The Threshold of the Visible World advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic--Kaja Silverman explores the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies. Accounting for these phenomena on both a conscious and an unconcious level, Silverman analyzes the psychic and (...) textual conditions under which our "field of vision" can be expanded. The title of this book is taken from Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. In that text, Lacan writes that "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world." He thereby suggests that the visible world has no existence as such until the infant subject has access to an image of self. Lacan intimates that the mirror provides the frame through which one relates to others within the domain of vision, stressing the priority of narcissism and the ego over all other libidinal transactions. The Threshold of the Visible World provides a psychic, social and political specification of Lacan's claim, and most particularly of its implications for the subject's relations to the social other. This is accomplished through examination of the ego, as well as two other categories at the center of Lacan's account of the mirror stage: ideality and identification. This book is an ethical-political project which leads to the re-elaboration of a number of crucial theoretical categories--Silverman offers an account of the bodily ego, of identification, of idealization, of the gaze, of the look, and of the "photographic." The Threshold of the Visible World leads as well to the formulation of a fresh model for conceptualizing sexual, racial and class "difference," and the terms under which it might be dismantled. This book thus seeks to apprehend the field of vision through the frame of a different kind of bodily ego, and discover the pleasures to be derived from corporeal transport. (shrink)

Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in highly innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and Being that has been in place since Plato’s parable of the cave. It is, essentially, an essay on what could be called “world love,” the possibility and necessity for psychic survival of a profound and vital erotic investment by a human being in the cosmic surround. Here, the author takes her cue from Freud’s assertion that the “loss of reality” associated with (...) psychosis is a function of a disturbance not in the capacity to reason or perceive, but rather in the capacity for world love, the libidinal and semiotic circuity by means of which such love actualizes itself. In an implicit challenge to poststructuralist thought, the author claims that this love is always in response to a call issued by the world—that the world has, as it were, a vocation: its beauty ought to be seen. We must think of our own being-in-the world as a response to a primordial calling out to respond to this beauty. We are, the author suggests, at the very core of our being, summoned to what she terms world spectatorship. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological elaboration of care as the being distinctive of human being and the primarily Lacanian conceptualization of the language of desire specific to each human subject, this metapsychology of love attempts to integrate issues in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, art history, and literary and film studies. (shrink)

Through a wide-ranging discussion, that extends from Ovid and Leonardo da Vinci to Gerhard Richter, and from philosophy and literature to time-based art, Kaja ...

In Moral Case Deliberation, healthcare professionals discuss ethically difficult patient situations in their daily practice. There is a lack of knowledge regarding the content of MCD and there is a need to shed light on this ethical reflection in the midst of clinical practice. Thus, the aim of the study was to describe the content of healthcare professionals’ moral reasoning during MCD. The design was qualitative and descriptive, and data consisted of 22 audio-recorded inter-professional MCDs, analysed with content analysis. The (...) moral reasoning centred on how to strike the balance between personal convictions about what constitutes good care, and the perceived dissonant care preferences held by the patient. The healthcare professionals deliberated about good care in relation to demands considered to be unrealistic, justifications for influencing the patient, the incapacitated patient’s nebulous interests, and coping with the conflict between using coercion to achieve good while protecting human dignity. Furthermore, as a basis for the reasoning, the healthcare professionals reflected on how to establish a responsible relationship with the vulnerable person. This comprised acknowledging the patient as a susceptible human being, protecting dignity and integrity, defining their own moral responsibility, and having patience to give the patient and family time to come to terms with illness and declining health. The profound struggle to respect the patient’s autonomy in clinical practice can be understood through the concept of relational autonomy, to try to secure both patients’ influence and at the same time take responsibility for their needs as vulnerable humans. (shrink)

Wissenschaftliche Praxen in das Zentrum der philosophischen Reflexion zu stellen, wird mit dem Anspruch verbunden, problematische Voraussetzungen der klassischen Wissenschaftstheorie zu überwinden. Dass ein solches immanenzphilosophisches Projekt allerdings dann am eigenen Anspruch scheitert, wenn es von einem problematischen faktiven Verständnis wissenschaftlicher Praxen und epistemischer Räume ausgeht, führt Kaja Tulatz in Auseinandersetzung mit Joseph Rouse vor. Demgegenüber macht sie die Argumentationslinie von Gaston Bachelard und Louis Althusser für eine rekonstruktionstheoretische Reflexion fruchtbar und entwickelt ein aktuelleres reflexionsbegriffliches Verständnis epistemischer Räume.

Provides evidence that human consciousness can never be reproduced and exposes the perils of artificial intelligence. Explains how consciousness transcends the brain and body through quantum theory and accounts of consciousness in the clinically dead. Shares scientific evidence of how the image on the Shroud of Turin was produced and connects these findings to evidence concerning near-death experiences. Reveals how consciousness cannot be reproduced by a machine and how attempts to do so threaten what makes us human.

The assumption, that speech is merely the appearance of an external reality to which it refers, is here reversed, in order to shift attention to speech as a ...

In this article, I first problematize the concept of rationality as educational ideal through the use of feminist philosophy. I then offer an alternative concept of rationality as educational ideal based on my reading of Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity, epigenesis, and rationality. In a last part, I explore the ontological and normative dimensions of this new concept of rationality through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “hyper-dialectics.”.

Aristotle's theory of moral character focuses on developing virtues, the deep internal dispositional traits from which external actions naturally flow. Aristotle describes moral virtue as a human excellence that can be developed through practice. The morally worst person is the vicious person who does the wrong thing, desires the wrong thing, and doesn't even know the right thing to do—perhaps even mistaking the wrong thing to do for the right thing. This was the sort of person Eleanor was when she (...) entered The Good Place. One objection to the possibility of moral development is called situationism: the claim that people don't really live according to moral character but are overwhelmingly shaped by the situations around them. As Eleanor learns in The Good Place, the road to being a better person starts with caring about those close to us. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “You're Right. There's No Earth. It's All a Legend” “I'm Not a Cylon!…Maybe, But We Just Can't Take That Chance” “You Have to Have Something to Live For. Let it be Earth” Notes.

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

John Alderson, Principled Policing: Protecting the Public with Integrity Winchester, U.K.: Waterside Press, 1998, 185 pp.

I argue that we should rethink the nature and scope of Spinoza’s “one and the same” relation. Contrary to the standard reading, the nature of this relation is not identity but a union, and its scope includes all idea-object pairs, even God and the idea of God. A crucial reason we should adopt this dual picture is that the idea of God must be one and the same as something found when Nature is conceived under each of the other attributes. (...) If “one and the same” is interpreted as a relation of identity, this requirement cannot be met. However, maintaining that God and the idea of God are one and the same not only fulfills this requirement, but also is independently motivated. I also briefly consider how the thesis that God and the idea of God are one and the same affords us with positive insights concerning the nature of this relation. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a critical phenomenological investigation of immigrant indebtedness, with special focus on its temporality. I understand immigrant indebtedness as a relation of debt where what is owed is gratitude, and which takes on a special meaning when the debtor in question is racially construed as immigrant. Understood as such, immigrant indebtedness has the power to function as a social structure that organizes, conditions and impacts people’s lives. By analysing writer and poet Sumaya Jirde Ali's descriptions of (...) immigrant indebtedness in dialogue with Marianne Gullestad, Alia Al-Saji and Maurizio Lazzarato, I argue that the harm of immigrant indebtedness becomes visible once we pay attention to its temporal structure—involving the permanence of the debt-relation, the freezing and distortion of the past, as well as their limiting effects on future and present. (shrink)

This title, first published in 1991, opens with an account by Gadamer of his own life and work and their relation to the achievements of hermeneutics. Building upon the key theme of dialogue, Gadamer and Hermeneutics provides a series of essays, either linked Gadamer to other major contemporary philosophers or focusing on a given Gadamerian theme. This book will be of interest to students of literary theory.

With the themed issue “The Critical Phenomenology of Borders and Migration,” we at Puncta wish to highlight the need for a continued systematic reflection on the lived experiences of migrants in relation to the political and social structures that inform these experiences. By claiming that critical phenomenology can be a fruitful approach to this work, we insist that the complex lived experience of migrants should not only be acknowledged and included in the form of examples and anecdotes, but systematically integrated (...) and interrogated in philosophical conversations on migration-related matters. The hope is that critically attuned phenomenological analyses of migrant lived experiences may contribute to offer new knowledges indispensable for understanding what is actually at stake—philosophically, politically, ethically, and existentially—with the particular situations that migrants, border-crossers and border-dwellers continually negotiate. (shrink)

Peterson, Karlawish, and Largent’s “Supported Decision Making with People at the Margins of Autonomy” brings welcome attention to the rights of people with cognitive impairment and provides...

In the late 1970s, while working in my laboratory at the American Health Foundation, I received a phone call from Henry Spira. Not one for small talk, he did not even bother introducing himself beyond his name. He immediately began questioning me about my studies using the protozoan Tetrahymenathermophila, which I hoped would serve as an alternative to the Draize ocular irritation test. While flattered that someone cared about my work, I was soon lost in confusion and skepticism about the (...) true purpose of his call. Who was Henry Spira? Why did he want to visit my animal facility and why did he want to bring a physician colleague with him? Not only was I naive about the budding opposition to the Draize test, I was equally naive that it was Spira, an ardent animal protectionist, who was leading the fight. This seminal interaction began a friendship that spanned nearly twenty years; a friendship that indelibly changed my perception of nonhuman animals and how I relate to them. (shrink)

An introductory text on cognitive science from an interdisciplinary perspective. Containing chapters on philosophy, psychology, cognition, neuroscience, the network and evolutionary approaches. Covers theories and models of mind looking at all major information processing categories: perception, attention, language, emotions, social, and artificial intelligence.

On the life and works of Maṇḍanamiśra, ancient Hindu philosopher.