This chapter contains sections titled: “How can these things be?” Reason's Transcendental Climb Where Were We?

The Perennial Philosophy is defined by its author as "The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds." With great wit and stunning intellect, Aldous Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains them in terms that are personally meaningful.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 3 contains lectures and essays spanning thirty years of campaigning about the importance of science in education. (shrink)

This article inserts Aldous Huxley's Brave New World into a bioethical conversation about the value of old age and old people. Exploring literary treatments of bioethical questions can supplement conversations within bioethics proper, helping to reveal our existing assumptions and clear the way for more considered views; indeed, as Peter Swirski has argued, literary texts can serve as thought experiments that illuminate the ramifications of philosophical ideas. This essay examines the novel's representation of a society without (...) old people in conjunction with ideas about aging and life narratives put forward by philosophers and bioethicists such as Ezekiel Emanuel, Gilbert Meilaender, and Alasdair MacIntyre. While critics, and Huxley himself, view the Brave New World as dystopian primarily because of its depiction of a totalitarian society where art, truth, and meaning are sacrificed to pleasure and distraction and where the ruled are programmed not to question the values of their rulers, the novel also makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs. (shrink)

'What is called the utopian dream of pacifism is in fact a practical policy - indeed the only practical, the only realistic policy that there is.' Aldous Huxley. Over 50 years and 100 million war-related deaths later, and with the world in turmoil, the truth of Huxley's views is felt by more and more people. -/- But pacifism continues to be ill understood, a problem to which pacifists themselves sometimes contribute. The title of Huxley's classic book, Ends and (...) Means, in a sense, describes the core of pacifism; the essay from which the title of this pamphlet is taken rehearses that debate and asks 'Can good ends be achieved by bad means?' Can, for example, the death of children, surely the most innocent of victims and amongst the most common casualties in any war, be justified on any grounds? This is a challenge to the apologists of war who claim it a moral means to an end. But the rhetoric of war, as indeed the apparent imperative to prepare for war, with all the jobs and family comforts that making and selling guns and bullets provide, crowds out this simple question, lest we are discomfited by our answer. -/- Huxley's views are as pertinent and challenging today as the day they were written - and perhaps more urgent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 282-287 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience Wrestling with the Ox: A Theology of Religious Experience. By Paul O. Ingram. New York: Continuum, 1997. 276 pp. Paul Ingram has set out a formidable task for himself. Even though he identifies himself as an historian of religion, he has chosen to push beyond phenomenological description (...) of the religious enterprise to make a prescriptive proposal, a theology that can illuminate and guide the great faith traditions. Simultaneously, his proposal aims at interpreting the necessity and the outlines of interreligious dialogue. Such dialogue, he argues, is not a peripheral enterprise reserved for a handful of religious exotics. It is central to understanding any and all religious traditions in the postmodern world.All religions have been discovered to reflect inescapable historical and cultural relativization. The old assumptions of unconditional claims and absolute assertions are no longer tenable. The world shared by all the religions today is characterized by an unavoidable religious pluralism. It is in this context that religious affirmations must be expressed and religious life embraced. According to Ingram, this is no accident. It is an ontological inevitability. As process philosophy and its roots in modern physics [End Page 282] --and, interestingly, the Buddhist recognition of dependent co-arising (pratitya samutpada)--understand, reality is unending process. This entails the inevitable relativization and contextualization of everything--including the religions. The theological questions that emerge are crucial ones. Among them: Is there an ultimate unity underlying this diversity, generic features common to all conditioned forms of religious faith and practice? What does religious pluralism show about the nature of the Sacred and of being human? Is any one religious Way best or is this even a question worth pursuing?Ingram proposes that the answers to these questions and the only viable response to religious pluralism can be found in interreligious dialogue. He does not even consider religious exclusivism as a viable option. This means only "inclusivist" and "pluralist" approaches are worthy of consideration, approaches that he names the "theology-of-religions model" and the "primordial model" respectively. Both recognize the problem of the relativity of belief and seek to overcome it. Both see the importance of interreligious dialogue as fundamental to religious affirmation. But Ingram rejects the theology-of-religions model because, despite its openness to other religions and its willingness to have interreligious encounter shape the affirmations and life of the believing community, it is self-encapsulated. One moves out from a particular community of faith, "passing over"--to use the language of John Dunne--into another religious Way in order to be creatively transformed, but only to return once again to the original community of faith. One stays within "the theological circle" (Tillich), one does not get beyond it. Some Christians, accordingly, make a blanket assertion about the ultimate and unsurpassable lordship of Christ despite their indebtedness to the creative transformation that interreligious dialogue can produce.Ingram clearly prefers the "primordial model" even though he recognizes that some of its classical proponents have made it vulnerable to criticism. Aldous Huxley's "perennial philosophy" and Sri Ramakrishan's assertion that "all paths lead to the summit" will not do. Huxley assumes that the mystical recognition of the ineffable common root of all religion critiques the historical and culturally relative expressions of this ultimate reality. But Huxley's attempt to make an end run around the problems involved won't work. His approach is ahistorical, makes uncritical assumptions about the nature of mysticism and religious experience, and is totally undialogical. The particularities of the differing religious Ways are dissolved in a universal solvent that is anything but self-evident. The same holds true for Ramakrishnan's subtly imperialistic (and very Hindu) model. It too has no room for religious particularity and imposes a pre-conceived common denominator on the multiplicity of religious phenomena.Ingram derives his term "primordial model" from Huston Smith's argument that a "primordial tradition" can be discerned underlying the multiplicity and variety of religious expressions. His is... (shrink)

This comprehensive Gandhi reader provides an essential new reference for scholars and students of his life and thought. It is the only text available that presents Gandhi's own writings, including excerpts from three of his books—An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Satyagraha in South Africa, Hind Swaraj —a major pamphlet, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place, and many journal articles and letters, along with a biographical sketch of his life in historical context and recent (...) essays by highly regarded scholars. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 1 begins with a brief autobiography, and examines the development and progress of scientific practice and knowledge. (shrink)

This comprehensive Gandhi reader provides an essential new reference for scholars and students of his life and thought. It is the only text available that presents Gandhi's own writings, including excerpts from three of his books—An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Satyagraha in South Africa, Hind Swaraj —a major pamphlet, Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place, and many journal articles and letters, along with a biographical sketch of his life in historical context and recent (...) essays by highly regarded scholars. (shrink)

What is philosophy about? According to the author of this work it is fundamentally the answer to the question: 'What can I know?' T. H. Huxley , the distinguished English scientist and disciple of Darwin, succeeds in giving a clear and succinct account of the way in which Scottish philosopher David Hume answered this question. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, Huxley provides the reader with a sketch of Hume's life, but the main emphasis (...) of the book is in Part 2, where by expounding Hume's views on the object of philosophy, consciousness, theology, language and free will, Huxley guides the reader towards an understanding of how Hume's philosophical principles can be regarded as a search for the ultimate element out of which all valid knowledge may be shown to emerge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experimenting with Islam:Nietzschean Reflections on Bowles’s AraplainaIan AlmondIn a letter to his friend Köselitz dated March 13 1881, Nietzsche wrote: "Ask my old comrade Gersdorff whether he'd like to go with me to Tunisia for one or two years.... I want to live for a while amongst Muslims, in the places moreover where their faith is at its most devout; this way my eye and judgement for (...) all things European will be sharpened."1 Various motifs in the work of Paul Bowles—a fascination with cruelty, an obsession with destruction, a predilection for abysses (metaphorical and literal) in the landscapes of his stories—invite some kind of reference to Nietzsche, however brief. Nietzsche's desire to live in the most intense pocket of Islam he could find had, one suspects, less to do with Islam than with his desire for a "trans-European eye"2 —four years after his remarks on Tunisia, Nietzsche would say the same thing about Japan in a letter to his sister.3 Nietzsche's proposed trip to Tunisia would lead to a better understanding of Europe, not Islam, and would provide him with an outside perspective on the European disease of modernity—a different set of lenses for his Kantian spectacles. This conception of Islam was, therefore, a means to self-knowledge, a handy instrument for diagnosing one's own illness, and a useful mirror to observe with greater clarity the more unattractive elements in one's own features. Most of Nietzsche's references to Islam and Islamic culture—and there are well over a hundred and fifty of them in the Gesamtausgabe—become clearer when one keeps this functional, almost anthropological, approach to the Islamic Other in mind.Although there is nothing new about this idea of the Orient as a tool of European self-awareness—as early as the 1780s, Sir William Jones was [End Page 309] already hoping the study of Sanskrit and Arabic would offer a "more extensive insight into the human [read "European"] mind"4 —an awareness of the genealogy of such Western interest in Arabs and Mohammedaner certainly helps us better understand Bowles's own eerie fascination with the faith. The parodies of missionaries, academics, and policemen which we find in stories such as "The Time of Friendship" and "A Distant Episode" confirm the distance Bowles attempted to put between his own texts and those Orientalist traditions of both Christian (i.e., Islam as a pool of potential believers) and Imperialist (Muslims as potential human resources) provenance. In attempting to escape such vocabularies and textual traditions, Bowles ultimately replicates and reshapes their original representations, producing an irony of delicate complexities, which is the object of this article.Near the beginning of Bowles's witty, though somewhat caustic autobiography Without Stopping, a moment takes place that gives an insight into the way, in later years, the narrator would approach different cultures with the intention of constructing new worlds. At age five, Bowles relates how he often found himself alone in his parents large upstate New York house. Abandoned to his own devices, the young narrator began to entertain himself by fabricating and mapping out new countries with his own imagination: "Soon I invented a planet with landmasses and seas. The continents were Ferncowland, Lanton, Zaganokworld and Araplaina. I drew maps of each and gave them mountain ranges, rivers, cities and railways."5 The image is captivating not only for its visual appeal, of a five-year-old Bowles, future author of Sheltering Sky, sitting on the carpet, crayoning out his map of Araplaina. It also suggests the presence, very early on, of what will always be a central motivation in Bowles's fascination with the world of Islam: a desire for novelty, for the really new, as an escape from boredom. Bowles's Tangiers would later provide the very Araplaina he had been seeking all along.In the world of Bowles's North African short stories, a number of common features seem to unite the otherwise disparate collection of tales found in The Time of Friendship and The Delicate Prey. Probably the foremost of these is cruelty. In "The Delicate Prey," the Moungari traveler... (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. In Volume 6, Huxley focuses on the philosopher David Hume, discussing his life and his philosophical and intellectual work. (shrink)

This paper examines how young peoples’ lived experiences with personal technologies can be used to teach engineering ethics in a way which facilitates greater engagement with the subject. Engineering ethics can be challenging to teach: as a form of practical ethics, it is framed around future workplace experience in a professional setting which students are assumed to have no prior experience of. Yet the current generations of engineering students, who have been described as ‘digital natives’, do however have (...) immersive personal experience with digital technologies; and experiential learning theory describes how students learn ethics more successfully when they can draw on personal experience which give context and meaning to abstract theories. This paper reviews current teaching practices in engineering ethics; and examines young people’s engagement with technologies including cell phones, social networking sites, digital music and computer games to identify social and ethical elements of these practices which have relevance for the engineering ethics curricula. From this analysis three case studies are developed to illustrate how facets of the use of these technologies can be drawn on to teach topics including group work and communication; risk and safety; and engineering as social experimentation. Means for bridging personal experience and professional ethics when teaching these cases are discussed. The paper contributes to research and curriculum development in engineering ethics education, and to wider education research about methods of teaching ‘the net generation’. (shrink)

In a review in JHS lxxxix 127 Dr M. L. West gives as an example of ‘a certain innocence on matters of literary history’ the belief that seven-stringed lyres ‘came in’ in the seventh century B.C. Since the emphasis in the context is upon rigorous down-dating, what Dr West seems to be saying is that seven-stringed lyres were not in use amongst the Greeks before about 600 B.C. I hope that I do not misunderstand Dr West's contention: the purpose (...) of this short note is to suggest, with the greatest respect and deference, that another view of the matter may perhaps be permissible.Let us ignore the seven-stringed musical instrument shown on the Ayia Triadha sarcophagus, because evidence from the Late Bronze Age may be thought too remote to be relevant to early Hellenic musical practice. Let us also leave aside ancient opinions associating Terpander with the seven-stringed lyre and assigning him to the first half of the seventh century B.C.. Dr West may well regard the putting of trust in such testimonies as evidence of incorrigible amateurism. There remains, nevertheless, a contemporary witness to the existence of seven-stringed lyres amongst the Greeks of the seventh century B.C.In JHS lxxi 248, fig. 8, there is illustrated a fragment of a Subgeometric dinos of the first half of the seventh century B.C. from the excavations at Old Smyrna. On the piece is painted a seven-stringed lyre. The lines representing strings are carefully distinguished and spaced. It would be extravagant to assert that the artist could not count, or that he was suffering from hallucinations, or that he was imagining a type of instrument never seen by himself or his customers. In short, a tentative suggestion may be made—with due deference and hesitation: scholars, including those whom in this particular matter Dr West would, it seems, classify as innocents, ‘can seriously argue’ that seven-stringed lyres were reintroduced to Greece or ‘came in’ well within the first half of the seventh century B.C. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 9 includes lectures delivered at Oxford University on the relationship between scientific thought and ethical problems. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 1 begins with a brief autobiography, and examines the development and progress of scientific practice and knowledge. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 2 examines the criticism and controversy surrounding Darwin's work, and the implications of his ideas on biological science. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. In Volume 4, Huxley turns to the issue of faith and science, examining the apparent conflict between theology and evolution. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. In Volume 5, Huxley discusses the doctrines of Christianity and explains how his dissatisfaction with conventional religion led him to agnosticism. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 7 features a collection of lectures discussing the biological relationship of humans to apes and other animals. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President (...) of the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 8 contains public lectures given by Huxley, on themes as diverse as yeast, lobsters and palaeontology. (shrink)

‘When Manu met MS’ is a story told to explain the origins of the dhammathats. ‘This is where the text came from’ implies the corollary ‘... and that is why we must obey the contents of the text.’ The special feature of this story, which rendered it unsuitable for inclusion in our ‘Postcanonical Adventures’ survey, is that MS shares equal billing with Manu. The legitimation of law is such a heavy task that it requires the combined efforts of two (...) culture heroes. Forchhammer and Lingat recognised the strangeness of this shared responsibility and interpreted it in terms of sources. Putting their shared position in colloquial language. (shrink)

T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was not only an active protagonist in the religious and scientific upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution but also a harbinger of the sociobiological debates about the implications of evolution that are now going on. His seminal lecture Evolution and Ethics, reprinted here with its introductory Prolegomena, argues that the human psyche is at war with itself, that humans are alienated in a cosmos that has no special reference to (...) their needs, and that moral societies are of necessity in conflict with the natural conditions of their existence. Seen in the light of current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, these claims remain as controversial today as they were when Huxley proposed them. In this volume George Williams, one of the best-known evolutionary biologists of our time, asserts that recent biological ideas and data justify a more extreme condemnation of the "cosmic process" than Huxley advocated and more extreme denial that the forces that got us here are capable of maintaining a viable world. James Paradis, an expert in Victorian studies, has written an introduction that sets the celebrated lecture in the context of cultural history, revealing it to be an impressive synthesis of Victorian thinking, as well as a challenge to eighteenth-century assumptions about the harmony of of nature. With Huxley's lecture as a focal point, the three parts of this book unite philosophy and science in a shared quest that recalls their common origins as systems of knowledge. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Reading is a peculiar kind of experience. Although its practice and theory have a very long tradition, the question of aesthetic pleasure is as perplexing as ever. Why do we read? What exactly thrills us in the text? Taking the work of Roland Barthes as a central reference, the aim of this collection of essays is to investigate a variety of themes and issues associated with the question of readerly pleasure. Pleasure 'in' the text is related to the content (...) of the text and associated with various methods of representing the pleasures of 'real life', whereas pleasure 'of' the text is discovered in the literary form. The imperfect, if not erroneous, distinction between form and content, constitutes one of the main methodological techniques for identifying the two major sources of pleasure, and serves as a starting point for the inquiry. This bookdoes not merely offer a personal view of the problem in question, nor an exposition of this problem locked within the limits of a given theory, but a broader perspective consisting of the reflections of academics who critically evaluate both its theoretical and practical aspects, across disciplines such as literary theory and criticism, semiology, philosophy and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In the 16th century Bruno asserted that the earth revolves around the sun. This notion violated the Catholic Church's teaching that the earth was the center of the universe, and his suggestion proved he was a heretic. He was promptly burned at the stake. One hundred years later Galileo said the same thing, and provided evidence. He was forced to recant his views, but he gave the world telescopes so that people could learn for themselves. Today, his assertion is held (...) to be fact with little excitement. Many academics live with a myth of protection; that the pursuit of science, conducted ethically and with methodological rigor, is protected from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Jim Coan's perspective on his experience while an undergraduate student at the University of Washington is important because it sheds light on an unsettling reality; Scientists pursuing unpopular science are no more shielded from attack from scientists and academicians than anyone else. It is particularly worth noting how unpopular science can be attacked in the name of ethics. Although we may be no more enthusiastic about the specific content of the findings than others, ethical academicians and scientists defend unpopular scientific endeavors from attacks leveled on ethical grounds. (shrink)

In the 16th century Bruno asserted that the earth revolves around the sun. This notion violated the Catholic Church's teaching that the earth was the center of the universe, and his suggestion proved he was a heretic. He was promptly burned at the stake. One hundred years later Galileo said the same thing, and provided evidence. He was forced to recant his views, but he gave the world telescopes so that people could learn for themselves. Today, his assertion is held (...) to be fact with little excitement. Many academics live with a myth of protection; that the pursuit of science, conducted ethically and with methodological rigor, is protected from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Jim Coan's perspective on his experience while an undergraduate student at the University of Washington is important because it sheds light on an unsettling reality; Scientists pursuing unpopular science are no more shielded from attack from scientists and academicians than anyone else. It is particularly worth noting how unpopular science can be attacked in the name of ethics. Although we may be no more enthusiastic about the specific content of the findings than others, ethical academicians and scientists defend unpopular scientific endeavors from attacks leveled on ethical grounds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning in Dramatic and Virtual Worlds:What Do Students Say About Complementarity and Future Directions?John O'Toole (bio) and Julie Dunn (bio)A top financial backer has arrived to determine which team of computer interaction designers has developed the most exciting and innovative proposal for the Everest component of the Virtually Impossible Computer Company's Conquerors of the World Series. Tension is high as the presentations begin, but this tension soon (...) turns to outright conflict as some proposals suggest George Mallory as the conqueror, and the financial backer will have none of him. The backer, it seems, has her own agenda and is determined to allow for only one view of history—the one that records Sir Edmund Hillary as a New Zealand hero and the only real conqueror of the tallest mountain on earth. The designers become more and more agitated until suddenly someone bangs their hand on the table and calls out, "Hang on... just because you've got the money doesn't mean... kids need to learn about both these men... they need to learn about history." With that the drama is cut by the teacher. The deep understandings about "history's purchased page" that can be generated when drama and computers are brought together for learning have been made explicit... but could these same outcomes have been achieved using just one of these approaches?IntroductionThe research explored within this article was generated as part of the Media Station, a project funded by the Australasian Collaborative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID), with an overall mission to investigate the potential of massively multiplayer online games for learning. This particular subproject, History's Purchased Page, saw researchers from interaction design [End Page 89] and drama education come together with a group of young learners to investigate their perceptions of the complementarity of computers and live classroom drama and to brainstorm future possibilities for applying computer-based technologies to drama-based learning. We sought to discover the following:• What do young learners say about how they experience and value learning in a context involving a combination of drama and computers?• What ideas do these young learners have about how future technologies might enrich the complementarity of this combination?As the drama researchers involved in this project, we had been experimenting with this perhaps slightly unusual combination for over a decade by incorporating computers into a number of our drama units within our primary textbook Pretending to Learn.1 Our goal in these experimentations had always been to enrich the classroom drama experience by taking advantage of the information capacity of the Internet and other computer-based resources, including databases. For example, we had used The First Fleet Database2 to support a drama unit where the learners take on the role of convicts arriving in Australia in 1788. We discovered that this material, combined with other documentation and historical materials available via the Internet, greatly enhanced not only the historical accuracy of the work but also the level of engagement experienced by the learners when in role. Therefore, we were very keen to extend this work by exploring new possibilities and were especially keen to develop a better understanding of what the learners made of this interactivity.In recent years the partnering of these two quite different approaches to learning has developed quite a research following, and a number of drama teachers and researchers have become interested in the complementarity of these ways of learning.3 At the same time, researchers and designers from the field of computer-assisted learning have also noted these connections. This goes back to the work of Brenda Laurel, who first drew attention to the intriguing links between computers and theatre in her now famous text Computers as Theatre.4 With the rapid growth of interactive learning tools such as 3-D immersive worlds, blogs, and online voice and text chat spaces, the opportunities for exploration of these connections have also grown, with each of these offering exciting new possibilities when used in conjunction with the highly interactive and engaging strategies of process drama.Process drama is a way of group learning, through whole-class improvised drama, with students (and sometimes the... (shrink)

Digital communication between a patient and their clinician offers the potential for improved patient care, particularly for young people with long term conditions who are at risk of service disengagement. However, its use raises a number of ethical questions which have not been explored in empirical studies. The objective of this study was to examine, from the patient and clinician perspective, the ethical implications of the use of digital clinical communication in the context of young people living with (...) long-term conditions. A total of 129 semi-structured interviews, 59 with young people and 70 with healthcare professionals, from 20 United Kingdom -based specialist clinics were conducted as part of the LYNC study. Transcripts from five sites were read by a core team to identify explicit and implicit ethical issues and develop descriptive ethical codes. Our subsequent thematic analysis was developed iteratively with reference to professional and ethical norms. Clinician participants saw digital clinical communication as potentially increasing patient empowerment and autonomy; improving trust between patient and healthcare professional; and reducing harm because of rapid access to clinical advice. However, they also described ethical challenges, including: difficulty with defining and maintaining boundaries of confidentiality; uncertainty regarding the level of consent required; and blurring of the limits of a clinician’s duty of care when unlimited access is possible. Paradoxically, the use of digital clinical communication can create dependence rather than promote autonomy in some patients. Patient participants varied in their understanding of, and concern about, confidentiality in the context of digital communication. An overarching theme emerging from the data was a shifting of the boundaries of the patient-clinician relationship and the professional duty of care in the context of use of clinical digital communication. The ethical implications of clinical digital communication are complex and go beyond concerns about confidentiality and consent. Any development of this form of communication should consider its impact on the patient-clinician-relationship, and include appropriate safeguards to ensure that professional ethical obligations are adhered to. (shrink)

This is a book that opens up an area of contemporary experience that rarely sees the light of day. I believe readers from all walks of life and different educational backgrounds will be as excited to read about these experiences as my subjects were delighted to talk about them. One measure of the public's interest in relevant oral history is the current popularity of Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York, Stories, found in museums and bookstores throughout the city. (...) And the fact that the recent Nobel went to Svetlana Alexievich, a writer whose work is grounded in oral history, will expand the market for such books, and is a sign that more and more readers are interested in what ordinary people, whose voices are usually muted, have to say about crucial aspects of modern life. The book's interdisciplinary appeal will attract faculty and students in cultural studies, English, sociology, and other departments and programs interested in aesthetics. The book will have considerable crossover appeal to a wide general audience that especially includes women (most of my subjects are women) and women of color (a third of my subjects are members of a minority). The book is, in fact, eminently "Oprah-ble" because of its undoubted appeal to her vast audience. The challenge for an academic press, of course, will be to gain this audience's attention, a task to which I will be more than happy to devote substantial time and effort. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Excited DeliriumWhat’s Psychiatry Got to do With It?Paul B. Lieberman, MDIf in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.—WittgensteinDelirium is a medical syndrome defined as “a relatively acute decline in cognition that fluctuates over hours or days” whose primary manifestation is a deficit of attention. It is common, estimated to occur in 10% to more than 50% of hospitalized (...) patients, with higher prevalence rates among people in nursing homes and at the end of life. It is often fatal, with a mortality rate in the hospital estimated to be 25% to 33%. Caused by a wide variety of conditions and frequently difficult to diagnose, it lacks characteristic postmortem pathology (Josephson & Miller 2018)‘Excited delirium,’ as Byju and Friesen forcefully argue (Byju & Friesen, 2023), is, if nothing else, an excuse. The ‘diagnosis’ has not been empirically validated and remains controversial (American Psychiatric Association, 2020). And while delirium is usually treated by internists and emergency medicine physicians, psychiatrists should also be concerned about the misuse of a putative medical diagnosis and join actively in discussion about it. For one thing, patients mis-diagnosed with this condition, as Byju and Friesen’s examples suggest, may actually have another psychiatric condition and, so, be people for whose safety we should advocate. Moreover, the kinds of police interventions which Byju and Friesen document as involving excited delirium also befall patients with other psychiatric problems in whom the issue of delirium does not arise.There are at least two broad ways in which psychiatrists are qualified and obligated to engage with this issue. As physicians, we should join our medical colleagues in carefully but persistently telling the scientific, medical truth. As psychiatrists, we should bring psychiatric knowledge into the discussion, for example, by explaining what can happen when people who do not, apparently, have a diagnosable mental disorder interact under stress with other people who, apparently, do.Delirium is a clinical diagnosis, made when characteristic signs and symptoms are present which should not be made ‘by exclusion’ when, as may happen, other causes are not found. There is no evidence of delirium in any of the three clinical descriptions Byju and Friesen provide. Perhaps such evidence exists which is not in their brief reports, but these three people appear to have had, either, another psychiatric condition, such as psychosis or drug intoxication, or perhaps no [End Page 353] diagnosis at all. Psychiatrists are particularly wellpositioned to make this point since patients with mental health problems are often misdiagnosed when they seek medical attention and are told, and treated as if, “it’s all (“just”!) psychological.”Excited delirium, if it exists, is fatal in 10% of cases (Gonin, Beysard, Hersin, & Carron, 2018) and, although this is lower than the rate for delirium in general, it is still high. Medical personnel must be available to evaluate and ensure the safety of patients in custody.The potential conflict between protecting the patient and protecting the public should not be overstated. Although physical trauma and excessive administration of medications, including ketamine 500 mg IV (Orhurhu, Vashicht, Claus, & Cohen, 2023) can be lethal, mechanical restraint by itself is not (Chieze et al., 2019; Gleerup et al., 2019): something else is necessary, such as asphyxiation (Evans, Wood, & Lambert, 2003). Nor is restraint necessary in many cases in which ‘de-escalation’ techniques can be equally effective (Garriga et al., 2016; Fernández-Costa, 2020). Perhaps these points are best made by law enforcement leaders—and they have been—but psychiatrists can add that safe management of potential violence can be provided for agitated people with psychiatric conditions.Although it is not clear what kind of strength ‘superhuman’ strength might be (certainly not medical), relative imperviousness to pain is clinically described. Its locus classicus is Beecher’s observation, during World War II, that injured soldiers awaiting return home from the front, required lower than usual doses of analgesics (Beecher, 1946). And it’s a common experience, scientifically confirmed, that physical trauma may not become painful until sometime after the injury (Melzack, Wall, & Ty, 1982). But pain is a warning. Its absence is not a license, but a caution... (shrink)

This paper considers the ways that concepts such as social justice and law were used as semiotic objects-in-tension by a group of five US undergraduates considering law school to make sense of their ideas about entering the discourse communities and communities of practice associated with being a lawyer. This group was made up of undergraduate women who had completed a summer residency program sponsored by the Law School Admissions Council to increase enrollment of students from under-represented groups. Of (...) the five participants, two were US-born; the others immigrated to the US as teenagers; each was aware of her position as multiply marginalized, by gender as well as other factors, including refugee or immigrant status, religious affiliation, sexual identity, and/or association with “at risk” labeling. Data analyzed reflect a 3-year study of their changing perceptions of their relationships to law school discourse communities, using text, interviews, individual video narratives, and informal, face-to-face group meetings. A sociolinguistic approach to multimodal discourse analysis is used to examine the ways that the women, each in a unique way, articulated an increased investment in direct and embodied engagement, lived experience, and personal testimony—not as supplements to doing/being a lawyer, but as necessary and expected practices therein. Over time and through various modalities, they used their vantage point from outside the dominant discourse communities of law to stage social critique and to contest the binary logic and normative criteria that forge the boundaries of exclusion from and inclusion in these communities. Specifically, they resemiotized notions of being a lawyer from the margins in ways that demanded a more fluid and polysemous interpretation of what it means to do ethically rigorous social justice work—hence reworking the relationships between justice and the law and widening the semiotic potential of their own future work. Particularly significant are the ways that semiotic trajectories progressed from an emphasis on what Halliday identifies as textual functions of language to interpersonal and ideational functions. Such a trajectory away from entextualization suggests that voices and perspectives from the margins may be using those imaginary margins tactically as sites from which to contest the boundaries that define whose voices count within the legal system and to contest normative limits on semiotic potentialities for lawyers working toward more just social futures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Excited DeliriumWhat’s Psychiatry Got to do With It?Paul B. Lieberman, MDIf in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.—WittgensteinDelirium is a medical syndrome defined as “a relatively acute decline in cognition that fluctuates over hours or days” whose primary manifestation is a deficit of attention. It is common, estimated to occur in 10% to more than 50% of hospitalized (...) patients, with higher prevalence rates among people in nursing homes and at the end of life. It is often fatal, with a mortality rate in the hospital estimated to be 25% to 33%. Caused by a wide variety of conditions and frequently difficult to diagnose, it lacks characteristic postmortem pathology (Josephson & Miller 2018)‘Excited delirium,’ as Byju and Friesen forcefully argue (Byju & Friesen, 2023), is, if nothing else, an excuse. The ‘diagnosis’ has not been empirically validated and remains controversial (American Psychiatric Association, 2020). And while delirium is usually treated by internists and emergency medicine physicians, psychiatrists should also be concerned about the misuse of a putative medical diagnosis and join actively in discussion about it. For one thing, patients mis-diagnosed with this condition, as Byju and Friesen’s examples suggest, may actually have another psychiatric condition and, so, be people for whose safety we should advocate. Moreover, the kinds of police interventions which Byju and Friesen document as involving excited delirium also befall patients with other psychiatric problems in whom the issue of delirium does not arise.There are at least two broad ways in which psychiatrists are qualified and obligated to engage with this issue. As physicians, we should join our medical colleagues in carefully but persistently telling the scientific, medical truth. As psychiatrists, we should bring psychiatric knowledge into the discussion, for example, by explaining what can happen when people who do not, apparently, have a diagnosable mental disorder interact under stress with other people who, apparently, do.Delirium is a clinical diagnosis, made when characteristic signs and symptoms are present which should not be made ‘by exclusion’ when, as may happen, other causes are not found. There is no evidence of delirium in any of the three clinical descriptions Byju and Friesen provide. Perhaps such evidence exists which is not in their brief reports, but these three people appear to have had, either, another psychiatric condition, such as psychosis or drug intoxication, or perhaps no [End Page 353] diagnosis at all. Psychiatrists are particularly wellpositioned to make this point since patients with mental health problems are often misdiagnosed when they seek medical attention and are told, and treated as if, “it’s all (“just”!) psychological.”Excited delirium, if it exists, is fatal in 10% of cases (Gonin, Beysard, Hersin, & Carron, 2018) and, although this is lower than the rate for delirium in general, it is still high. Medical personnel must be available to evaluate and ensure the safety of patients in custody.The potential conflict between protecting the patient and protecting the public should not be overstated. Although physical trauma and excessive administration of medications, including ketamine 500 mg IV (Orhurhu, Vashicht, Claus, & Cohen, 2023) can be lethal, mechanical restraint by itself is not (Chieze et al., 2019; Gleerup et al., 2019): something else is necessary, such as asphyxiation (Evans, Wood, & Lambert, 2003). Nor is restraint necessary in many cases in which ‘de-escalation’ techniques can be equally effective (Garriga et al., 2016; Fernández-Costa, 2020). Perhaps these points are best made by law enforcement leaders—and they have been—but psychiatrists can add that safe management of potential violence can be provided for agitated people with psychiatric conditions.Although it is not clear what kind of strength ‘superhuman’ strength might be (certainly not medical), relative imperviousness to pain is clinically described. Its locus classicus is Beecher’s observation, during World War II, that injured soldiers awaiting return home from the front, required lower than usual doses of analgesics (Beecher, 1946). And it’s a common experience, scientifically confirmed, that physical trauma may not become painful until sometime after the injury (Melzack, Wall, & Ty, 1982). But pain is a warning. Its absence is not a license, but a caution... (shrink)

Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of “surface reading.” While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian (...) tradition of Idealist ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art. Altieri finds a perspective for that restoration in a reading of Wittgenstein’s later work that stresses Wittgenstein’s parallel criticisms of the spirit of empiricism. Altieri begins by offering a phenomenology of imagination, because we cannot fully honor art if we do not link it to a distinctive, socially productive force. That force emerges in two quite different but equally powerful realizations in his reading of John Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual,” which explicitly establishes a model for a postromantic view of imagination, and William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He then turns to Wittgenstein with chapters on the role of display as critique of Enlightenment thinking, the honoring of qualities like sensitivity and the ability to attune to the actions of others, the role of expression in the building of models, and the contrast between ethical and confessional modes of judgment. Finally, Altieri produces his own model of aesthetic experience as participatory valuation and makes an extended argument for the social significance of appreciation as a way to escape the patterns of resentment fundamental to our current mode of politics. A masterful work by one of our foremost literary and philosophical theorists, Reckoning with the Imagination will breathe new life into ongoing debates over the value of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, he was referring to the maelstrom of ideas, conversations, and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality within the estate's larger ethos of community living and rural reform. Disenchanted with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, purchased the extensive Devonshire estate in 1925 and began to encourage regular visits and (...) social and spiritual advice from prominent British interwar intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. As the estate's activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help of visiting American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon to assess and advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington's experimental school. Sheldon's ‘Promethean Psychology’ and ‘Somatotyping’ body classification system offered the Dartington group, a social, spiritual, and ‘scientific’ alternative to Freudian understandings of the mind. Visitors such as Huxley, decades later, relied on Sheldon's somatotyping system to fashion a utopian education in Pala (in his last novel, Island) where the population might live in nonmaterialistic cooperative harmony. Dartington's attraction to the use of Sheldon's Promethean psychology in supporting a utopian view of progressive education was as short-lived as were Pala's utopian ambitions decades later. In years to come, however, elements of Sheldon's views continued to find an audience among physical educators and sports scientists, who saw in somatotypes a useful guide for assessing talent identification and future sporting success. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre (...) as it explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that God is portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and in the Rabbinic literature—some of the very Hebrew texts that have influenced the three major world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as One who can be argued with and even changes his mind. Contrary to fundamentalist positions, in the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish texts God is omniscient but enjoys good, playful argumentation, broadening the possibilities for reasoning and reasonability. Arguing with God (...) has also had a profound influence upon Jewish humor, demonstrating that humans can joke with God. More specifically, we find in Jewish literature that humor’s capacity to bisociate between different domains of human experience can share a symbiotic relationship with argumentation’s emphasis on producing multiple, contested perspectives. Overall, once mortals realize that figures such as God can accept many perspectives through humor, teasing, arguing, criticism, and in at least one case, even lawsuits, a critical point emerges: citizens should learn to live, laugh, and reason with others with whom they disagree. (shrink)

Environment and Philosophyprovides an accessible introduction to the radical challenges that environmentalism poses to concepts that have become almost second nature in the modern world. These include: * the ideas of science and objectivity * the conventional placement of the human being within the environment * the individualism of convential Modern thought Written in an accessible way for those without a background in philosophy, this text examines ways of thinking about ourselves, nature and our relationship with nature. It (...) offers an introduction to the phenomenological perspective on environmental issues, and also to the questions of what natural beauty is. (shrink)

Humphry Osmond wrote to Aldous Huxley in 1956 proposing the term “psychedelic,” coined from two Greek words to mean “mind manifesting.” The scholars, one a psychiatrist and the other a celebrated novelist and philosopher, were exuberant about the potential of drugs for accessing the mind. Huxley favored a phrase from William Blake: -/- If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. -/- He postulated that psychedelics disturbed the “cerebral reducing valve” (...) (1954), and that this was in fact the shared mechanism for regular drug trips, as well as schizophrenic and mystical experiences. If it were the case, the drugs could offer a chemical shortcut to the divine, and a reasonable way to scientifically study mental illness. -/- With such ideas in vogue, the 1950s were heady years, at least for research on psychedelic drugs. More than 750 articles were published on LSD alone. Some studies made use of the drug experience to model schizophrenia, others to develop treatments for alcoholism. And as Nicolas Langlitz explains in Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain, the brain as filter – the idea of gates or doors (which, yes, also gave name to the band) – would go on to serve as a significant shared conceptual matrix for psychopharmacologic research, from experimental psychosis to experimental mysticism (10). (shrink)

Este artículo trata de investigar si es posible que se produzca una emoción partiendo solo de su expresión, y no de un estímulo. Para ello se analizarán algunos trabajos de autores como William James, Francisco Alcayde y Vilar o la psicóloga chilena Susana Bloch. Todos ellos han tratado de demostrar que la expresión de una emoción puede conducir al sujeto a experimentarla. Sin embargo, estas tesis cometen el error de abolir el pensamiento del sujeto, otorgándole una especial importancia a la (...) parte física que diferencian de la que podríamos llamar la parte mental. This article intends to investigate whether an emotion can be born from their expression, and not of an external stimulus. For this reason, I will analyze some works of authors such as William James, Francisco Alcayde and Vilar and Susana Bloch. All of them have tried to show that the expression of an emotion leads a person to experience that emotion. However, these theories are not correct because they invalidate the thinking of the self, and they give special importance to the physical part which they distinguish from what we might call the mental part. (shrink)

Joaquin Segura. Untitled (fig. 40) . 2007 continent. 1.2 (2011): 117-124. The interview that follows is a dialogue between artist and gallerist with the intent of unearthing the artist’s working strategies for a general public. Joaquin Segura is at once an anomaly in Mexico’s contemporary art scene at the same time as he is one of the most emblematic representatives of a larger shift toward a post-national identity among its youngest generation of artists. If Mexico looks increasingly like a (...) foreclosed home burning to the ground, Segura could likely be the one walking away, charred matchstick between thumb and forefinger and shit-eating grin on his face. His corrosive attacks on institutions, ideologies, and power reflect a deep general distrust of authority, increasingly evident within the work of younger Mexican artists. It is perhaps most directly the result of President Calderon’s deeply unpopular war against the cartels but no doubt equally the product of decades upon decades of rampant corruption and errant policy within Mexico. Brett W Schultz (BWS): A recurring—if not dominant—theme within your current work and investigation explores ideological extremism in reaction to some perceived political and economic disenfranchisement, especially that espoused and practiced by right-wing groups in United States. That's exactly why I thought of you when I was approached to contribute a piece to an issue on the subject of the moraine—taken metaphorically here to signify a certain set of beliefs that have resurfaced within mainstream American culture in the wake of a probably over-exaggerated political sea-change, marked by Obama's election. You're a Mexican artist who now lives and works in Guadalajara, far from the border cities where such concerns would seem more likely to be relevant to a contemporary artist; of course, you're even farther from the culture that birthed this nature of extremism. What interests you so intensely about this movement, if we can call it that? Joaquin Segura (JS): I think there are several seminal points that you touch on in this particular question. There's a very specific set of interests that make me address the socio-political issues I've been dissecting through my practice in the last few years. First of all, I don't really consider myself a 'mexican' artist. As I've made clear in the past, I don't really believe in the notion of 'identity' or the idea of 'nation', which I find totally laughable and heartwarmingly passé. I'm convinced that these are totally outdated models of understanding our differences and similarities, expanding our already immense and irreconcilable cultural abysses instead of bringing them together, thus resulting in their total dispersion among the complex and extremely arbitrary weaving of contemporary social nucleii. Pretty much a frankly bad joke, if I may say so. The fact that I live and work in Mexico is a completely random geographical and temporal factor, which of course affects what I think and what I do, but I've chosen not to be limited by this specific circumstance. In the past, while working abroad, I've taken advantage of this preconception of Mexico—to be more exact, pretty much all of Latin America—as one of the last barbaric bastions of western civilization. Totally amusing, if you ask me about it. I consider my practice to be, among other things, a gonzo strategy of deceit: there are quite a few roles you can adopt in this approach that may actually reveal themselves to be a privileged vantage point. In my experience, the gentle savage is one of the most effective ones to establish my standing position. Thus, I'm a mexican artist if I need it to prove my point. If it's not necessary in a specific circumstance, I'm not. Quite simple, I think. Said in other words, it's just an ace I can play to win a particular match. It has worked so far, at least for me. L: Hey, America… , 2009. R: The Inaugural Address , 2009. I am interested in the nature of power and the rise and fall of totalitarian ideological and political apparatuses nowadays. But I guess, going even further, I'm essentially fascinated by the fissures and contradictions that have made these structures spectacularly crumble to the ground. I do believe extreme ideologies have played a crucial role in the globalization of socio-political crisis. In the end, our world is nothing more than a fading monument to all things gone wrong—the inspiring triumph of failure, in every sense. I see this as an exciting parable. And of course, it is an undeniable fact that the US, through their influence in world economy, international policies and general attitude towards the rest of the planet is the largest structure waiting to collapse. I think we are all secretly awaiting that moment of splendor, even americans. It'll be disastrous and as nasty as it can get, but it will also be liberating and incredibly inspirational. Not just because it’s the US but because it'll prove that absolutely everything is susceptible to fall. And not only that, most importantly, it would confirm that radical change may actually be possible and not just one more of the unfulfilled promises modernity has left us to struggle with on our own. BWS: I want to talk first about two of your works in particular: Hey, America... and The Inaugural Address . I feel like your more recent work has a subtle —or even hidden—sinisterness, but these two works are perfect examples of how brutally confrontational your earlier work has been. When we showed Hey, America... at Mexico City's Zona Maco art fair in 2010, there were at least a couple visitors to our stand who were absolutely ready to punch me in my gringo face for having done so. Certainly the shock value of these works is crucial to their central ideas, but can you tell me more about your intentions and how these works relate to your general oeuvre? JS: So funny. Perhaps we do deserve to be punched in the face. I think that's what I'm sometimes looking for, but I hardly ever get it. I do think of such works as some sort of logical trap, a somewhat perverse ambush waiting for someone to walk into head-on. I think what I tried to do with those two specific works, as well as some other past projects, is just emphasize issues or themes that do disturb or make me uneasy and restless. I consider my essential intention a need to make clear that we do not have to look the other way, ignore or forget. We must address, understand and solve these manifestations of senseless violence and absurdity because if we don't confront them this way, they'll end up consuming us. In other words, I do consider these works as a personal need of coming to terms with the nonsense of the world we all are living in. I don't particularly consider myself to be someone with a clear set of beliefs. Perhaps my only certainty would be that everything is there to be denied, demolished and obliterated—even my supposed unquestionability of that particular 'dogma.' My practice is a reflection of that paradox, and I do think that's how these two pieces relate to a wider body of work. Every democratic system and so-called developed contemporary society is deeply flawed on the inside, and that is because each has swept things under the rug. Of course, there's tolerance, good will and eagerness to make a difference but there's also hatred, pain and fear lingering all around. We must learn to relate to both sides of the spectrum. In a way, I approach the themes behind these particular works in what I think to be a non-biased, somewhat 'neutral' way. I do think there's an encryption process going on in the way I work, some sort of formal refinement of this somewhat outrageous content. A digest of infamy, if we can refer to it that way. It is up to the individual experiencing the work to decide which way these pieces lean. They can easily be seen from both positions and I'm ok with that. If you look closely at these works, there's nothing that establishes an unrelenting position—neither support nor rejection. I don't want my personal political views to directly set an agenda for the spectator as that’s essentially propaganda, which is one of the things I absolutely despise. To sum it up, I strive for the spectator to complete the piece in that sense. The work then becomes a reflection of his or her own contradictions, a playground of the mind. I'm interested in achieving a deadpan and deadlock state in the observer. So, in a way, those visitors threatening to beat the shit out of you unconsciously became that particular issue the work is alluding to. Just blind and senseless reaction to god knows what people feel must be defended, the overwhelming virtue of ambiguity. Beautiful. Perhaps you can also think of my practice as a uber-sophisticated and snobbish version of Punk'd. And you wouldn't be far from what I'm trying to convey. Untitled (Disturbance Scenarios #2) . 2010. BWS: To me, an important transitional marker in the overall trajectory of your work is the series, Disturbance Scenarios , which evokes a similar generalized state of panic, paranoia, and impending doom through its incorporation of sensationalist newspaper headlines, yet also suggests this slyly mysterious meta-narrative via the context in which the newspaper itself is placed. How did you arrive at this series and why did you choose photorealistic painting as the medium for it? JS: I consider this series to be a by-product of the process I follow when making work. I spend an important part of my time just doing research, going through documentation and accumulating visual or historical references for the themes or episodes I'm interested in, in that particular moment. These are, of course, valuable assets that connect among themselves in a mysterious and almost undetectable manner, sometimes a few years between one and the other. I've employed similar production strategies in the past, in ongoing series like Random Moments of Urban Decay , in which I document what I consider to be physical traces of ethnic, religious or ideological violence in the form of text graffiti, invisibly scattered in different cities of the world, mostly in the US. Disturbance Scenarios was started in early 2010, following a particularly intense period of traveling here and there that lasted for most of the year. I've always felt compelled by text, as I find quite intriguing the idea of how words can create equally intense evocations of what I call a mental panorama of uneasiness than those produced by aesthetically-charged imagery; of course, if handled right. I have a close relationship to print media—due both to my academic background and to my attraction to its ubiquity and almost unlimited influence, which in the end, is nothing else but power—so I found myself with a growing archive of newspaper headlines snapshots from cities like Melbourne, Auckland, London, and LA. Going through them, I noticed that they had in common a very specific thematic slant: they were all about some sort of conflict: energy crisis, political unrest, local episodes of domestic violence, you name it. So as you very well put it, I felt they all connected through this feeling of anxiety and anguish and I decided to start thinking of them as a body of work. Basically, I felt an interest in creating what I think of as my personal fragmented prefigurements of the end of civilization. There were few elements on the shots that could give away its actual location, geographically speaking, and I liked that. I find this sensation of vagueness and uncertainty quite alluring. The more subtle, the more perverse. The formal resolution of the series—as photo-realistic painting—is linked to my intention of creating distance between me as the artist and the themes I work with. I rarely execute my own work, and that is more a personal choice as I'm more interested in the ideas I mingle with than in the actual outcome of that process, understood as an "art-object" with certain market value. I did some tests with light-jet prints of those snapshots and I found them devoid of that nightmarish, disturbing indistinctness that I felt was so important for them to be able to project the turmoil I experienced upon encountering them and in conceiving of them as a series. So I thought that photorealistic painting would be an interesting resource to play with, as I hardly had worked with that medium before because of my lenient animosity toward painters and their craft. So they were executed like that and I think it turned out to be just right. Homemade (Napalm #2) . 2010. BWS: Though Disturbance Scenarios remains ongoing, it's an interesting contrast to another series of yours, Homemade, which are these beautifully banal photographs of the ingredients used to make improvised explosives. Whereas Disturbance Scenarios still confronts the viewer aggressively with its visual emphasis on loaded texts, in Homemade , you've dropped the surface-level bravado entirely. They're pieces that require explanation to someone not already versed in the fine art of amateur explosive-making. You weren't known for subtlety in your past work; why this change in direction? JS: I'm personally convinced that these are just two angles of the same conceptual preoccupation. I mentioned before my obsession with the idea of encryption. I'm quite enticed by how these processes of translation can politically and semantically alter and deviate purportedly subversive materials such as the ones these works allude to. I do think subversion is futile. I was really troubled by that thought for some time, but I think now I understand that it's not really that important. What is really significant is to elaborate on these alternate views, to envision and refine possible escape routes. It doesn't really matter if they go nowhere, but that is because nothing really matters. A "mute" artwork is a notion that captivates me. When you look at the works you mention, you know there's something off, but it's not fully clear how and why that is. I rely on that insecurity—on that moment of hesitation. And that can also be achieved through an approach like the one I'm now interested in. Let's just call it a smoke screen, a surrogate ruse to get to the same point: to talk about impotence and defeat in contemporary life. The notion that readily accessible information is actually a weapon is a double-edged fallacy: sure, you can make use of whatever resources you can lay your hands on, but that doesn't set you free because freedom is impossible. Still, that doesn't mean you can't blow up stuff during the process, metaphorically or not. I didn't understand the nature of subtlety before. I used to think that you needed to be loud and manifest anger and unconformity in the most aggressive manner possible. Then I finally realized that you can actually permeate and rarify a battleground—because after all, this is low-intensity war—if you actually aim at silently building up the contradictions and making the symbolic value of ideas and acts clash within themselves. Or perhaps it is that I am just getting old. I guess I used to be an angry kid until recently. Now I think of myself as a disenchanted post-teenager, and of course that reflects in my work and my approach to art-making. Kind of a rite of passage and I laugh at it because, overall, it has been overwhelmingly fun. And that doesn't mean that I'm not ready to stick it in someone or something's face again if I feel like it. BWS: You're now taking the subtlety of the Homemade series even further with your newest series, Definitive Reader For a Botched Revolution , in which you photograph a series of politically-charged books side-on, negating their content entirely—essentially reducing them to purely aesthetic objects in which the subject matter is only revealed in the title of the work. Can you talk about the ideas behind this series? Furthermore, is your recent interest in this idea of the "botched revolution" an indication of a general attitudinal or philosophical shift you've since adopted? JS: This new series of works is the logical outcome of a brief period I went through. Probably the last couple years, in which due to a number of circumstances that don't really have to do with my art-making, I was forced to renegotiate my ideas, my beliefs and practically everything that surrounds me. It was quite distressful and turbulent, but in the end, I think it was also almost epiphanic. I came to terms with myself and now I'm calm and serene. That is, of course, my personal take on it but I mention it because I do think it's important to address this shift you mention. The idea of an artwork as a container for latent revelations enthralls me quite a bit. That's how I see these particular works: art as an incendiary agent. It's up to the artist and the spectator to do whatever they please with it. I think the detachment and almost surgical cleanliness from the Definitive Reader series is also my take at poking fun of the way some art is totally innocuous and uncompromising. These images may be pleasing to the eye, but there's something twisted and rotten within them, well hidden beneath. You'll either see it or not, but without a doubt, it will not cancel its presence. This series is intrinsically linked to Homemade . I'm pretty much horsing around with similar ideas and statements here. And well, yes, I do think any revolution is a botched one. There's nothing too heavy about their own downfall. Decay and breakdown are here and will not go away. Perhaps we must learn to embrace them in one way or another, for our own sake. L: Untitled (T.A.Z.). R: Untitled (United States Marine Guidebook of Essential Subjects) . 2011. BWS: Finally, let's discuss the near future. You've got an upcoming solo show at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros [SAPS] in Mexico City this summer. What can we expect from that? What else do you have planned? JS: I'll go and get seafood as soon as I'm done with this interview. It's pretty good here in Guadalajara. That's my top priority at this very moment. About my solo project at SAPS, it's due to open in late July. I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm still closely working with the curator on the general feel for the show but I can say that it'll be more of a revision of past works that have not been shown in Mexico City except for a couple pieces. It definitely won't be a showcase for new projects, although we may include one or two previously unseen works. What you can expect is a rereading of what I've been working on during the past few years. In a way, that's exciting to me because for some reason I don't really care about, I'm not that active in Mexico City even though that's where I lived and work for years. I've hardly shown there after my solo project at Yautepec in February of 2010. It'll be nice to see how it all comes together and I'm more thrilled about it because I totally love the space and I think they're doing an excellent job with their programming and its direction. And in a certain way it feels like going back home. About everything else, I need a period to reflect and fully understand what I've been thinking and working on. I've got a few group shows here and there: New York, San Francisco, and Melbourne are the ones happening soon. I will present my censored project Untitled ( Gringo Loco ) as part of the programming of the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, two years after being escorted at gunpoint from the installation site by police sent by the extreme right-wing mayor of the city, which I found pretty amusing for an otherwise typical Saturday afternoon. I'm also involved in a couple "curatorial" projects. In my case, "curatorial" means that I help put together stuff I like and I'm interested in. One of them will open in late September of 2011 at Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, and I will work with three of whom I consider to be some of the best artists in a lively and active scene such as the one here in Guadalajara. But most importantly, I've been doing heavy research so there are also a number of projects that I've yet to finalize. That'll be my main focus during the rest of the year, even though I really enjoy procrastination. There'll be time for that later. Or maybe not. We'll see. About Joaquin Segura The action, installation, intervention and photographic work of Joaquin Segura (b. Mexico City, 1980) has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Some spaces that have featured his work include La Panaderia, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Centro de la Imagen and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City; El Museo del Barrio and apexart, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; and Palace Adria in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2008 and 2009, Segura was an artist-in-residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, NY and at the 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. He is represented YAUTEPEC in Mexico City and by Arena Mexico Arte Contemporáneo in Guadalajara. Further Reading Joaquin Segura’s website YAUTEPEC artist page for Joaquin Segura Capps, Kriston. “ID-ENTITY: Washington, DC.” ART PAPERS . 2009. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialog around the theme Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research (inspired by the title of the commentary by Babalola and van Gils). These editors, considering the diversity of empirical approaches in business ethics, envisage a future in which quantitative (...) business ethics research is more bold and innovative, as well as reflexive about its techniques, and dialog between quantitative and qualitative research nourishes the enrichment of both. In their commentary, Babalola and van Gils argue that leadership research has stagnated with the use of too narrow a range of perspectives and methods and too many overlapping concepts. They propose that novel insights could be achieved by investigating the lived experience of leadership (through interviews, document analysis, archival data); by focusing on topics of concern to society; by employing different personal, philosophical, or cultural perspectives; and by turning the lens on the heroic leader (through “dark-side” and follower studies). Taking a provocative stance, Bal and Garcia-Lorenzo argue that we need radical voices in current times to enable a better understanding of the psychology underlying ethical transformations. Psychology can support business ethics by not shying away from grander ideas, going beyond the margins of “unethical behaviors harming the organization” and expanding the range of lenses used to studying behavior in context. In the arena of finance and business ethics, Guedhami, Liang, and Shailer emphasize novel data sets and innovative methods. Significantly, they stress that an understanding the intersection of finance and ethics is central to business ethics; financial equality and inclusion are persistent socio-economic and political concerns that are not always framed as ethics issues, yet relevant business policies and practices manifest ethical values. Finally, Charles Cho offers his opinion on the blurry line between the “ethical” versus “social” or “critical” aspects of accounting papers. The Journal of Business Ethics provides fertile ground for innovative, even radical, approaches to quantitative methods (see Zyphur and Pierides in J Bus Ethics 143(1):1–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3549-8, 2017), as part of a broad goal of ethically reflecting on empirical research. (shrink)

The neuroethics field emerged in the early 2000s in an effort to face important philosophical dilemmas and anticipate disruptive social changes linked to the use of neurotechnology (Safire, 2002). From very early on, this field grew out of two core issues, namely inquiries into the ethics of neuroscience –concerning the moral use of knowledge and technology– and inquiries into the neuroscience of ethics –on how new brain function evidence can change human self-understanding (Roskies 2002). Similarly, neurolaw is now on a (...) parallel path with two main pillars as Chandler (2018) suggested, (1) “self-reflexive inquiry” (the neuroscience of law) and (2) “inquiry into the development and use of brain science and technologies” (the law of neuroscience). In this paper, I suggest that these two lines of research are still excessively disconnected from one another and, to support this claim, I analyze the three potential point-of-no-return risks that Aldous Huxley associated with technological challenges, namely centralization of power, bureaucratic alienation, and scientific idealism. In addition, I show how Huxley shifted analysis of technological problems from a focus on the rights of potential victims to the duties of potential aggressors. Finally, I argue that Aldous Huxley’s view on how to build a bridge that brings pillars 1) and 2) closer together also helps prevent the technological point-of-no-return. According to Huxley, the key is found in paying particular attention to understanding contemplative activity, reinforcing its role in the study of reality, and, eventually, returning the romantic gaze updated to academia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 265-267 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-First Century Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-First Century. By A. L. Herman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xi + 245 pp. (...) At first glance, this title might seem a bit over the edge: how could an author intelligently juxtapose such diverse thinkers as an ecological scientist, two advocates of human rights, and an ancient religious founder? For the most part, the author succeeds in demonstrating that the twenty-first century requires a definition of community that includes environmental, social, and spiritual concerns. In a format particularly [End Page 265] helpful for undergraduate teaching, he carefully rehearses at the end of each section three central questions: how does this thinker contribute to our understanding of community? Does his approach lead to the diminishment of violence? Does it facilitate peace?For the first quarter of the book, Herman explores various aspects of community. Drawing from Erich Fromm, Socrates, and Aldous Huxley, he demonstrates that out of enlightened self-interest, all people seek peace for themselves. He is careful to point out, however, that the Socratic virtues of wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice, which arise from within, are far superior to the uniformity of the World State as described in Huxley's Brave New World, which leaves nothing uncontrolled by the external authorities. Both lead to nonviolence and peace, but the World State can fall prey to what Fromm terms cultural insanity.Supplementing his discussion of Aldo Leopold with references to the work of Rachel Carson and J. Baird Callicott, Herman emphasizes that ideas of community peace must be informed by holistic structures of nature, particularly as articulated in Leopold's Sand County Almanac. However, he also warns that if the welfare of the biotic community takes precedence over all other concerns, then society could fall into a state of ecofascism.Herman's chapter on Mahatma Gandhi ably summarizes the life and works of this great political reformer, with particular focus on his formative years in South Africa. Influenced by John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi developed the concept of the "Ashramic community," a means of collective, intentional living designed to effect social change. After describing the Phoenix Settlement (1904, Johannesburg), the Sabarmati Ashram (1915, Ahmedabad), and Sevagram Ashram (1933, Wardha), Herman presents a fifteen-page play script based on the Asian travel diaries of Professor George P. Conger, chair of philosophy at the University of Minnesota from 1937-1953. Conger spent two months at Gandhi's ashram in Wardha, India, in 1933, and in the play called "Salt," his students take up issues including the ill treatment of Jews in Germany, the definition of nonviolence, and emphasized, as does Gandhi, the necessity for self-transformation to achieve personal and community peace.Martin Luther King Jr. inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi, employed nonviolent techniques to bring about the many successes of the American Civil Rights Movement. Herman provides a brief biography of Martin Luther King Jr., quotes several of his pivotal sermons, and emphasizes the notion of beloved community as critical to King's thinking. He writes that "in King's interpretation of agape, it is your being loved that gives you value; and it is your selflessly loving others that gives them value and makes the beloved community possible" (p. 138). According to King, fear and racial discrimination prevent one from entering into the beloved community. By changing laws, and, more importantly, changing the hearts of individual people, a more peaceful community can be built.The least successful chapter of this book discusses Gautama Buddha and the "karmic community." Rather than focusing directly on Buddhist theories of Karma, Herman engages in a long discussion of the Bhagavad Gita, an important Hindu text, as a foil to explain Buddhist theories... (shrink)

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and (...) show how the novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)