The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics (...) and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge. (shrink)

Religious considerations in medical decision-making have enjoyed newfound attention in recent years, challenging the assumption that the domains of biological and spiritual flourishing can be cleanly separated in clinical practice. A surprising majority of patients desire their physicians to engage their religious and spiritual concerns, yet most never receive such attention, particularly in cases near the end of life where such attention seems most warranted.1–3 As physicians Aparna Sajja and Christina Puchalski recently wrote in the AMA Journal of Ethics theme (...) issue on ‘Religion and Spirituality in Healthcare Practice’, modern medical training is ‘falling short of preparing physicians to help patients with the metaphysical needs of their illness’.4 It would seem then that both patients and physicians might challenge the conclusions proffered by philosophers Jake Greenblum and Ryan Hubbard in ‘Responding to Religious Patients: Why Physicians Have No Business Doing Theology’, in which they claim that physicians ought not to engage religious reasoning for medical decisions. Their conclusion relies on two core arguments: a ‘public reason’ argument and a ‘fiduciary argument’, both of which contend that theology and religious considerations have no place in medical reasoning. We find that two central errors undergird these arguments. First is the fraught notion of an epistemically and ethically normative public reason, and second is a fundamental mischaracterisation of the fiduciary nature of the patient–physician relationship and the nature of medicine itself. In response, we argue that all physicians essentially ‘do theology’ and that, rather than divorcing theology from medical practice, clinicians should make it their business to do theology well. To support the exclusion of religious reasoning from medical decision-making, the authors open with a ‘public reason argument’, suggesting that physicians serve in roles closely resembling those of public officials. As such, the physician as public official ought to limit himself …. (shrink)

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) has become prominent in metaphor scholarship because of its explanation of the relations between people's metaphoric thoughts and their use of metaphoric discourse. Our aim in this article is to explore the temporal characteristics of how conceptual metaphors shape verbal metaphor use. We argue that cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics mostly adopt simplistic, and psychologically implausible, views of how conceptual metaphors are activated and then constrain people's comprehension of metaphoric language. But more contemporary ideas on how cognitive (...) processing unfolds over time in human experience provide better models of how conceptual metaphors shape verbal metaphor use. The implications of this newer vision of CMT are discussed, particularly in regard to methods for studying how conceptual metaphors support interpretation of linguistic metaphor. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard’s writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard’s thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard’s contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, (...) literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines. -/- Contents: Envy, Janne Kylliäinen; Epic, Nassim Bravo Jordán; Epigram, David R. Law; Ethics, Azucena Palavicini Sánchez; Evil, Azucena Palavicini Sánchez and William McDonald; Exception/Universal, Geoffrey Dargan; Existence/Existential, Min-Ho Lee; Experience, Jakub Marek; Fairytale, Nathaniel Kramer; Faith, William McDonald; Finitude/Infinity, Erik M. Hanson; Forgiveness, John Lippitt; Freedom, Diego Giordano; Genius, Steven M. Emmanuel; God, Paul Martens and Daniel Marrs; Good, Azucena Palavicini Sánchez; Governance/Providence, Jack Mulder, Jr.; Grace, Derek R. Nelson; Gratitude, Corey Benjamin Tutewiler; Guilt, Erik M. Hanson; Happiness, Benjamin Miguel Olivares Bøgeskov; Hero, Sean Anthony Turchin; History, Sean Anthony Turchin; Holy Spirit, Leo Stan; Hope, William McDonald; Humility, Robert B. Puchniak; Humor, Alejandro González; Hypocrisy, Thomas Martin Fauth Hansen; Identity/Difference, Claudine Davidshofer; Imagination, Frances Maughan-Brown; Imitation, Leo Stan; Immanence/Transcendence, Leo Stan; Immediacy/Reflection, Zizhen Liu; Immortality, Lee C. Barrett; Incognito, Martijn Boven. (shrink)

What kind of persons could engage in political torture? Not only the morally impaired who lack empathy or compassion, or even the merely obedient, but also the righteous who struggle with conscience, and the realists who set morality aside.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

Michael Ruse's Darwin and Design: Science, Philosophy, Religion explains the history and philosophical arguments of the design metaphor of evolution. It recounts the historical uses of the metaphor from Plato to twentieth‐century American science. Ruse explores the criticisms of the design metaphor and ultimately concludes that it is a beneficial term. The chief contribution of Darwin and Design is that it offers a clear understanding and comparison of the argument from design and the argument to design.

Gadamer's book extends and codifies the main hermeneutical concepts of Bultmann, Heidegger, and their adherents, and can be considered a summa of what Robinson calls "The New Hermeneutic." By Robinson and other theologians, and by Continental literary critics, Wahrheit und Methode has been welcomed as a philosophical justification for "vital and relevant" interpretations that are unencumbered by a concern for the author's original intention. On this point "The New Hermeneutic" reveals its affinities with "The New Criticism" and the newer "Myth (...) Criticism." All three have impugned the author's prerogative to be the determiner of textual meaning. Gadamer, however, grounds his anti-intentionalism only partially in aesthetics and not at all in the collective unconscious but primarily in the radical historicism of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

In the analysis of Aquinas, instrumental causation is central to his doctrine of providence, yet their connection is not widely understood. On the one hand, early modern thinkers like Nicolas Malebranche claim that any notion of instrumental causation is unintelligible as a mode of divine operation. Alternatively, certain Thomists commit Aquinas to the doctrine of premotion, which partially resolves the problem of instrumental causation, but only at the cost of eliminating the causal freedom of creatures. In this paper I address (...) these two issues. After providing an outline of Aquinas’s position on instrumental causation, I first argue that Thomistic instrumentalism is not the target of Malebranche’s objections, for Malebranche endorses a view very much like that of Aquinas. Secondly, I discuss the doctrine of premotion and offer some reasons for thinking that Aquinas was not a premotionist. (shrink)

The distinction between cause and effect has been viewed as crucial to scientific thinking. David Hume dedicates many pages of his “Enquiry” to the argument of causality, and it appears to be of central vitality to our understanding of the world, despite the fact that he can find nothing to the notion. In Hume's prose, one senses both disappointment and heroic resignation. Some philosophers view causality—sometimes even universal causality—as a needed assumption or basic “presupposition” of science. It is sometimes argued (...) that universal causation, or at least its probability, is required for the induction's justification. (shrink)

The majority of the philosophical attention on induction has been connected with universal conventions: “All crows are black,” “All emeralds are green,” “Every creature with kidneys is a creature with a heart,” and others. It has been observed that if it can be shown how and why such conventions can be given rational justification by our restrained observations of the world, the outcome will be simpler. It is felt that it is but a small step from here to quantitative laws (...) and only a little-longer jump to general theories. After achieving an understanding of general theories, we can go back, in a mopping-up approach, to handle such irrelevant trivia as statistical conventions. (shrink)

Probabilistic connections are simple to reproduce counterfactually or hypothetically, since this involves simply adding the required statements to our evidential corpus without worrying about erasing some statements. In the serious uniform causal connections' case, the problem is complicated by the fact that some erasures will almost always have to be made, and that leads to the problems of intention and vagueness. On the other hand, uniform causal connections, considered both counterfactually and hypothetically, are exactly the connections needed to be taken (...) into account in life. Finally, however, some dispositions can be no more than hard facts. (shrink)

Induction is the inference from a sample to a population, regardless of the possible existence of exceptions. Induction is used in the practice of science and engineering based on knowledge that can be accepted as evidence. There are two bodies of knowledge: evidential corpus, a set of propositions acceptable as evidence in a certain context; and practical corpus, a set of propositions counting as “practically certain” in that context. There are five kinds of induction described: statistical, universal, nomic, theoretical, and (...) instantial. (shrink)

In order for an “ideal” to make relevance, it is not mandatory, certainly, to be able to reach it. It is enough that it is possible to approach it, and even only to a certain extent. To be able to approach the ideal arbitrarily closely is not needed, even “theoretically.” To make sense of the “improvement” we can get in approaching an ideal, the measure of how close the ideal needs to be must be determined. In the thermometer's case, the (...) measure was determined by the bias in the error distribution at different points on the scale. An essentially internal measure was given, a measure related closely to the pertinent kind of measurement. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the philosophy and logic behind the mathematical ideas of first-order logic, metalanguages, arithmetic, and geometry. It familiarizes the reader to these mathematical ideas, which will be used in succeeding chapters. The chapter also contrasts that mathematical or logical theories can utilize these mathematical ideas, while scientific theories will find them inapplicable. First-order logic involves conclusions based on premises which are given to be true with no room for imprecision or vagueness, both of which are crucial to the (...) productive use of scientific language. Metalanguage is contrasted with object language, in which scientific laws are expressed. Both arithmetic and geometry are used with idealized, abstract objects and have a limited physical application. (shrink)

One problem that has been plaguing for the long term is the problem of choosing the levels of rational corpora. Since what goes into a corpus is what has a probability higher than the index of that corpus, that index has a bearing on what is in a corpus. We have two levels to deal with, since the focus is both with the evidential corpus and with the practical corpus. What principles can be used to select these levels? A practical (...) way to approach this question is through the analysis of full belief or acceptance. Partial belief is distinguished in terms of a propensity to make, or fail to make, bets. (shrink)

The chapter begins by explaining the concepts of quantity and magnitude. It then presents the method of measurement without using magnitude. This method of direct measurement can be achieved through the observation of the transitive relation among objects. A particular set of equivalence classes is selected to serve as a unit of measurement and is assigned magnitude. The concept of measurement error and approximation is then introduced. In some cases, such as temperature, indirect measurement, or measurement in terms of a (...) different quantity, yields less error and proves more accurate and convenient than direct measurement. In general, indirect measurements of different kinds are appropriate at different regions of the scale. (shrink)

There are two main classes of interpretations of probability. The first are those that rely on a measure of frequency. The other is those that take a logical or subjective view of a unique event, independent of past or future events. The interpretation of probability which is used in the book is then defined as evidential probability, a function based on a set of known statements based on frequency or measure. The properties of probability are then enumerated and explained. Probabilities (...) can also be based on statistical inference. Statistical inferences are statistical properties with high probability based on statistical evidence. (shrink)

This chapter chronicles the complex relationship between philosophy and science throughout history. It illustrates how they have mutually influenced each other in modern times. Philosophy and science are thought to be polar opposites, but they are not as different as they seem to be. Philosophy is considered part of the humanities and not the sciences. However, it can be argued that schools of science branched off from the domain of philosophy. Scientific studies start as or are inspired by philosophical ideas. (...) Mathematics, the very paradigm of a logical and rational discipline that much of science embodies, is a lot like philosophy in that it involves ideas that have no empirical basis and uses logic. (shrink)