This paper is about Christopher Wren’s engravings for Thomas Willis’ The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves of 1664. It is a study in the intersection of medicine and art in 17th century Britain. Willis, an eminent English physician and anatomist, was a major figure in the development of modern neurology, and The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves was his most famous and influential book. Wren was Willis’ assistant and medical artist. I discuss the visual strategies employed by Wren (...) to present their research and frame it as genuine knowledge. (shrink)

Robert Knox (1791–1862) is typically remembered as the Edinburgh anatomist to whom the murderers Burke and Hare sold the bodies of their victims. This association brought Knox infamy and damaged his life and career. Before the Burke and Hare scandal, Knox was one of the most famous, original and influential anatomists in Britain. He was also something of a dandy with a sophisticated appreciation of the visual arts. His most significant writings on artistic subjects were his books A Manual of (...) Artistic Anatomy and Great Artists and Great Anatomists: A Biographical and Philosophical Study. Knox's interesting and independently minded opinions on the central artistic questions of his day were taken seriously by his contemporaries. His demotion in the official history of anatomy following his involvement with Burke and Hare, however, also removed him from the history of art theory in 19th century Britain. Knox was such a magnetic and impressive figure, though, that he has to be brought back to his era and his era is not complete without him. This paper discusses how Knox's writings on anatomy and biology shaped his contributions to art theory. It is a first step towards returning Knox, the art theorist, to the cultural life of 19th century Britain. (shrink)

This paper looks at the ethics of opt-in vs. opt-out of organ donation as Scotland has transitioned its systems to promote greater organ availability. We first analyse studies that compare the donation rates in other regions due to such a system switch and find that organ increase is inconclusive and modest at best. This is due to a lack of explicit opt-out choices resulting in greater resistance and family override unless there are infrastructures and greater awareness to support such change. (...) The paper then looks at the difference between informed consent of the opt-in vs. presumed consent in the opt-out approaches. Patient autonomy and dignity are better reflected with informed consent. Eighteen months have passed since the new organ donation policy has come into effect, this paper recommends more research into organ donors’ psychological motivations to help governments and the healthcare profession obtain more organs for transplantation. (shrink)

This article examines two Buddhist explanations of how a conceptual cognition, whose object is a universal, can give rise to activity that leads to a particular. In both theories, that of Dharmottara and that of Ratnakīrti, this activity is due to a kind of error. A detailed investigation of how this error happens shows that there were big differences in the two underlying epistemological models.

The capability approach constitutes a significant contribution to social theory but its potential is diminished by its insufficient treatment of the social construction of meaning. Social meanings enable people to make value judgements about what they will do and be, and also to evaluate how satisfied they are about what they are able to achieve. From this viewpoint, a person’s state of wellbeing must be understood as being socially and psychologically co-constituted in specific social and cultural contexts. In this light, (...) the telos of ‘living well’ which is at the heart of Sen’s version of the capability approach is inadequate and must be modified to a telos of ‘living well together’ which includes consideration of the social structures and institutions which enable people to pursue individual freedoms in relation to others. The policy significance of the capability approach can be further strengthened by paying greater consideration to the political economy of policy decision-making processes and the ways in which conflicts and distributions of power are institutionalized. (shrink)

Penseur de pointe du Judaïsme contemporain, André Neher (1914-1988) a laissé une oeuvre immense : plus de vingt livres parus de son vivant, des inédits en cours de publication, près de 500 articles étalés sur cinquante ans d'une existence toujours sur la brèche. Ce livre présente un choix de textes parmi les plus importants et les plus signifiants : une gerbe de textes courts destinés à être une initiation à l'oeuvre d'André Neher. Car l'ouvrage d'André Neher ne (...) cesse pas et ne cessera pas de nourrir intellectuellement et spirituellement ceux qui sont en quête d'une réflexion en profondeur. (shrink)

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Page 338-340, October-December.

Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology—his landmark American publication of 1939—contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of Critical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that (...) reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wölfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915 on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language.4 But Logos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but a principal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ has a good claim to be the culmination of Panofsky's philosophical thinking in his German period under the Weimar Republic. · 1. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , p. xv; hereafter abbreviated SI. See Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 : 103–19; trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under the title ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’, Critical Inquiry 38 : 467–82; hereafter abbreviated ‘P’.· 2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method’, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi , pp. 17–59, esp. pp. 36–41.· 3. See Panofsky, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. , 2:1009–18; ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’,Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2:1019–34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder under the title ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, Critical Inquiry 8 : 17–33; and ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Erörterung über die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe’, Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2: 1035–63, trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, Critical Inquiry 35 : 43–71.· 4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger , pp. 25–37; Éric Dufour and T. Z. R. Créteil, ‘Le Statue du singulier: Kant et le néokantisme de l’École de Marbourg', Kantstudien 93 : 324–50; Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture , pp. 22–51; and Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos , pp. 52–86. Specifically on the Cassirerian Kantianism of Panofsky, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art , pp. 181–82; Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History , pp. 91–92, 147–52; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce , pp. 174–77, 182–84; David Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, ed. Irving Lavin , pp. 9–24; Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline , pp. 68–77; Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and Its History , pp. 70–73; Allister Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky's Early Art Theoretical Essays', Word and Image 20 : 41–51; Georges Didi-Huberman,Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman , pp. 4–6, 90–138; and Lorenz and Elsner, ‘Translators’ Introduction', Critical Inquiry35 : 33–42, esp. pp. 38, 40–42. (shrink)

This article approaches Levinas’s 1963 Talmudic reading entitled “Messianic Texts” in light of the metaphoric numbers 0, 1, and 2. “Zero” will refer to unforeseen silences in the Talmudic text in question (here, Rabbi Eleazar’s sudden silence in the debate about the conditions of redemption, as well as commentator Rashi’s silence on Talmudic discussions about a certain “identity” of the messiah. The number “one” concerns a textual hapax: Rabbi Hillel’s historicist dismissal of the messiah as promise and open future—a position (...) virtually anathema to rabbinics (inter alia) but nevertheless preserved by the Talmud. My metaphoric numbers strategy turns, finally, to the curious presence of “allegorical doubles” in the Bible, which Levinas describes as a configuration of textual “eidetics.” Using my three numbers (0, 1, 2) as an elementary analytic grid, I turn from Levinas’ “Messianic Texts” to André Neher’s biblical commentary on Levinas’s presentation—a commentary similarly concerning messianism but no longer in the Talmud. My purpose is dual: to sketch the context of this complex Talmudic reading, to offer one (idiosyncratic) reading-strategy focusing on two events of “silence,” the future anterior of the “messiah” who will have been but will come no more, and finally the play of identity-in-difference in the biblical doubles. Keywords: “Messianic Texts,” Vladimir Jankélévitch, André Neher, messianisms, world-to-come, the Samozvanetz. (shrink)

On cherche ici à penser, à travers les pages du livre d' André Neher, L'Exil de la parole. Du silence biblique au silence d'Auschwitz, ce qui, dans une expression fort rhétorique, se dit comme « la défaite de Dieu ». Il s'agit de tenter, une nouvelle fois, de comprendre cette défaite du Dieu biblique face à la Catastrophe : de sonder les modulations ou les variations de Son éclipse. À travers l'herméneutique du nom biblique « Shadday » attribué à (...) Dieu, on cherche à évaluer les limites de la puissance divine. Mais c'est peut-être dans le ve hen lâ et le Kouléhay ve-oulay! qu'il faut chercher les derniers et les premiers mots d'une foi née ex nihilo. The attempt here is to understand, through the pages of André Neher's book, L'Exil de la parole. Du silence biblique au silence d'Auschwitz - translated into English: The Exile of the Word: from the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz — what is defined in the highly rhetorical phrase of « God's defeat ». It is once again an effort to comprehend this defeat of the biblical God in the face of the Shoah, and to probe the modulations or the variations of His eclipse. Reviewing the hermeneutics of the biblical name "Shadday" assigned to God, this paper tries to evaluate the limits of God's divine power. It may well be in the ve hen la and the Kouléhay ve-oulayl that one must look for the last and the first words of a faith born ex nihilo. (shrink)

Neher uses Moses as the focal point for a well written introduction to the Jewish faith, and he makes continuous references to the twentieth century. The volume is well illustrated.--K. H.

Although content related to parenting Autistic children is common in online media, little attention is paid to the experiences of Autistic parents. There is a growing trend of parents receiving autism diagnoses after their children are diagnosed, yet a basic Google search on “parents” and “autism” reveals myriad data on the experiences of parents of Autistic children and little on experiences of Autistic parents. A systematic online search, augmented with a “crowd-sourcing” request to online parent support groups, identified only 15 (...) articles and blogs that discuss Autistic parenting in advocacy, lifestyle, and parenting websites. This article explores the scope and content of Autistic parenting discourse in these online media to consider how the experiences of Autistic parents are conceptualized and situated within broader narratives of neurodiversity, autism and parenting. Media discourse focused on women who had received their autism diagnosis in adulthood, their experiences navigating their diagnoses, minimizing parenting challenges, and pushing back against autism stereotypes, with the majority of content intended for Allistic audiences. Recent increased recognition of autism in women has coincided with a new interest in Autistic parenthood, raising questions about gendered assumptions and disabled mothering. The media narrative includes “defying stereotypes” and “proving” autism is compatible with parenthood, echoing mainstream beliefs. Social justice issues reinscribed in the narrative illustrate how centring the voices of Autistic parents can reconceptualize public perception of autism and bridge the disconnect between parenting Autistic children, and Autistic parenting of children. (shrink)

The rise of mobile communication applications and technologies presents promising therapeutic and accessibility-related interventions for neurodivergent users. However, top-down approaches in human-computer interaction research often prioritize the needs and goals of allistic and neurotypical researchers and secondary stakeholders in media creation. Furthermore, media technologies are created with a one-size-fits-all approach, with the intent of rehabilitating or curing neurodivergent ways of being. This article imagines neuroqueer technoscience as an extension of crip technoscience that amplifies new styles of relationality, self-expression, and communication (...) practices within the development of information and communication technologies. Using an interdisciplinary framework informed by crip technoscience and human-computer interaction research, the author presents three tenets for mediating neuroqueer subjectivities. (shrink)

For some years now, an opposition has been drawn, not only among Israeli academics but among politicians and journalists as well, between Jewish nationalist or Zionist thought and the kind of thinking that is called “postmodern.” The argument is that a Zionist cannot be a postmodernist and vice versa, the two being incompatible. It appears that this opposition originated with an identification made between “post-Zionist” historical revisionism (of the kind associated with Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Simha Flapan, and (...) Tom Segev) and postmodernist methods, assumptions, and claims. In some cases, the identification was made by the “new historians” themselves. While there is considerable bad blood between post-Zionist scholars and those, inside and outside the academy, who defend one or another version of the Zionist narrative, it needs to be demonstrated that postmodernism has nothing to do with their adversarial relations. The effort of this article is to show that, even before postmodernism was heard of, nationalist thinkers such as Rabbi A. I. H. Kook (1865 – 1935), Rabbi M. A. Amiel (1883 – 1946), Rabbi Abraham Hazan (1920 – 2003), and Professor André Neher (1914 – 1988) mounted Zionist arguments of a sort that we now regard as poststructuralist or postmodern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of Romantic ProphecySara GuyerThe Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Ian BalfourStanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. 368. $70.00, cloth; $29.95, paperback.Not insignificantly, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot are the first two names to appear in Ian Balfour's excellent study The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Benjamin and Blanchot are authors of two of the most influential essays on romanticism, essays that, it just so happens, Ian Balfour is (...) responsible for introducing to an English-reading audience. 1 Thus, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is not only a long awaited, prize-winning book by a major theorist of romanticism, it is also a book written by the first English translator of Benjamin's and Blanchot's essays. Both Blanchot's "The Athenaeum" and Benjamin's "On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" expose the incompletion of the romantic project and unsettle the relation between the past and the present. They also provide a context for understanding the kind of book that Ian Balfour has written. Like its eminent predecessors, this book focuses on local phenomena, yet its force far exceeds the field that it so thoughtfully treats. In it, Balfour shows how a turn to the past (to a set of historical texts) has the effect of unsettling the present, and he argues that an apparent turn to the future (prophecy) has as its issue the present.The book's introduction, entitled "The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin)," alerts us to the fact that Benjamin and Blanchot, who have written extensively on language, also have written compellingly on the prophetic. While the prophetic today most often seems to signify religion's naive or violent claims on the future (and by implication on the present), in Benjamin's and Blanchot's work—and in Balfour's work—"the prophetic" (by which Balfour means not a genre, but a "mode") poses problems of referentiality and interpretation. Benjamin's treatment of messianism and allegory in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offers Balfour a clear framework for undertaking this examination. And, in style and approach, Benjamin is the thinker with whom Balfour has the closest kinship. Like Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is a historical study that is not historicist, that is, it does not aim to account for a historical phenomenon, but is a philosophical and rhetorical investigation into language.However, it is Blanchot's brief essay "Prophetic Speech"—a review of André Neher's L'essence du prophétisme—that informs Balfour's thinking about the prophetic. Indeed, Balfour's book can be read as a meditation on the rhetorical implications of Blanchot's suggestion that: [End Page 257]Prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence. 2With this passage, Blanchot not only recasts the conventional account of prophecy (and, implicitly, the symbolic reading upon which prophecy relies), but also shows that if prophecy turns the future into a referent—and hence becomes history—the present is lost. Balfour's transfer of Blanchot's account of the prophetic to romanticism is broadly explained by the debates within romanticism (and contemporary criticism of romanticism) about referentiality and the primacy of symbol over allegory, debates that today are most well-known to non-romanticists through Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality."Balfour offers a lucid account of his project—and its relation to history and historicist criticism—when he explains:If there is a historical force to the analysis here, it lies not in the attempt to show how representative these texts were of some larger, pervasive phenomenon—although they sometimes are—but rather to mark what was possible to be thought and done at a given moment. More than that, the analysis implicitly and sometimes explicitly confronts... (shrink)

In his paper "Noneism or Allism" David Lewis argued that Richard Sylvan's rehabilitation of Meinong's theory of objects was not a noneist one but rather an allist, that is, that all objects whatsoever actually exist and thus Meinong and Sylvan are among the greatest "entity-multipliers". But this is exactly what Sylvan tried to show is not the case. I'll argue that Lewis' attack ultimately fails in re-instating an old serious misinterpretation of Meinongian metaphysics. In doing so he deflects attention away (...) from the substance of Sylvan's position and casts him as the defender of something unintelligible. (shrink)