This paper explores foreign travel as an affective experience, embodied practice and form of learning. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on tourism and pilgrimage in the Himalayan region, the phenomenological notions of “home world” and “alien world” are employed to discuss how perceptions of strangeness and everyday practices are shaped by enculturation and socialisation processes. It is shown that travellers bring the habitus and doxa acquired in the home world to foreign situations, where these embodied knowledge schemes and abilities for skilful (...) coping can break down. In a home world, cultural patterns offer actors “trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world” that allow everyday experience to go largely unnoticed and unquestioned. In alien worlds, however, travellers – as strangers – encounter differences and disturbances that disrupt experience and cause things normally overlooked to become “lit up”. Using Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of “light breaks” and Dewey's theory of challenge, the author argues that foreign travel generates a form of embodied learning. This occurs first on the level of the pre-reflexive body that is affected and solicited by the new and unfamiliar demands of an alien world. Ultimately, through continuous adjustment of habits and practices in foreign environments, an embodied cosmopolitanism is generated via accumulated travel experience. This calls attention to the role of the lived body in travel experience, as well as the role of place and environment in shaping human practices, perceptions and modes of dwelling. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

The article investigates the rhetorical means of mediating affective experience in occasioned storytelling. The completion of this article has been supported by The Emil Aaltonen Foundation and The Academy of Finland project (285144) The Literary in Life and The Academy of Finland project (326645) European Solidarities in Turmoil. We are interested in the forms and aspects of bodily action in signifying and communicating a “para-factual experience” that was triggered by a real-life incident, but in fact only took place in a (...) person’s imagination. We explore the case of a TV interview in which an American living in Finland narrates a personal, disturbing experience related to the news about 9/11. The story presents a visual scenario of the teller’s affective reaction towards two Muslim women in a grocery store. What is interesting in the story are its involuntary dimensions: the scenario portrays a picture of the teller that he finds unrecognizable and detached from his sense of self as a person. Even if the act was never actually realized, to the teller it felt real and compelling, as is manifest in the way he translates the scenario into a bodily performance. The teller not only uses his body to tell the story but momentarily turns the surrounding setting into a scene in the storyworld in which he plays the unidentified me. We call this physical performance of the imagined scene the embodied ekphrasis of experience. In Semiotica, the rhetorical device of ekphrasis has appeared before (see Frosh 2003; Hopkins 2015; Nesselroth 2016; Sarapik 2009) from such literary and linguistic perspectives, as well as through the lens of media research and cultural studies, to which our application will add from the viewpoint of ethnomethodology and the social sciences. Deploying research on multimodal interaction and intermediality, our empirical analysis explicates how the teller’s body, and not just words, build action, convey affective meaning, and resemiotize and mobilize a physical enactment of the past hypothetical scene. (shrink)

The processing, representation, and perception of bodily signals (interoception) plays an important role for human behavior. Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. Similarly, activation of interoceptive representations and meta-representations of bodily signals supporting interoceptive awareness are profoundly associated with emotional experience and cognitive functions. This article gives an overview over present findings and models on interoception and (...) mechanisms of embodiment and highlights its relevance for disorders that are suggested to represent a translation deficit of bodily states into subjective feelings and self-awareness. (shrink)

Much of the characteristic symptomatology of schizophrenia can be understood as resulting from a pervasive sense of disembodiment. The body is experienced as an external machine that needs to be controlled with explicit intentional commands, which in turn leads to severe difficulties in interacting with the world in a fluid and intuitive manner. In consequence, there is a characteristic dissociality: Others become problems to be solved by intellectual effort and no longer present opportunities for spontaneous interpersonal alignment. This dissociality goes (...) hand in hand with a progressive loss of the socially extended mind, which normally affords opportunities for co-regulation of cognitive and affective processes. However, at times people with schizophrenia report that they are confronted by the opposite of this dissociality, namely an unusual fluidity of the self-other boundary as expressed in experiences of ambiguous body boundaries, intrusions, and even merging with others. Here the person has not lost access to the socially extended mind but has instead become lost in it, possibly due to a weakened sense of self. We argue that this neglected aspect of schizophrenic social dysfunction can be usefully approached via the concept of genuine intersubjectivity: We normally participate in a shared experience with another person by implicitly co-regulating how our interaction unfolds. This co-regulation integrates our respective experience’s dynamical bases into one interpersonal process and gives the interaction an ambiguous second-person character. The upshot is that reports of abnormal self-other fluidity are not indicative of hallucinations without any basis in reality, but of a heightened sensitivity and vulnerability to processes of interpersonal alignment and mutual incorporation that form the normal basis of social life. We conclude by discussing implications of this view for both the science of consciousness as well as approaches to intervention and therapy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Schizophrenic Delusions, Embodiment, and the BackgroundGiovanni Stanghellini (bio)Keywordsschizophrenia, delusion, embodiment, common sense, phenomenologyIn their article Delusions, Certainty, and the Background, Rhodes and Gipps (2008) argue for a Background theory of delusions. Their central argument may be summed up as follows:• The formation and maintenance of delusions becomes intelligible once they are seen to reflect a basic disturbance. When studying delusions, the focus should be on providing an (...) adequate framework for understanding, rather than providing empirical hypotheses to be tested.• The basic disturbance in delusions, and insanity in general, is not a deficiency in reasoning or a defect in the content of experience, but rather something more fundamental.• Delusions––this is their central claim––are caused by a failure of the Bedrock of beliefs (Wittgenstein) or the Background (Searle) to adequately inform or constrain the process of belief formation.• Our Bedrock certainties are defined––following Wittgenstein––as ultimately constituted by our ability to act in the world and demonstrate our primary engagement with the world. They are born out of our everyday experience of the world, conveying our direct, pre-reflective, and practical grasp of the world, rather than expressing judgments we make about it.• Similarly, the Background is defined as those abilities and dispositions that are neither representations nor rules, that function before we can make sense of our experiences.• Wittgenstein’s Bedrock and Searle’s Background in great part overlap with Blankenburg’s pre-reflective natural self-evidence and Stanghellini’s common sense, namely, our own unreflecting know-how, a set of nonpropositional skills, capacities, and dispositions that attune us with the world.• Without a fully functioning Background, the distinctions between imaginary and real (mind and world), self and non-self, and cause and coincidence fail to be adequately drawn within experience. Also, grasping the meaning of others’ behaviors and a weakening of contextual influences are entailed by an erosion of Background sensibilities.I feel extremely sympathetic to this account and, as Rhodes and Gipps report, there are remarkable points of overlap between their and my own ideas about the formation of schizophrenic delusions. I would like to add some comments on the main theories on the basic disorders entailed in the pathogenesis of delusions and conclude with some suggestions to integrate the Background theory of delusions. [End Page 311]Syntagmatic Versus Paradigmatic Models of DelusionsLet me raise first an epistemological point: paradigmatic models of delusions––defining what a delusion is in itself and what are its borders with similar phenomena––proved to be unsatisfactory in psychopathology. As Schneider and Huber (1975) put it more that 40 years ago, “[w]hat counts in delusions is not the delusion itself... but snagging the course of the lived experience, rather than its product” (p. 2042). What we do need, to understand what delusions really are, are syntagmatic models how––delusions (in this case, delusions in persons with schizophrenia) are connected to other phenomena within a structure or a process. What we should look for, then, are the phenomena that contribute as motivationally (or causally) necessary vulnerability, that is, the basic disturbance for the development of delusions. This logically implies that we need studying delusions in fieri, or the pathways that lead to delusions themselves. I subscribe to the principle that studying delusion by merely concentrating exclusively on its crystallized forms would be like studying stroke victims to know more about hypertension (Parnas and Sass 2001). This methodological move from crystallized delusions to delusions in-the-making is quintessential to define the subtle, basic, phenomenal invariant core that characterizes a given psychopathological phenomenon and that emerges across the manifold facets of the phenomenon itself and shapes them and keeps them meaningfully interconnected.A syntagmatic model should account for (at least) the following features of schizophrenic delusions:• abnormalities in symbolization (loss of commonsense meaning of a given thing or fact),• formal aspects (e.g., revelation character, experience of centrality), and• specificity of content (e.g., metaphysical tinge).It should also be compatible with those phenomena like self-disorders (loss of sense of ownership and of agency) that are entailed in most schizophrenic symptoms (e.g., verbal–acoustic hallucinations and experiences of alien control). Finally, it should keep meaningfully... (shrink)

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches-somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny-may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours-evocative objects designed at once to to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, imaginative pages not only enables a (...) window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past, but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative study with 124 participants we explore what is in ordinary language referred to as 'suicidal feelings'. We identify four interrelated aspects of this experience, which together suggest that 'suicidal feelings' is in fact a 'feeling of being suicidal', an existential feeling. Although each experience is unique in its presentation, it is also the case that people who are suicidal tend to experience a combination of the following: 1) loss of consistency and/ or coherence in their sense (...) of self; 2) a disruption in the reciprocal action between self and world; 3) serious depletion of their mental resources; and 4) a disturbance of embodiment. We then argue that 'the feeling of being suicidal' should be understood as a disruption in the experience of the self as an agent and that this forms the appropriate background for interpreting suicidal thoughts and intentions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Background Theory of Delusion and Existential PhenomenologyRichard G. T. Gipps (bio) and John Rhodes (bio)KeywordsPhenomenology, psychological explanation, epistemology, schizophreniaSituating and Clarifying the PaperThe commentaries of Nassir Ghaemi and Giovanni Stanghellini help to sketch out the intellectual landscape of philosophical perspectives in psychiatry, and situate our paper within it. A happy convergence between the analytical philosophy perspective from which we were writing, and the existential–phenomenological paradigm described by both (...) authors, is the result. Stanghellini in particular carefully describes three main theories of existential deformations, tracing delusion formation back to either (i) a disturbance of meaning synthesis conceived as a dysfunction of a Husserlian consciousness, (ii) a disturbance of pre-reflective self-consciousness resulting in a kind of paralyzing hyperreflexivity, and (iii) (Stanghellini’s preferred model) a disturbance of embodiment. This final account views delusion as springing from a failure in the subject’s corporeal and praxical being-in-the-world. As the subject’s practical, pre-reflective grip on the world is loosened, so their minds become unconstrained by that understanding and practical rationality immanent within that grip, and thought, now unconstrained, starts to travel through delusional worlds. Stanghellini accordingly views our model as an example of a disembodiment theory, which allows it to overcome the disadvantages of the first two models, which may both, in their own ways, overvalue the rôle of (disturbances of) reflective consciousness in the formation (and delusional deformation) of everyday understanding.Being situated within a preexisting landscape has both its benefits and its disbenefits, the principle example of the latter being the potential assimilation of anything new to what has already been said. Thus, although we are grateful to our commentators for placing us on the larger historical and conceptual map, it may be helpful to briefly rehearse our motivations for drawing on the philosophical ideas of the Bedrock and Background in our theory of delusion. Our paper was primarily motivated by a concern that current, psychologically mainstream, cognitive models of delusion, although helpfully drawing our attention to common reasoning and perceptual deficits in the person with psychosis, fail to adequately account for what is delusional about delusions. It was, in [End Page 321] particular, to account for the certainty with which the deluded person clings to often quite extraordinary beliefs that we drew on the epistemological notion of the background. And although this epistemological notion fits quite neatly with ontological concerns regarding the embodied and praxical character of human existence, it is the particular epistemic rôle that it played in our theory—to do with the extraratiocinative constraint on judgement provided by the Background—that we wish to stress here.We return to this shortly, but first wish to comment briefly on two specific considerations raised by the commentaries. The first concerns Stanghellini’s claim that, for us, “when studying delusions, the focus should be on providing an adequate framework for understanding, rather than providing empirical hypotheses to be tested” (2008, 311–314). It seems to us, however, that both are equally important. What we wished to stress, however, was that empirical hypothesis testing may be led astray if it is not informed by an adequate framework for understanding. For example, most cognitive psychological experiments on delusions concern themselves with the individual’s ability to make appropriate guesses (e.g., regarding the color of beads in a bag), and their tendency to jump to conclusions; they do not concern themselves with the kinds of extraordinary conviction and certainty met with in delusion. The risk run by empirical researchers of cognitive factors in delusion is that a lack of a prior adequate theorization of delusion makes for accounts that are ultimately only of the formation, not of delusion in particular but rather of false or unusual beliefs more generally. An analytical approach, however, can help to explicate the ways in which the psychiatric concept of delusion fails to be adequately characterized by the quite general ‘external criteria’ of delusion (as Jaspers [1963] called them: falsity, stubbornness, uncommon), and aids in the construction of empirical hypotheses this time constrained by an understanding of the true ‘internal criteria’ of psychotic belief. Such an approach helps to spell out the... (shrink)

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro's writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize (...) win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again. (shrink)

Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of study and research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and debates in this exciting subject and essential reading for any student and scholar of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts: Historical Underpinnings Perspectives (...) on Embodied Cognition Applied Embodied Cognition: Perception, Language and Reasoning Applied Embodied Cognition: Social and Moral Cognition and Emotion Applied Embodied Cognition: Memory, Attention and Group Cognition Meta-Topics. The early chapters of the Handbook cover empirical and philosophical foundations of embodied cognition, focusing on Gibsonian, phenomenological and cybernetic approaches. Subsequent chapters cover additional, important themes common to work in embodied cognition, incuding embedded , extended and enactive cognition as well as chapters on embodied cognition and empirical research in perception, language, reasoning, social and moral cognition, emotion, consciousness, memory and learning and development. (shrink)

In this article the author seeks to highlight a specific disorder related to bodily experience in melancholia conceived as a severe form of clinical depression. The article is divided into three parts. In the first section, the author investigates the intersubjective dimension of bodily experience in light of the categories of Außen- and Innenleiblichkeit. In the second section, I explore a specific disturbance of the dimension of intercorporeality. The excessive feeling of the bodily (außenleibliche) visibility of his/her own sufferance is (...) a fundamental aspect of depression. At a pre-reflexive level, we constantly assume the noncoincidence between one's own bodily expression and the Other's experience/reading of these expressions. An alteration of this (pre-reflexive) awareness occurs in melancholia. The patient feels as if the melancholic condition would be transparent to the other. In the third section, the author intends to show the alteration of the embodied communication between the melancholic person and the other investigating two particular phenomena: the exchange of gaze in a face to face encounter, and the disturbance of the oral sense, revealing a specific form of irresponsiveness and the experience of void. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time is a fundamental constituent of human consciousness and can be disturbed under conditions of mental disorders such as schizophrenia or affective disorders. Besides the scientific domain of psychiatry, time consciousness is a topic that has been extensively studied both by theoretical philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. It can be shown that both approaches exemplified by the philosophical analysis of time consciousness and the neuroscientific theory of cross-temporal contingencies as the neurophysiological basis of human consciousness implemented in (...) the prefrontal cortex converge in 2 respects. Firstly, a tripartite conception of consciousness divides human cognition in 3 different temporal domains comprising retention, presentation, and protention and the past, the present, and the future corresponding to working memory, interference control, and preparatory set. Secondly, both concepts refer to the present as an extended duration that integrates information from the recent past and the future. We propose that the integration of phenomenological and neuroscientific approaches can stimulate the development of enriched pathophysiological concepts of mental disorders. This approach appears to be particularly fruitful with respect to schizophrenia that is interpreted as a structural disturbance of time consciousness. (shrink)

Autism research has recently witnessed an embodied turn. In response to the cognitivist approaches dominating the field, phenomenological scholars have suggested a reconceptualization of autism as a disorder of embodied intersubjectivity. Part of this interest in autistic embodiment concerns the role of sensory differences, which have recently been added to the diagnostic criteria of autism. While research suggests that sensory differences are implicated in a wide array of autistic social difficulties, it has not yet been explored how sensory and (...) social experience in autism relate on a phenomenological level. Given the importance of the sensory dimension of social encounters in phenomenological analyses of autism, this question must be considered crucial. This article investigates the role played by sensory differences in autistic social experience. Through a phenomenological analysis informed primarily by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with particular emphasis on the relation between intersubjectivity and perception, I argue that sensory differences affect the way other people appear in autistic experience on a pre-reflective level. By drawing on autistic young adults’ experiential descriptions of social encounters, this article identifies three aspects of how sensory differences affect social experiences in autism. First, social encounters manifested as sensorially disturbing, chaotic, and unpredictable events. Second, the embodied expressions of others appeared unfamiliar, threatening, and promoted a sense of detachment from the social world. Third, deliberate practices were employed to actively seek perceptual and social meaning in these disorienting social encounters. This analysis stresses the importance of understanding embodied intersubjectivity through its sensory dimensions. In addition, it indicates an important avenue for future research in exploring the potential role of practice in maintaining an intuitive grip on social meaning. By approaching social encounters as sensory and perceptual events, I emphasize how social difficulties in autism are inherently world-involving phenomena rather than a cognitive deficit reducible to the autistic person. (shrink)

This book suggests a bold comparative approach to broad cultural differences between Africa and Melanesia. Its theme is personhood, understood in terms of what anthropologists call embodiment. These concepts are applied to questions ranging from the meanings of spirit possession, to the logics of witchcraft and kinship relations, the use of rituals in healing, and even the impact of capitalism. Questioning common assumptions about the huge differences among these discrete areas, the contributions document surprising continuities.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guibert of Tournai's Letter to Lady Isabelle:An Introduction and English TranslationLarry F. Field, Jacques Dalarun, Sean L. Field, and Guibert of TournaiIntroductionGuibert, from the noble family of As-Piès, was born near Tournai around 1200. From his hometown he traveled to Paris for his art degree, and completed the curriculum in theology there before entering the Franciscan Order around 1240. He may have participated in Louis IX's crusade of 1248, (...) but, if so, was surely back in Paris by 1254 at the latest, since he preached a cycle of sermons de dominicis et de sanctis to the university community before summer 1255.1 His regency as Franciscan master of theology at Paris was probably around 1259–1261,2 about the time he [End Page 31] completed his Eruditio regum et principum for Louis IX,3 and began his most substantial work, the Erudimentum doctrinae.4 Other significant treatises include his De pace et animi tranquillitate (ca. 1275)5 written for Marie de Dampierre, and the Collectio de scandalis ecclesiae, prepared for the Second Council of Lyon.6 Guibert died in Tournai on 7 October 1284.7Sometime around 1254, Guibert wrote a long letter of spiritual advice to Isabelle (1225–70), the sister of King Louis IX.8 Isabelle was herself a remarkable figure. She had rejected several proposals of marriage, including that with Conrad, the heir to Emperor Frederick II, in 1243, in spite of pressure from her family and Pope Innocent IV. But following a bout of serious illness at about that time,9 her family accepted her [End Page 32] decision to remain unwed. There is no evidence, however, that Isabelle ever pronounced a formal vow of virginity. Through the 1250s she simply remained at the Capetian court as a virgin princess with an increasing reputation for piety and indeed holiness, praised in lavish terms by Innocent IV in 1253 and Alexander IV in 1256.10 This piety took a distinctly Franciscan turn by 1254, when Pope Innocent IV granted her request for Franciscan confessors,11 which would ultimately result in her foundation of Longchamp, a house of Sorores minores just west of Paris, by 1260.12 Guibert's letter shows no awareness of such a project, indicating that it must have been written before spring 1255, by which time the land for Longchamp was being purchased on Isabelle's behalf.13 Guibert thus wrote at the moment when Isabelle was forming her first ties to the Franciscans, but well before her move to Longchamp, where she lived out the 1260s as resident lay patron (but never a nun).Guibert's Letter is really a short treatise of spiritual and moral advice, tailored to a celibate princess. It is organized around Psalm 44:14–15, All the glory of the king's daughter is within in golden fringes, clothed around with varieties. In a five-part structure, the king's daughter stands for a heavenly inheritance; glory within represents internal purity; gold indicates virginity; the fringes are a sign of humility; and clothed around with varieties points to honest comportment. The resulting "royal garment," however, is rather unequally woven together, with section one on the "heavenly inheritance" and the intertwined sections three and four on virginity and humility receiving by far the most space. In fact, section one forms a sort of treatise-within-a-treatise, organized as a ten-step ascent to the heavenly inheritance awaiting the daughter of the king. [End Page 33]The Letter to Lady Isabelle was first edited by Alphonse de Poorter in 1931, from a manuscript which contained only part of the text.14 The full text was brought into print by Sean Field in 2003,15 and translated into French by Jacques Dalarun in 2014.16 Yet in spite of these advances, the Letter has remained little noticed by scholars. Anne-Hélène Allirot offered several perceptive pages in 2010, stressing the way Guibert's treatment of hereditas implies that female members of the royal family might be particularly able to embody Capetian claims to holiness.17 That same year, in the only recent article dedicated specifically to this Letter, Rina Lahav... (shrink)

In this paper I argue that meditation has a direct bearing upon philosophical discourse by enabling us to distance ourselves from the basic structure of subjectivity that often limits the scope of reason. Recent neurobiological hypotheses are discussed in conjunction with the method of hermeneutic phenomenology to argue that interpretations on the level of our neurobiology underly and construct our experience of ourselves as subjects and the sense of explicit rational understanding that arises from it. This implies that prediscursive embodied (...) practice can play a crucial role in freeing our philosophical understanding from implicit assumptions. (shrink)

In the last two centuries, our world would have been a safer place if philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche had not given intellectual encouragement to the radical ideologies of Jacobins, Stalinists, and fascists. Maybe the world would have been better off, from the standpoint of sound practice, if philosophers had engaged in only modest, decent theory, as did John Stuart Mill. Yet, as Ronald Beiner contends, the point of theory is not to think safe thoughts; the point is (...) to open intellectual horizons. In Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, Beiner reflects on the dualism of theory and practice. The purpose of the theorist is not to offer sensible guidance on the conduct of social life but to test the boundaries of our vision of social order. Whereas the liberal citizen should embody the practical virtues of prudence and moderation, the theorist should be radical, probing, and immoderate. Looking back at the liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s, Beiner recognizes that the antidote to our spiritless times lies neither in the embrace of community over individualism nor of individualism over community: both individual and community need to be submitted to radical questioning. It is by exposing ourselves to the challenge of fearless thinking encountered at the philosophical extremities that we are most likely to understand our own world at a deeper level. In this collection of essays and reviews, Ronald Beiner helps us to think critically about the thought-worlds of our foremost contemporary thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, J¦rgen Habermas, Will Kymlicka, Christopher Lasch, Richard Rorty, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

Disturbances of consciousness, including fluctuations in attention and awareness, are a common and clinically important symptom in dementia with Lewy bodies. In the present study we investigate potential mechanisms of such disturbances of consciousness in a clinicopathological study evaluating specific components of the cholinergic system. [3H]Epibatidine binding to the high-affinity nicotinic receptor in the temporal cortex differentiated DLB cases with and without DOC, being 62–66% higher in those with DOC. The were no differences between DLB patients with or (...) without DOC in 125I-labeled α-bungaratoxin binding to the low-affinity nicotinic receptor, [3H]pirenzepine binding to the muscarinic M1 receptor, or in choline acetyltransferase activity. These findings provide support for the hypothesis that cholinergic activity is an important neural correlate if consciousness and suggest a mechanism of DOC in DLB involving alterations in the nicotinic receptor, composed of predominantly α4 and β2 subunits. (shrink)

The first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. This landmark work is the first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists that considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. With twenty-six chapters by leading researchers, the book connects and integrates findings from fields that range from philosophy of mind to sociology of sports. The chapters show not only that (...) sports can tell scientists how the human mind works but also that the scientific study of the human mind can help athletes succeed. Sports psychology research has always focused on the themes, notions, and models of embodied cognition; embodied cognition, in turn, has found striking confirmation of its theoretical claims in the psychological accounts of sports performance and athletic skill. Athletic skill is a legitimate form of intelligence, involving cognitive faculties no less sophisticated and complex than those required by mathematical problem solving. After presenting the key concepts necessary for applying embodied cognition to sports psychology, the book discusses skill disruption ; sensorimotor skill acquisition and how training correlates to the development of cognitive faculties; the intersubjective and social dimension of sports skills, seen in team sports; sports practice in cultural and societal contexts; the notion of “affordance” and its significance for ecological psychology and embodied cognition theory; and the mind's predictive capabilities, which enable anticipation, creativity, improvisation, and imagination in sports performance. Contributors Ana Maria Abreu, Kenneth Aggerholm, Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, Duarte Araújo, Jürgen Beckmann, Kath Bicknell, Geoffrey P. Bingham, Jens E. Birch, Gunnar Breivik, Noel E. Brick, Massimiliano L. Cappuccio, Thomas H. Carr, Alberto Cei, Anthony Chemero, Wayne Christensen, Lincoln J. Colling, Cassie Comley, Keith Davids, Matt Dicks, Caren Diehl, Karl Erickson, Anna Esposito, Pedro Tiago Esteves, Mirko Farina, Giolo Fele, Denis Francesconi, Shaun Gallagher, Gowrishankar Ganesh, Raúl Sánchez-García, Rob Gray, Denise M. Hill, Daniel D. Hutto, Tsuyoshi Ikegami, Geir Jordet, Adam Kiefer, Michael Kirchhoff, Kevin Krein, Kenneth Liberman, Tadhg E. MacIntyre, Nelson Mauro Maldonato, David L. Mann, Richard S. W. Masters, Patrick McGivern, Doris McIlwain, Michele Merritt, Christopher Mesagno, Vegard Fusche Moe, Barbara Gail Montero, Aidan P. Moran, David Moreau, Hiroki Nakamoto, Alberto Oliverio, David Papineau, Gert-Jan Pepping, Miriam Reiner, Ian Renshaw, Michael A. Riley, Zuzanna Rucinska, Lawrence Shapiro, Paula Silva, Shannon Spaulding, John Sutton, Phillip D. Tomporowski, John Toner, Andrew D. Wilson, Audrey Yap, Qin Zhu, Christopher Madan. (shrink)

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it (...) is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. (shrink)

This article deals with two aspects of psychoanalytic history. The first is the history of ideas, specifically the notions of a one- and two-person psychology that are in such wide use today. Second, the authors attend, much more critically, to a disturbance of memory (repeated distortion, omission, selective representation, and misrepresentation) that has accompanied scholarly discussion of these ideas for the past 50 years. Finally, the authors attempt to restore the original meaning of the person-psychology concept and illustrate its relevance (...) for contemporary psychoanalytic debate. (shrink)

The structure of human embodiment is fundamentally characterized by a polarity or ambiguity between Leib and Körper, the subjective body and the objectified body, or between being-body and having-a-body. This ambiguity, emphasized, above all, by Helmuth Plessner and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is also of crucial significance for psychopathology. Insofar as mental illnesses disturb or interrupt the unhindered conduct of one’s life, they also exacerbate the tension within embodiment that holds between being-body and having-a-body. In mental illnesses, there is a (...) failure of tacit mediations upon which one’s bodily being-toward-the-world is based. Instead of serving as a medium of relating to the world, the body makes .. (shrink)

The paper presents the phenomenological conception of bodily perception as a possible therapeutic model for treating melancholic depression. At the beginning, it discusses some key concepts of Freud’s psychoanalysis: instinct, memory, perception, narcissism and melancholia. Next, the Freudian theory of melancholia is compared with studies of phenomenological psychopathology. It is investigated how melancholia is based on the division of temporal relations. Finally, the main problem of the paper is investigated: can the structure of perception and its constitutive openness toward the (...) future represent a theoretical model for therapeutic practices designed to treat melancholic depression? (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

Today the concept of 'schizophrenia' is often presented in psychiatric texts as a construct, a construct bringing together a diverse and, allegedly, independently assailable range of signs and symptoms. According to such a diagnostic scheme two patients may both be allowed to count as suffering from schizophrenia despite sharing hardly a single symptom. The validity of the concept has accordingly been contested by psychologists for its apparent lack of unity. In the absence of clear independent evidence of a unitary physiological (...) disease process underlying such diverse phenomena, a natural enough suggestion has been to... (shrink)

The article defects priority idiological and centenary positions of the Ukrainian society in the 19th century. The acceptance of consciousness and self-relevant is characterized by a comprehensive analysis. The aim and the tasks: вy working out ethical and philosophical literature, to justify the establishment of dignity of personality in the conditions of domestic cultural and socio-political selfdetermination of the late twentieth century.Research methods are the main methods of research are historical, structuralfunctional, systemic and comparative. To solve specific research tasks also (...) used the principles of systemicity, objectivity, ascension from abstract to concrete, etcEmphades of a new state in ethical and phylosophic keys, analyzes the values of Ukrainians, slogans, native ideas are analyzed. Research results: Scientifically illustrated embodies of the national self-release of the Ukrainian society: Selfrelease of the Naziological State Ukraine: Sovereignty of Ukraine (1985-1991 gg.); Nassional State Formation of Ukraine in the conditions of socio-purity and socioeconomic neoperedelenost (1992-1996 gg.); Creation of oligarchata as a diverse manifestation of a democratic regime in Ukraine (1996-2004 gg.); Polarization of the Farility (2005-2014 gg.); Thick ethape, which is purely formally defined as "post-revolutionary". The author exemplary aspects of the social realities of the reorganization, and the presentation of honor and dignity of the license. Discussion. It is condemned that for the self-release of the national state, the slide of restructuring of steel, the significant income from the public discourse of the topics of repressions, reversed to the families of the species of culture, science, public expressions, popularization of the creativity of the dyspasses and diaspree Figur. Conclusion. In such a way, the protest in the second half of the 1980s is Pastepeno Gladenna, which has received the introduction of privacy in its own participants.Many were re-enriched, rising from the laurel of the prison establishment, the inside of the country, and in the finishing of the bobs for Naziovnoye venereal, the rule of law and market economy. The dignity of a person on the day of restructuring, in the whole, was disturbed from the ancestors of the historical objects of the maintenance of the specialty – Ego Simbiosis with such categories, as freedom, will be, independence. (shrink)

This article considers a series of ideas disturbing the conventional wisdom that decrees education an essential force in saving the world. Taking Morton's descriptions of hyperobjects seriously, we consider his radical idea that the world has ended amidst the eco-political depredations of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, we claim that education in modernity most properly belongs - materially and ideologically - with technological enframing and the rise of biopower. In other words, what is taken almost universally as the sacred realm of education (...) is, in fact, a contributory factor in the global eco-ontological crisis. Morton describes global warming, plastics and nuclear arsenals as hyperobjects: viscous, nonlocal entities that exist in temporal and spatial planes vastly different from our own immediate worlds. They are the threatening, difficult to access entities that express the Anthropocene. While most will propose that education will be vital in combating looming ecological apocalypse, we consider that education is a hyperobject itself. Education, we opine, is aligned with the forces and conditions that have generated the present crisis. This is because education embodies the same qualities as the hyperobjects of modernity; according to any rigorous historical ontology, education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control. If this position is to be taken seriously, education is not merely impotent in combatting ecological catastrophe, but is a key apparatus supporting the Anthropocene. Education is thus another element of the end of the world. (shrink)

Over the past years, the intersubjective dimension of psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, has gained increasing phenomenological attention. Psychopathologists and philosophers have developed ideas on how the social aspects of psychotic symptoms and experiences could be understood, in particular in their relation to the ipseity disturbance model, namely the idea that schizophrenia is essentially a disorder of the minimal self. Although the exact characteristics of the ipseity disorder hypothesis can differ from author to author, emphasizing certain phenomenological aspects like temporality or (...) embodiment... (shrink)

This chapter wades into the growing discussion surrounding embodied cognition and predictive processing. After surveying a recent debate between Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, it articulates two outstanding issues facing discussions of compatibility. It argues that headway on these issues can be made by drawing on the resources of philosophy of science.