Because of risks of essentialism and homogenization, feminist theorists frequently avoid making precise ontological claims, especially in regard to specifying bodily connections and differences among women. However well-intentioned, this trend may actually run counter to the spirit of intersectionality by shifting feminists' attention away from embodiment, fostering oppressor-centric theories, and obscuring privilege within feminism. What feminism needs is not to turn from ontological specificity altogether, but to engage a new kind of ontological project that can account for the material complexity (...) of social space in the twenty-first century. Taking inspiration from the phenomenological concept of flesh as well as ecofeminism and María Lugones's theory of the colonial/modern gender system, this essay argues that our own flesh is related to that of others through lines of intercorporeal relations that collectively form topographies of flesh. When we attend to those material relationships present in a particular locality at a point in time, we are able to recognize topographical aggregates of beings that can serve as a basis for this new feminist ontology. An example from Toni Morrison's Beloved involving a human woman and a nonhuman one is used as a paradigm for thinking ontological connection and difference at the same time. (shrink)

Abstract Starting with Ben-Menahem's definition of historical contingency as sensitivity to variations in initial conditions, we suggest that historical events and processes can be thought of as forming a complex landscape of contingency and necessity. We suggest three different ways of extending and elaborating Ben-Menahem's concepts: (1) By supplementing them with a notion of historical disturbance; (2) by pointing out that contingency and necessity are subject to scaling effects; (3) by showing how degrees of contingency/necessity can change over time. We (...) also argue that further development of Sterelny's notion of conditional inevitability leads to our conclusion that the topography of historical contingency is something that can change over time. (shrink)

이 글은 리쾨르 철학에서 타자(l’autre) 개념에서부터 ‘l'étranger’ 개념에 이르는 문제의 생성과 변화, 그 최종적 도착점, 이 전체의 모습을 그려보려는 아주 큰 기획의 첫 걸음으로 준비된 것이다. 적어도 서양 현대 유럽철학, 특히 현상학이나 해석학에서의 은 물론이겠지만, 리쾨르의 사회 및 정치 철학에서 논의되는 ‘타자’ 개념의 문제를 포함하여, ‘타자적인 것’, ‘다른 것’, ‘외국인’, ‘낯선 것’ 등으로 번역되고 이해되는 ‘l'étranger’개념의 문제 지형은 한 편의 논문의 형태로 정리되거나 요약될 수 없을 것이다. 따라서 본 논문은 단숨에 끝날 수는 없는 작업에 무모하게 돌진하기보다는, 길고 지난한 본격적인 탐구에 (...) 앞서 이 중요한 문제의 기승전결의 대략적인 그림, 다시 말해 시작점, 성장점, 변곡점 및 종착점에 이르는 표지판 정도를 세우는 예비적 목표를 달성하고자 한다. 결국 필자와 같이 리쾨르 철학에서 광의의 타자의 문제를 천착하려는 사람들이 주목하고 고민해야 할 지점들과 그 논거들을 대략이나마 짚어내고 해명하는 것이 현재 작업의 관건일 것이다. 다시 말해, 타자 문제와 ‘l'étranger’ 문제들이 리쾨르 철학에서 언제, 어떻게 등장하며, 또 다르게 어떻게 변형되어 가는지를 제시하는 것으로 만족하려 한다. (shrink)

The existence of shoulder abduction (SA) and finger extension (FE) movement capacity shortly after stroke onset is an important prognostic factor, indicating favorable functional outcome for the hemiparetic upper limb. Here we asked whether variation in lesion topography affects these two movements in a similar or a distinct way, and whether lesion impact is similar or distinct for left and right hemisphere damage. SA and FE movements were examined in 77 chronic post-stroke patients using relevant items of the Fugl-Meyer (...) test. Lesion effects were analyzed separately for left and right hemispheric damage (LHD, RHD) patient groups using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. In the LHD group, SA and FE were affected only by damage to the cortico-spinal tract in its passage through the corona radiata. In contrast, following RHD, these two movements were affected not only by cortico-spinal tract damage but also by damage to white matter association tracts, the putamen and the insular cortex. In both groups, voxel clusters have been found where damage affected SA and also FE, along with voxels where damage affected only one of the two movements. The capacity to execute SA and FE movements following stroke is affected significantly by damage to shared and distinct voxels in the cortico-spinal tract in LHD patients and by damage to shared and distinct voxels in a larger array of cortical and subcortical regions in RHD patients. (shrink)

2015년 본격화된 ‘페미니즘 리부트’가 미투 운동, 불법촬영 반대운동, 낙태죄 폐지 운동으로 이어지며, 2020년 현재까지 지속되고 있다. 20대 여성의 절반이 자신을 페미니스트로 인식하며 페미니즘 대중서 붐을 추동하고 있는 현실에서, 대학 강단은 청년들의 페미니즘 지식에 대한 욕구에 어떻게 응답하고 있는가?BR 본 연구는 ‘성’ 관련 교양 수업을 대학이 일련의 페미니즘 리부트 이후의 사회 변화와 학생들의 수요에 어떻게 대응하고 있는지를 보여주는 하나의 중요한 자료라고 보고, 이를 탐색적으로 분석하고자 한다. ‘페미니즘 리부트’를 전후하여 14개 대학에서 개설된 ‘성(sex, gender, sexuality)’ 관련 교양 교과목명의 변화를 살펴, ‘성’을 바라보는 (...) 대학과 교수자의 인식을 탐색하고, 강의계획서의 내용을 분석하여 대학이 사유하는 ‘성’과 페미니즘과의 간극 혹은 접점을 살펴본다. 분석 결과, ‘성’ 관련 강의의 양적 변화는 청년들의 페미니즘 지식 열망에 대한 대학의 긍정적 응답이라고 판단하기 어려우며, 오히려 젠더 계급을 부정하고 양성의 조화만을 강조하거나, 이성애 중심주의, 정상가족 이데올로기를 전제하는 ‘성’ 강의가 상당수 있음을 확인하였다. SNS에서 싸우고 페미니즘 대중서로 독학하며 고군분투하는 20대 여성들이 계속해서 페미니즘과 사회변화에 대한 관심을 이어갈 수 있도록 대학이 지식과 배움의 장을 제공해야 한다. 이를 위해 여성학 교과목의 증설 및 신설, 여성학 수업의 페미니즘 페다고지의 실천에 대한 고민과 함께, 다양한 학과에서 주관하는 ‘성’ 강의의 현황을 파악하여 성차별적 강의에 개입할 수 있는 방안 마련이 경주되어야 할 것이다. (shrink)

Jeff Jordan has recently challenged the idea, widely accepted among theistic philosophers, that “God’s love must be maximally extended and equally intense.” By way of a response, I suggest a way to sidestep Jordan’s argument entirely and then try to show that his own argument is multiply flawed. I thus conclude that his challenge is unsuccessful.

Does God love every human equally and to the deepest degree possible? In an earlier article I argued that no one could, in principle, love every human equally and to the deepest degree possible. Thomas Talbott has objected and argues that a model of the divine love extended equally to all best captures the idea of God as loving parent. I contend that Talbott’s argument fails, in part, as it implies that the divine love treats the interests of humans as (...) fungible. (shrink)

It is widely thought that God must love each and every human to the same depth and degree. This proposition plays a prominent role in influential versionsof the problem of evil, and in theistic attempts to answer the problem of evil. A common reason cited in support of the idea of God’s loving equally every human is that a perfect being would possess every great-making property and loving equally every human would be a great-making property. It is the argument of (...) this essay, however, that a perfect being cannot in principle equally love every human. This argument is erected upon an unnoticed principle of perfect being theology: for all properties F, if F is a deficiency when had by a human, then F cannot be great-making when had by God. (shrink)

(2001). Comparing topographies: Across paths/around place: A reply to Casey. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 231-238.

The Weimar-Republic, and the modernist architecture and planning that was born there, is still a contested place, from whence liberals, reactionaries and Marxists can all trace their lineage. Sabine Hake’s Topographies of Class attempts to clarify this contestation, through an interdisciplinary study of the modernist geography of the interwar-capital, Berlin. The book offers many new insights into the Weimar-era city, countering a tendency on the Left to reject the twentieth-century city in favour of the romanticised ‘capitals of the nineteenth century’, (...) with their insurgent proletariat and their lushly ornamented boulevards. Topographies of Class is a reminder that, irrespective of the era’s rejection of ornament and romanticism, it was a site of class-struggle as intense as that of the Paris of the 1870s. However, Hake’s study is dominated by a conception of class as an ‘identity’, akin to the identity-politics of race or gender, leading to an argument centred on the suppression or expression of ‘class-difference’ rather than class-struggle. In the process, her reading of the city’s modernism becomes overly one-sided, as a period of tension between labour and capital is read, under the influence of Manfredo Tafuri and Italian post-Marxist architectural theory, as being governed almost solely by the logic of Fordist capital. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the basis for the moral obligation to remember. As the moral relation to the past is primarily a matter of shared identity, the kind of obligation in question splits into two related issues, namely, that of political, state-oriented and state-organized memory on which the political identity rests and that of memory labour grounded in social identities based in shared, time-extended projects. Drawing upon tensions between these two, I discuss time control and the (...) accumulation of identity as central to memory labour and, referring to John Zerzan’s critique of symbolical roots of power, pinpoint the moral basis of such an accumulation. On the basis of this, I argue for nesting the duty to remember in acknowledging the agent’s recognition of the relatedness and dependency of their agency and possibilities of flourishing which can be obtained thanks to adjusting the field of the virtue of practical wisdom so that it includes members of the time-extended community. (shrink)

(2001). Comparing topographies: Across paths/around place: A reply to Casey. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 231-238.

Orientalism within Us: Discourse Structure That Tames Us Unwittingly When cherry blossoms bloom, Lass, North Korean lass! I will kiss your lips for the ...

The focus of this study is the city of Berlin as a site of contested spaces and its representations in the novel Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis. As a number of recent books on Berlin have indicated, the ongoing efforts to physically re-configure historical sites in the city and construct a new post-unification identity for the capital and the nation has produced dissonance between long-standing national narratives of identity and the challenges presented by new identity narratives. The foundation of (...) cultural identity, social memory, is political, shaped and wielded by those in power. Yet, as Michel de Certeau has posited, such power can be contested at the street level where ruptures can be observed. Book of Clouds, the first novel by transnational author Chloe Aridjis, explores the relationship of identity and memory as Tatiana, a young Mexican Jewish woman living in Berlin in the first decade of the twenty-first century, observes and interacts with the city and its inhabitants from an outsider’s perspective. (shrink)

I consider the relation between the shape or structure of the world and the moral position occupied by human beings, and show that a cosmology that places earth at the centre does not give the centre of the universe pride of place but the lowest place, so any reluctance to move the earth from the centre of the universe was not due to thinking that humans must be in the most important position. From Plato on, the surface of the earth (...) is at the bottom and the outer heaven is the highest place. This applies to ancient thought and to Christian thought. (shrink)

Le naos de Dionysos Eleuthereus, croisé par Pausanias sur la route menant du Dipylon à l’Académie, n’a jamais pu être décrit faute de découverte qui pourrait lui être associée de manière sûre. Sa localisation varie selon les auteurs, qui le situent à différents endroits et de manière plus ou moins vague, sans qu’aucun argument soit déterminant. Il est cependant possible de resserrer les limites de l’espace d’investigation par une analyse attentive du passage du Périégète qui concerne cette région. L’auteur ne (...) suit vraisemblablement pas un ordre topographique strict, mais structure sa description en deux volets et parcourt le même espace deux fois selon des thèmes différents : d’abord les sanctuaires, puis les tombeaux. L’autre sanctuaire mentionné par Pausanias dans la région, celui des Artémis Aristè et Kallistè, peut fonctionner ici comme une balise spatiale et narrative. Or sa localisation, si elle n’a guère été discutée depuis près d’un siècle, est assez sûre. (shrink)

The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at (...) one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories. (shrink)

Le naos de Dionysos Eleuthereus, croisé par Pausanias sur la route menant du Dipylon à l’Académie, n’a jamais pu être décrit faute de découverte qui pourrait lui être associée de manière sûre. Sa localisation varie selon les auteurs, qui le situent à différents endroits et de manière plus ou moins vague, sans qu’aucun argument soit déterminant. Il est cependant possible de resserrer les limites de l’espace d’investigation par une analyse attentive du passage du Périégète qui concerne cette région. L’auteur ne (...) suit vraisemblablement pas un ordre topographique strict, mais structure sa description en deux volets et parcourt le même espace deux fois selon des thèmes différents : d’abord les sanctuaires, puis les tombeaux. L’autre sanctuaire mentionné par Pausanias dans la région, celui des Artémis Aristè et Kallistè, peut fonctionner ici comme une balise spatiale et narrative. Or sa localisation, si elle n’a guère été discutée depuis près d’un siècle, est assez sûre. (shrink)

The first interdisciplinary study of place, bringing together many of the key thinkers writing on the concept in the twenty-first century.

The shape of the Earth's surface, its topography, is a fundamental dimension of the environment, shaping or mediating many other environmental flows or functions. But there is a major divergence in the way that topography is conceptualized in different domains. Topographic cartographers, information scientists, geomorphologists and environmental modelers typically conceptualize topographic variability as a continuous field of elevations or as some discrete approximation to such a field. Pilots, explorers, anthropologists, ecologists, hikers, and archeologists, on the other hand, typically (...) conceptualize this same variability in terms of hills and valleys, mountains and plains, barrows and trenches, that is, as (special sorts of) objects, with locations, shapes, and often names of their own. In this chapter, we sketch an approach to bridging this fundamental gap in geographic information infrastructure. (shrink)

This article explores the theological role of cities in Judaism as settings for the mediation between the heavenly and earthly realms. By way of juxtaposing the late antique city of Sepphoris and the modern settlement of Me'ah She'arim in Jerusalem, two understandings of this mediation will be studied dialectically. The differences and similarities between the two communities and their self-representation through urban architecture reveal the ways in which the highest religious symbols are manifested in the life of a city. They (...) also unfold the transformation of modernity and the particular interpretation of a Jewish settlement it inspired. (shrink)

A sensitive and imaginative opening to the evocative force of nature.