the part of scholars who have viewed the reading process as solely cognitive and linguistic, rather than affective and visual.Part One summarizes some of these earlier views, finding phenomenological approaches the most friendly to visualization, while linguistic (semiotic) and psychoanalytic studies downplay its importance. Freudian approaches to reading, for example, view images as “hallucinations,” and value displacement from image to word. Lacan likewise minimizes the importance of imagery, despite the fact that concepts like the “mirror stage” could obviously benefit from visualization.The second part of the book summarizes recent advances in cognitive psychology, leading to the development of experimental tools for measuring readerly imaging. While late nineteenth-century psychology expressed interest in image-formation, behaviorism put a stop to this work. In the 1960s, interest in imagery returned, and with it the study of “mental maps,” verbal learning, and the role of the visual in memory. Esrock details the use of images in teaching children to read, but shows that this process has not been taken seriously in research on adults. The most promising direction in contemporary research, she finds, is the discovery that visualization and affective experience are interwoven. Considerations about the pleasure of reading, right/left brain function, and the role of the visual in psychosexual stages (readerly voyeurism, for example) are detailed here.The last chapter contains an interesting opposition between the objections of critic William Gass to readerly imaging and the use of visual images by writer Italo Calvino (Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities). Esrock shows that it is almost impossible to interpret Calvino’s work without forming visual images.The conclusion finally presents the author’s case for the importance of visualization to both the cognitive and affective sides of the reading process. She admits the presence of differences among genres, authors, and readers, but still finds a set of general principles which should apply to all. Among these are the claims that imaging affects memory, that it clarifies spatial descriptions, and thus makes a fictional world concrete. Esrock calls for more attention to imaging by reader-response critics, classroom pedagogy, linguistics, and gender/cultural studies.The Reader’s Eye provides a solid history and summary of the current positions of a variety of fields on the hitherto neglected topic of readerly imaging. One criticism of the book might be that the author waits until the conclusion to [End Page 363] present her own findings, which occupy only twenty-seven of the volume’s 205 pages. Enthusiasts of this topic will hope that Professor Esrock may expand on some of these ideas in her next book.Cathleen M. BauschatzUniversity of MaineCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to My ReadersMichael S. Hogue (bio)I. IntroductionI often begin writing for personal reasons: to slow my thinking, clarify and organize my thoughts, trace ideas, and sort concepts. Generally, a concern for something I consider wrong about the world motivates me to write. Provoked by such a concern, I write to understand why and how what is wrong came to be that way and why and how (...) I think it can or should be different. I write in reply to H. Richard Niebuhr's moral hermeneutic question, "What's going on?" And yet, while writing typically begins (for me) as a personal search for understanding, this search eventually leads me to (re) discover my formative communities of inquiry and interpretation. None of my questions or ideas, none of my orienting values, none of my interpretive impulses are mine alone. They do not, and cannot, exist independently of others' questions, ideas, values, and interpretations. To use Peirce's metaphor, they are slender fibers braided into a larger cable rather than independent links in a chain. The issues and questions that motivate my research; the topics I care about enough to develop into articles and books; the conceptual, critical, and normative vocabularies I bring to my research and writing; the intellectual traditions that shape the patterns of my thinking—none of these are strictly personal or individual. They have taken root and grown in me as I've learned with and from others. Writing reminds me that, as a person, I am a creature of relational processes because it shows me that my mind is not (exclusively) my own—what and how I think have been formed, animated, and limited by my experience with others in a larger world of experience that is broader and deeper than any individual mind.I open this brief essay with this comment to acknowledge my gratitude and indebtedness not only to the authors of the articles in this special issue (Walter Gulick, Robert Smid, John Teehan, and AJ Turner) but also to the larger community of scholars that comprise the readership of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy (AJTP) and the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought (IARPT). I attended my first IARPT (HIARPT, at the time) conference about seventeen years ago, soon after completing my Ph.D. I didn't know anyone personally then, but I knew several folks as authors of articles and books I had read in recent years. I discovered IARPT through the bibliography of Victor Anderson's book, Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating [End Page 80] the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology. I resonated with Anderson's articulation of a socially engaged public theology that drew from American pragmatist, historicist, and naturalist philosophies of religion. His mind had been where mine was going, into the dissenting tradition of American immanence, or the left wing of American radical theology, as I refer to it.While reading Anderson's book, I learned that many of the authors in his bibliography met every summer as a (relatively?) organized group of like-minded scholars. I joined them the next chance I had. And as things go with this group, I was immediately recruited to serve as the book review editor for the AJTP! Since that first meeting, I've attended as many IARPT meetings as my schedule allows, organized one of the summer conferences, served as AJTP book review editor for several years, and then served for several more years as the AJTP editor (following Michael Raposa's illustrious term!). Most recently, I was honored when Andrew Irvine and Austin Roberts made American Immanence a focus of the 2021 IARPT conference, "Political Thought and the Powers of Democracy: American Thought in the Anthropocene." Gulick's, Smid's, Teehan's, and Turner's articles began as papers for that conference.All this is to say what I have heard many others say through the years: the IARPT/AJTP community of interpretation has become a primary intellectual (and even spiritual) home for me. I am (and we are) fortunate to belong to a group of academic philosophers and theologians who collectively embody a rare (let us hope not... (shrink)