Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

According to the standard account, to hope for an outcome is to desire it and to believe that its realization is possible, though not inevitable. This account, however, faces certain difficulties: It cannot explain how people can display differing strengths in hope; it cannot distinguish hope from despair; and it cannot explain substantial hopes. This paper proposes an account of hope that can meet these deficiencies. Briefly, it argues that in addition to possessing the relevant belief–desire structure as allowed in (...) the standard account, a hopeful person must also be able to see a way in which the desired outcome can come about and to see such a way to the outcome as a genuine possibility. (shrink)

This paper develops a hybridization of Newcomb’s Problem and the Frustrater (Spencer and Wells 2019 paper ‘Why take both boxes?’), underscoring how difficult it is to reconcile the rationality of taking both boxes in Newcomb’s Problem and the rationality of taking the envelope in the Frustrater.

I distinguish two ways of developing anti-exceptionalist approaches to logical revision. The first emphasizes comparing the theoretical virtuousness of developed bodies of logical theories, such as classical and intuitionistic logic. I'll call this whole theory comparison. The second attempts local repairs to problematic bits of our logical theories, such as dropping excluded middle to deal with intuitions about vagueness. I'll call this the piecemeal approach. I then briefly discuss a problem I've developed elsewhere for comparisons of logical theories. Essentially, the (...) problem is that a pair of logics may each evaluate the alternative as superior to themselves, resulting in oscillation between logical options. The piecemeal approach offers a way out of this problem andthereby might seem a preferable to whole theory comparisons. I go on to show that reflective equilibrium, the best known piecemeal method, has deep problems of its own when applied to logic. (shrink)

What makes a biological entity an individual? Jack Wilson shows that past philosophers have failed to explicate the conditions an entity must satisfy to be a living individual. He explores the reason for this failure and explains why we should limit ourselves to examples involving real organisms rather than thought experiments. This book explores and resolves paradoxes that arise when one applies past notions of individuality to biological examples beyond the conventional range and presents an analysis of identity and (...) persistence. The book's main purpose is to bring together two lines of research, theoretical biology and metaphysics, which have dealt with the same subject in isolation from one another. Wilson explains an alternative theory about biological individuality which solves problems which cannot be addressed by either field alone. He presents a more fine-grained vocabulary of individuation based on diverse kinds of living things, allowing him to clarify previously muddled disputes about individuality in biology. (shrink)

Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing (res). Rather, he understands artifacts (...) as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than substances created by human artifice. (shrink)

Some well-known metaphysical arguments against relativism rest on the claim that relativity somehow must be accompanied by relationality. I argue otherwise, and trace the consequences for some prominent disputes between relativists and absolutists.

Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at the epistemology of (...) introspection but which generalizes to theories of perceptual justification as well. (shrink)

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a brain stimulation technique known for its relative safety and minimal invasiveness. tDCS has demonstrated efficacy as a potential treatment for certain neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, and has been shown to enhance a range of cognitive abilities under certain contexts. As a result, this technique has captured the interest of both the research community and the public at large. However, efforts to gather information about the effects of tDCS on the brain are (...) still in their infancy, leading to concerns about informed consent as it pertains to the possible risks associated with tDCS treatment. The ability to purchase tDCS equipment in the form of commercial, direct-to-consumer devices, generates even more cause for ethical concern, given the unknowns surrounding this technology and its potential broader societal impact. Previous research has touched on the many ethical issues raised by the emergence of this technology, including under what circumstances its use is justifiable and appropriate. In this paper, we survey recent normative and empirical works pertaining to the ethics of tDCS with the goal of summarizing the current state of ethical debate surrounding its use in the contexts of both therapy and cognitive enhancement, with a particular emphasis on the latter. Our analysis of the collected research finds that issues pertaining to user safety are paramount within existing scholarship; that tDCS use in children is an emerging area of concern entailing special considerations; and that regulatory bodies and legal agencies have struggled to implement appropriate, impactful regulation pertaining to tDCS and related technologies in order to balance public welfare against individual autonomy. This analysis will facilitate future efforts to develop bioethical approaches to tDCS by highlighting the ethical dimensions of tDCS prioritized in existing literature and identifying areas where further ethical consideration is needed. (shrink)

The use of philosophical phenomenology for conceptual debates in psychiatric nosology and psychopathology is beginning to be recognized. In this paper, we extend this trajectory to include Tourette Syndrome, focusing on so-called premonitory urges (PU) preceding Tourettic tics. We clarify some inconsistencies around typology in both phenomenological description and medical classification (i.e., in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Text Revision, International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition [World Health Organization, 2004], and the scales that elicit PU). (...) We show how a less typological approach might be usefully deployed in the field, that being the dimensional approach developed by Fernandez (2019a; 2019b). We test both the typological and dimensional approaches in relation to the experience and etiological role of PU in Tourette’s syndrome. Based on our synthesis of existing studies and new information garnered through phenomenological interviews (using an approach associated with “micro-phenomenology”), we argue that the role of PU in nosology challenges both the current “operational” criteria favored by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, Text Revision, that are focused on behaviorally observed symptoms, as well as essential and prototypical phenomenological descriptions about a given “type” of experience. (shrink)

To what extent are cognitive capacities, especially perceptual capacities, informationally encapsulated and to what extent are they cognitively penetrable? And why does this matter? Two reasons we care about encapsulation/penetrability are: (a) encapsulation is sometimes held to be definitional of modularity, and (b) penetrability has epistemological implications independent of modularity. I argue that modularity does not require encapsulation; that modularity may have epistemological implications independently of encapsulation; and that the epistemological implications of the cognitive penetrability of perception are messier than (...) is sometimes thought. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that there are two, competing versions of W. V. O. Quine’s unrelenting empiricism, perhaps divided according to temporal periods of his career. According to one, logic is exempt from, or lies outside the scope of, the attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction. This logic-friendly Quine holds that logical truths and, presumably, logical inferences are analytic in the traditional sense. Logical truths are knowable a priori, and, importantly, they are incorrigible, and so immune from revision. The other, radical (...) reading of Quine does not exempt logic from the attack on analyticity and a priority. Logical truths and inferences are themselves part of the web of belief, and the same global methodology applies to logic as to any other part of the web, such as theoretical chemistry or ordinary beliefs about ordinary objects. Everything, including logic, is up for grabs in our struggle for holistic confirmation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the law of non-contradiction, and the concomitant principle of ex falso quodlibet, from the perspective of the principles advocated by the radical Quine. I show that he has no compelling reason to accept either of these. To put it bluntly, neither the law of non-contradiction nor the rule of ex falso quodlibet is empirically confirmed, and these principles fare poorly on the various criteria for theory acceptance on the methodology of the radical Quine. So the radical Quine is led rather quickly and rather directly into something in the neighborhood of Graham Priest’s dialetheism. (shrink)

The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to (...) rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral. (shrink)

This is a critical, personalized approach to reframing the discipline of psychology through a singular narrative in the form of a memoir written by a successful research psychologist. In this book we follow Martin's unique career, which has allowed him to understand and adopt different perspectives and ways of approaching psychology, from working in applied areas like educational and counseling psychology to more specialized areas like theory and history of psychology. His journey through and within the field describes his movement (...) away from scientifically based psychology, which views teachings and interventions to be primarily underwritten by hard scientific evidence. Martin exposes the flaws in this approach and highlights the importance of focusing on the study of persons in their life contexts over the use of aggregated group results to ensure that the discipline survives and flourishes. This is an impactful and universally applicable book with valuable insights for students and scholars of psychology today, particularly those studying history of psychology, theoretical psychology, and philosophical psychology. (shrink)

This essay reviews current work in conversation analysis with an eye to what it might contribute to the study of evidentiality and epistemic asymmetry. After a brief review of some aspects of the interactional organization of conversation, I turn to consider the way in which participants negotiate relative epistemic positioning through the use of particular practices of speaking. The analytic focus here is on agreements and confirmations especially in assessment sequences. In conclusion, I consider a single case in which various (...) practices are employed to convey a delicate balance of knowledge and simultaneously to attend to a range of other, non-epistemic, interactional issues. (shrink)

While there have been many essays devoted to comparing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with that of Jacques Derrida, there has been no sustained book-length treatment of these two French philosophers. Additionally, many of the essays presuppose an oppositional relationship between them, and between phenomenology and deconstruction more generally. -/- Jack Reynolds systematically explores their relationship by analyzing each philosopher in terms of two important and related issues—embodiment and alterity. Focusing on areas with which they are not commonly associated (...) (e.g., Derrida on the body and Merleau-Ponty on alterity) makes clear that their work cannot be adequately characterized in a strictly oppositional way. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity proposes the possibility of a Merleau-Ponty-inspired philosophy that does not so avowedly seek to extricate itself from phenomenology, but that also cannot easily be dismissed as simply another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. Reynolds argues that there are salient ethico-political reasons for choosing an alternative that accords greater attention to our embodied situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Phenomenological Interviews and Tourette'sThe authors report no conflicts of interest.We appreciate the responses from the two clinicians, Efron and Mathieson. We agree with their reminder about the holistic nature of clinician's engagement (mood, sociality, and work life) and with their emphasis on patient-reported outcome measures, although this is not quite what we did in our interviews. As has recently been recognized in section 24 of the Victorian Mental Health (...) and Well-being Act (to provide a local Australian example), patients and caregivers' "lived experience makes them valuable leaders and active partners in the mental health and wellbeing service system."1In this paper, however, our aim was both more modest and immodest: modest, in that we aimed to work with those "leaders and active partners" to generate a more adequate account of lived experience in concert with behavioral symptomatology; immodest, in that we wondered how the lived experience of Tourette syndrome (TS) aligned (or not) with some of the commonly ascribed features of the condition. Although phenomenology as a discipline does not own lived experience, of course, it is more systematically treated in this tradition, starting with elaborations of Erlebnis.Efron and Mathieson note that older patients are more likely to describe urges or premonitory urges (PUs). This raises the priming question: Has greater exposure to and involvement in medical concepts and treatments transformed the nature of their self-report, or has it provided them with more phenomenological skills, enabling them to pick out discrete parts of experience? Or perhaps they have just been exposed more frequently to the experience over time? We address some related issues below, in our reply to Fernandez, where we outline our interview techniques more fully.They end by noting that the aim of comprehensive behavioral intervention for tics is to become attentive to PUs to better block tics. This is complex and understudied. In principle, becoming aware of something cognitively and experientially can foreground or even perhaps induce that experience. Conversely, from the TS scholarship, we know that attending to urges in certain ways (e.g., via acceptance training) can also reduce perceived urge frequency and intensity (see Gev et al., 2016). We would welcome further work on this link between attention and experience in TS. [End Page 49]Response to FernandezBecause our paper was partly framed around Fernandez' own work on phenomenological psychopathology, we welcome his invitation to provide further "inspiration and guidance" for other phenomenological researchers conducting empirical studies, who may also be dealing with the challenge posed by "narrative habits." When an interviewee uses well-worn medicalized terms to describe their experience, it is not clear whether these descriptions genuinely reveal or rather occlude the experience in question. There are sometimes, perhaps often, second-person phenomenological 'tells' regarding interviewees genuinely re-evoking an experience, but for interviewers it still raises the question of how to prompt alternative and potentially more accurate descriptions of experience.Because of this challenge, we purposely did not use the term "urge" or "premonitory urge" (PU) in our interview questions. Instead, we asked about (and used the broader term of) "experiences" that may occur prior, during, or after ticcing, without assuming that there are such experiences in the first place. We guided interviewees to evoke the memory of a specific, singular tic event (a tic token; see Curtis-Wendlandt 2020, 2023). Once a memory of such an event had been identified, we asked interviewees the following three lead questions:1. What, if anything, did you experience during this tic?2. What, if anything, did you experience before this tic?3. What, if anything did you experience after this tic?The temporal framing of these questions counters common trends and assumptions in the scholarship, which has focused heavily on pre-tic experiences, with little attention given to post-tic experiences (reduced to notions of "relief" and barely investigated), and even less to experiential explorations of the tic itself. Our catalogue of supporting questions sought to elicit fine-grained descriptions of evoked/recalled experiences along sensory and cognitive-affective dimensions:•. Did you see anything before, during, or after this tic? If so, what did you see?•. Did you hear anything... (shrink)

This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism of the approach, and researchers from mathematics and linguistics weigh in on (...) the role of the semantic tradition in their disciplines. This book will be invaluable to philosophers and logicians alike. (shrink)

This paper provides a reply to articles by Nicola Angius and Guiseppe Primiero responding to our paper “Software Intensive Science”.

The article Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivism, written by Maurizio Meloni and Jack Reynolds, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 18 June 2020 without open access. With the author’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 6 November 2020 to ©The Author 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution.

Emotions are understood sociologically as experiences of involvement. Emotion regulation influences the type, incidence, and expression of emotions. Regulation occurs through physical processes prior to an emotions episode, through social interaction in which a person’s emotions are modified due to the reactions of others to them, and by a person’s self-modification or management of emotions which they are consciously aware of. This article goes on to show that there are emotions which the emoting subject is not consciously aware of. Therefore, (...) a certain class of emotions function by foregrounding external objects of attention while remaining outside the emoting subject’s consciousness. The nature and significance of such backgrounded emotions beyond explicit emotion regulation are explored through consideration of their role in theory choice in science and in trust relations. (shrink)

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. "Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts" presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of (...) philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies, feminism and race theory. (shrink)

Two widespread assumptions concerning networks, including guanxi networks, are that they function in terms of trust relations and that their structure is dyadic. This article subjects both assumptions to critical assessment and proposes alternative formulations. When the distinctions between trust and trustworthiness and between trust and assurance are made, then broader understandings of guanxi relationships emerge. The article shows that the assurance mechanism of guanxi is public exposure of transgressions against network norms, leading to the transgressor’s loss of face (mianzi). (...) The necessity of third-party intervention of this type, typically but not exclusively through gossip, indicates the triadic rather than dyadic structure of guanxi relationships when sanction of reputation is included in the conceptualization of guanxi. Changes in guanxi during economic transition in China, from strong-to weaker-tie associations, require careful consideration of the changing nature of the mechanisms of face-loss. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introducing persons and the psychology of personhood Jack Martin and Mark H. Bickhard; Part I. Philosophical, Conceptual Perspectives: 2. The person concept and the ontology of persons Michael A. Tissaw; 3. Achieving personhood: the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology Charles Guignon; Part II. Historical Perspectives: 4. Historical psychology of persons: categories and practice Kurt Danziger; 5. Persons and historical ontology Jeff Sugarman; 6. Critical personalism: on its tenets, its historical obscurity, and its future prospects James (...) T. Lamiell; Part III. Social-Developmental Perspectives: 7. Conceiving of self and others as persons: evolution and development John Barresi, Chris Moore and Raymond Martin; 8. Position exchange theory and personhood: moving between positions and perspectives within physical, sociocultural and psychological space and time Jack Martin and Alex Gillespie; 9. The emergent ontology of persons Mark H. Bickhard; 10. Theorising personhood for the world in transition and change: reflections from a transformative activist stance on human development Anna Stetsenko; Part IV. Narrative Perspectives: 11. Identity and narrative as root metaphors of personhood Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson; 12. Storied persons: the double triad of narrative identity Mark Freeman. (shrink)

In a climate of institutional change and loss of authority, it is urgently needed to rethink the legitimacy of religious authority. This article offers a case study of Paul's authority claims in Corinth, using French & Raven's theory of social power, to offer new insights into the construction of religious leadership. Paul negotiated renewed acceptance as Corinth's founder and apostle by appealing to legitimate power that he was a better leader than Moses, even Christ's ambassador, and by undermining the legitimate (...) power of his opponents who claimed Jewish descent and apostolic miracles as key leadership markers. Similarly, Paul appealed to referent power by portraying his suffering as a mark of Christ-embodying leadership and undermined the referent power of his opponents by denouncing status, patronage support and rhetoric as legitimation for leadership. Paul did not appeal to other power bases, because he could not be sure to outrank his opponents on those counts. This analysis suggests that religious authority in the form of Paul's founding apostleship was difficult to comprehend and embed in the social and cultural structures of Corinth at that time. Paul needed to engage in intense contention and negotiation to construct a socially and culturally viable model of leadership that would do justice to his vision of Christian identity. As a corollary, the evidence of the intensity of this conflict at various levels throughout the epistle can be interpreted as supporting the literary unity of the epistle. (shrink)

Although Gene Sharp was a pacifist, he was also, in the last few decades of the 20th century, the initial framer of a new methodology of political and social struggle, which is now often referred to as civil resistance. Organizers of successful people’s movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, Mali, Ukraine, Tunisia and a score of other countries in the last thirty years pushed out rights-violating rulers and did so without resort to violence.

To decode the function and molecular recognition of several recently discovered cytosine derivatives in the human genome – 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, 5-formylcytosine, and 5-carboxylcytosine – a detailed understanding of their effects on the structural, chemical, and biophysical properties of DNA is essential. Here, we review recent literature in this area, with particular emphasis on features that have been proposed to enable the specific recognition of modified cytosine bases by DNA-binding proteins. These include electronic factors, modulation of base-pair stability, flexibility, and radical changes (...) in duplex conformation. We explore these proposals and assess whether or not they are supported by current biophysical data. This analysis is focused primarily on the properties of epigenetically modified DNA itself, which provides a basis for discussion of the mechanisms of recognition by different proteins. 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, 5-formylcytosine, and 5-carboxylcytosine have recently been discovered in mammalian DNA and appear to have essential regulatory roles. Here, we summarize recent investigations into their effects on the structural, chemical, and biophysical properties of DNA, an understanding of which is essential to decoding their behavior in the genome. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article uses Gadamer’s concept of play as a common lens through which both traditional church liturgy and imaginative evangelical practices of engaging with God can be understood. The category of play encompasses processes which exhibit a back-and-forth motion and functions in Gadamer’s aesthetics to describe the relationship between artwork and viewer. Through an aesthetics of play, Gadamer accounts for the presence of truth in art. As I demonstrate in this paper, liturgy displays the playful characteristics of artwork, allowing for (...) a theologically realist interpretation of divine presence. The final part of this paper considers the imaginative evangelical practices described by anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, which I refer to as God-play. I argue that there is an unexpected commonality between God-play and traditional liturgy in the form of a functional similarity between the two and propose that God-play may be regarded as liturgy-like practice that has not been traditionalised. My evaluati... (shrink)

While self-interest is depreciated in Confucian ethics the processes of family relations in traditional China are animated by the self-interested actions of family members. The paper outlines the Confucian ideology of filial piety which is commensurate with the governance of family life organized hierarchically and through the senior male's management of the joint-family's collective property. The structure, operations and principles of membership in traditional Chinese families are indicated, highlighting the tensions within them between consanguinity and conjugality and their material bases. (...) The differential operation of self-interested actions by husbands and wives is also presented. A non-Confucian model of the relational-self is outlined in which both the collective context of Chinese families and the self-interested actions of individual family members within them is explicated. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

A screenwriter and stand-up comic’s hilarious and profound account of his journey into Zen monkhood—featuring a foreword by Leonard Cohen Shozan Jack Haubner is the David Sedaris of Zen Buddhism: a brilliant humorist and analyst of human foibles, whose hilarity is informed by the profound insights that have dawned on him—as he's stumbled and fallen into spirituall practice. Raised in a truly strange family of Mel-Gibson-esque Catholic extremists, he went on to study philosophy (becoming very un-Catholic in the process) (...) and to pursue a career as a screenwriter and stand-up comic in the clubs of L.A. How he went from life in the fast lane to life on the stationary meditation cushion is the subject of this laugh-out-loud funny account of his experiences. Whether he’s dealing with the pranks of a juvenile delinquent assistant in the monastery kitchen or experiencing profound compassion in the presence of his spiritual teacher, Haubner’s voice is one you'll be compelled to listen to. Not only because it’s highly entertaining, but because of its remarkable insight into the human condition. (shrink)

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. "Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts" presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of (...) philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies, feminism and race theory. (shrink)

Firstly I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners whose land we are meeting on today. I acknowledge that I stand before you on the shoulders of Indigenous Peoples globally, past and present that have been marginalised, had their knowledge exploited, and generally had their inherent native title rights ripped off for the financial and health benefit of others.