Distortion of Scientific Terms by Supposed Modernizing Translations: The Example ‘orbis’ (sphere)/‘orbita’ (orbit). The use of modern terminology and thinking hinders to understand historic astronomical and physical texts and often misleads the reader, because between celestial physics from Aristotle and Ptolemy to Copernic on the one side and since Kepler and Newton on the other side a fundamental change of paradigm had taken place. The former started from the assumption that planets are indirectly moved by large equally rotating etherical spheres (...) combined with each other to form every kind of unequally apparent planetary motion as a resultant, whereas the later started from Kepler's idea that every motion of a planet is directly caused by two forces moulding his (naturally unequal) ‘orbit’. ‘orbita’ was Kepler's new specific term for the way of the planet coined in late 1604; in contrast, the Latin term of the elder paradigm has been ‘orbis’ (‘sphere’), on the one hand as concentric ‘orbis totalis’ of a planet (or the fixed stars), on the other hand as non‐concentric ‘orbes particulares’ (of the eccenters and epicycles) within the space of an ‘orbis totalis’. These terms were interpreted and translated in accordance with modern dynamic (as the supposed ‘true’) thinking as if they were ‘orbits’ (German: ‘Bahn’). But you cannot bring the two paradigms into line. As a result, the texts of seemingly ‘modern’ translations become incomprehensible, absurd and wrong. The study shows this on thinking (1st) about Aristotelian physics of former times using terms and ideas of modern dynamics, and on thinking (2nd) about the former explanation of apparent motions of heavenly bodies using these dynamics and ignoring the different special Aristotelian and Ptolemaic physics of ‘orbes’ (spheres). (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Elementary Students’ Construction of Geometric Transformation Reasoning in a Dynamic Animation Environment” by Alan Maloney. Upshot: Parnorkou and Maloney’s article presents an interesting, well-structured and clearly described study of children’s reasoning about mental rotations. Specifically, Parnorkou and Maloney deploy the microworld Graphs ’n Glyphs, and use it as a “window on thinking-in-change” as they observe and interview children who use it. Reading the article raised a few questions for me about the role of (...) class='Hi'>body syntonicity in learning about rotation of geometric shapes, and I wonder where the authors feel these foundational concepts fit in with their research. (shrink)

The dynamics of rapidly rotating bodies is formulated in a rotationally invariant form in all frames rotating with constant angular velocities relative to each other. This includes the energy, angular momentum, rotational frequency, and moment of inertia. The transformation between these quantities, when expressed in different frames, is then given explicitly and expressed in terms of both the angular momentum and the rotational frequency variables. Comparison with the approximate formula for the Routhian is made, and some consequences of physical interest (...) are drawn. (shrink)

Several arguments suggest that motor planning may share embodied neural mechanisms with mental rotation (MR). However, it is not well established whether this overlap occurs regardless of the type of stimulus that is manipulated, in particular manipulable or non-manipulable objects and body parts. We here used high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the cognitive similarity between MR of objects that do not afford specific hand actions (chairs) and bodily stimuli (hands). Participants had identical response options for both types of (...) stimuli, and they gave responses orally in order to prevent possible interference with motor imagery. MR of hands and chairs generated very similar behavioral responses, time-courses and neural sources of evoked-response potentials (ERPs). ERP segmentation analysis revealed distinct time windows during which differential effects of stimulus type and angular disparity were observed. An early period (90–160 ms) differentiated only between stimulus types, and was associated with occipito-temporal activity. A later period (290–330 ms) revealed strong effects of angular disparity, associated with electrical sources in the right angular gyrus and primary motor/somatosensory cortex. These data suggest that spatial transformation processes and motor planning are recruited simultaneously, supporting the involvement of motor emulation processes in MR. (shrink)

Gianantonio Tadini is the little known protagonist in an important experiment carried out in Bergamo between 1794 and 1795. Based on the measurement of the deviation of a falling body, the experiment owes much to the one that was conducted by Giambattista Guglielmini in Bologna in 1791, which aimed at demonstrating Earth’s rotation. Tadini’s experimental work represents the most successful attempt carried out before the 19th century, and it led to the first correct formulation of deviation’s measurement. In (...) spite of this, it is not well represented in the general literature on the history of experiments intended to show diurnal Earth’s motion.1 The discovery of Tadini’s diary of experiments as well as some notes and a part of his correspondence – preserved as manuscripts in the Angelo Mai municipal library in Bergamo – allows us now to reconstruct the history of Tadini’s experiment and of his reasoning about Guglielmini’s work. In this paper, I describe the genesis and the development of Tadini’s experiment, clarify the role played by the different personalities involved and set these trials against the background of the widest history of proofs on diurnal Earth’s rotation carried out in Europe in those years. (shrink)

이 글은 유가에서 좌선하는 천도를 통해 예제에서의 좌우 방위를 천체운행 관념으로 밝히고, 조선 예학에서 논의된 천도와의 관련성을 성호와 경호의 변설을 중심으로 고찰하였다. 좌선과 우행은 천체가 운행하는 방향으로 묘사된 것인데 예학에서 발견되는 방위서술 가운데 周旋하는 의절의 원리로서 검토된다. 고대의 예제가 천인관계에서 천문 역상을 본떠 인문제도에 적용한 모형으로 선행연구에서 밝힌 바에 따라 주선하는 행례와 좌우의 상위 개념이 좌선하는 천도와의 관련성에서 볼 때 천체운행의 관념을 지닌 것으로 파악하였다. 이를 위해 소옹의 易圖說에서 그려낸 차서도와 주희의 방위도를 천도 좌선과 일월 우행의 구체적인 형상과 그 방향을밝히는 (...) 근거로서 제시하였다.BR 이러한 배경에서 예서에서의 좌우 구분과 방위로 서술된 의절은 고대 동아시아의 천체운행론의 관점으로 검토된다. 역은 태극이요, 우주론으로 논의되어온 역학이 천문 역상을 본떠 제작된 예제의 원리를 밝히는 방법론으로 매우 유용할 것이다. 이 과정에서 유가에서 말해지는 좌선하는 천도가 천도론에서 깊이 고찰된다. 고대 우주론에서 천체구조론은 한대 이후 남송대 주희에 이르기까지 천문역법을 구하는 과정에서 역가와 유가가 공유해온 천문현상이다. 이러한 천좌선과 일월우행은 개천설과 혼천설에서도 공유되지만 이를 주희는 좌선설로서 논란을 주도하였다. 최근까지도 어떤 이유에서인지 밝혀지지 않은 주희의 헷갈리는 주장은 본고가 제출한 소강절의 역도설에서 그 형상과 의미를 밝힐 수 있었다. 이는 주희가 주장한 좌선설과 배치되는 천좌선하고 일월우행하는 우선설인데 이를 주희 스스로 易學에서 실증한 셈이 된 것이다. 이러한 결과는 尙左가 역학에서 順天하는 陽의 방향으로 천도와의 관련성을 입증한 것이고 尙右는 천도와 어긋나는 逆天으로 陰의 방향 즉 神道와의 관련성에서 對比된다.BR 조선 예학에서는 천도론의 관점에서 예제를 논의한 경우는 없었을까? 조선의 예학자 가운데 성호의 ‘導柩右旋’과 경호의 尙左･尙右에 관한 변설을 중심 사례로서 검토하였다. 조선의 유자들이 예학을 천도 좌선과의 관련성에서 좌우 방위를 어떻게 적용하였고 또 인식하였는지를 살피기 위해서였다. 성호는 상례에서 널의 머리 쪽이 우선한 것을 좌선하는 천도에 대응되는 地道로서 右旋이라 하였다. 그의 제자 이병휴에 따르면 좌선은 왼쪽에서 부터 오른쪽으로 향하고, 우선은 오른쪽에서부터 왼쪽으로 향하는 형상으로 인식하였다. 그의 이 같은 견해는 역도설에서 밝힌 천도론과 천체운행론의 관점으로 본 좌우 방위 관념과 일치하는 형상이다.BR 경호는 『가례증해』에서 상좌와 상우를 모두 천도 좌선에 처한다고 인식하여 팔괘에서 그 좌선하는 천도 방향을 밝히고 일월의 출입이 동에서 시작되는 것으로서 동쪽과 왼쪽을 천도에 따른 것이라 하였다. 이러한 경호의 해석은 공영달과 이하 曆家의 천도 좌선하고 일월의 우행이기 보다는 天道와 地道로서 대응한 천도론적 관점이었다.BR 그의 천도에 따른 상좌의 당위성은 역학에서 천도를 본뜬 좌선하는 형상을 높여 상좌라고 하였고 땅에서의 형세에 따라 상우로 하였다. 따라서 예학에서의 人道는 천도를 따라 尙左를 생인의 상위로 삼고, 제례에서 신위를 모실 때에는 尙右로서 하였다. 결과적으로 조선 예학에서의 검토되는 사례는 행례에서 천도 좌선의 관점을 견지하고 천체운행론의 관념을 함의한 것으로 드러날 것이다. (shrink)

Determining how we use our body to support cognition represents an important part of understanding the embodied and embedded nature of cognition. In the present investigation, we pursue this question in the context of a common perceptual task. Specifically, we report a series of experiments investigating head tilt (i.e., external normalization) as a strategy in letter naming and reading stimuli that are upright or rotated. We demonstrate that the frequency of this natural behavior is modulated by the cost of (...) stimulus rotation on performance. In addition, we demonstrate that external normalization can benefit performance. All of the results are consistent with the notion that external normalization represents a form of cognitive offloading and that effort is an important factor in the decision to adopt an internal or external strategy. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the ultimate bound set and positively invariant set of a 3D Lorenz-like chaotic system, which is different from the well-known Lorenz system, Rössler system, Chen system, Lü system, and even Lorenz system family. Furthermore, we investigate the global exponential attractive set of this system via the Lyapunov function method. The rate of the trajectories going from the exterior of the globally exponential attractive set to the interior of the globally exponential attractive set is also obtained (...) for all the positive parameters values a,b,c. The innovation of this paper is that our approach to construct the ultimate bounded and globally exponential attractivity sets assumes that the corresponding sets depend on some artificial parameters ; that is, for the fixed parameters of the system, we have a series of sets depending on λ and m. The results contain the known result as a special case for the fixed λ and m. The efficiency of the scheme is shown numerically. The theoretical results may find wide applications in chaos control and chaos synchronization. (shrink)

We give a relativistic treatment to the dynamics of spherical bodies rotating at very high speed. It is found that most of the mass of a homogeneous spherical quark with Franklin rotation is due to the relativistic increase of the mass.

Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? Is there any link between the performance and (...) the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects . More particularly, schizophrenic patients’ reaction time varied as a function of the angular disparity of the stimuli. On the other hand, they were significantly slower and less accurate. Interestingly, patients suffering from hallucinations made significantly more errors than non-hallucinatory patients. We discussed these latter results in terms of deficit of the forward model. We emphasized the necessity to distinguish different levels of action, more or less impaired in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Much indirect evidence supports the hypothesis that transformations of mental images are at least in part guided by motor processes, even in the case of images of abstract objects rather than of body parts. For example, rotation may be guided by processes that also prime one to see results of a specific motor action. We directly test the hypothesis by means of a dual-task paradigm in which subjects perform the Cooper-Shepard mental rotation task while executing an unseen (...) motor rotation in a given direction and at a previously learned speed. Four results support the inference that mental rotation relies on motor processes. First, motor rotation that is compatible with mental rotation results in faster times and fewer errors in the imagery task than when the two rotations are incompatible. Second, the angle through which subjects rotate their mental images, and the angle through which they rotate a joystick handle are correlated, but only if the directions of the two rotations are compatible. Third, motor rotation modifies the classical inverted V-shaped mental rotation response time function, favoring the direction of the motor rotation; indeed, in some cases motor rotation even shifts the location of the minimum of this curve in the direction of the motor rotation. Fourth, the preceding effect is sensitive not only to the direction of the motor rotation, but also to the motor speed. A change in the speed of motor rotation can correspondingly slow down or speed up the mental rotation. (shrink)

Este artículo revisa el proceso histórico de la ‘Conquista del desierto’ y la existencia de campos de concentración para indígenas en Argentina a través de una lectura de hermenéutica filosófica. El objetivo del artículo es interpretar el periodo y el uso de campos como instancias que configuraron la diferenciación del pueblo mapuche como sujeto racializado en la sociedad argentina. Los resultados de la exposición muestran que la marginación del cuerpo mapuche ocurre por el registro de excepciones y que aquella es (...) disputada por sujetos mapuche. This paper reviews the historical process of the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ and the existence of concentration camps for indigenous people in Argentina. The research is conducted through philosophical hermeneutics. The objective of the paper is to read the period and the use concentration camps as instances that shaped the differentiation of the Mapuche people as a racialized subject in Argentine society. The results of the argumentation show that marginalization of the Mapuche body occurs through the registration of exceptions, which is disputed by Mapuche subjects. (shrink)

It has been known for years that it is only the round-trip speed of light that has physical significance. We show that even using this freedom, the synchronization gap, which is useful for testing predictions of general relativity, still remains.

Newton had a fivefold argument that true motion must be motion in absolute space, not relative to matter. Like Newton, Kant holds that bodies have true motions. Unlike him, though, Kant takes all motion to be relative to matter, not to space itself. Thus, he must respond to Newton’s argument above. I reconstruct here Kant’s answer in detail. I prove that Kant addresses just one part of Newton’s case, namely, his “argument from the effects” of rotation. And, to show (...) that rotation is relative to matter, Kant changes the meaning of ‘relative motion.’ However, that change puts Kant’s doctrine in deep tension with Newton’s science. Based on my construal, I correct earlier readings of Kant by John Earman and Martin Carrier. And, I argue that we need to revise Michael Friedman’s influential view of Kant. Kant’s struggle, I conclude, illustrate the difficulties that early modern relationists faced as they turned down Newtonian absolute space ; and it typifies their selective engagement with Newton’s case for it. (shrink)

Nuclear bodies contribute to non‐random organization of the human genome and nuclear function. Using a major prototypical nuclear body, the Cajal body, as an example, we suggest that these structures assemble at specific gene loci located across the genome as a result of high transcriptional activity. Subsequently, target genes are physically clustered in close proximity in Cajal body‐containing cells. However, Cajal bodies are observed in only a limited number of human cell types, including neuronal and cancer cells. (...) Ultimately, Cajal body depletion perturbs splicing kinetics by reducing target small nuclear RNA (snRNA) transcription and limiting the levels of spliceosomal snRNPs, including their modification and turnover following each round of RNA splicing. As such, Cajal bodies are capable of shaping the chromatin interaction landscape and the transcriptome by influencing spliceosome kinetics. Future studies should concentrate on characterizing the direct influence of Cajal bodies upon snRNA gene transcriptional dynamics.Also see the video abstract here. (shrink)

A gyroscope in orbit about a central rotating mass undergoes relativistic nutational oscillations in addition to the well-known precessional motions. The amplitude of the oscillation is proportional to the angular momentum of the rotating mass and its period is the Fokker period of geodetic precession. The amplitude is maximum for a polar orbit and vanishes if the orbit is equatorial. This nodding effect is due to a small divisor phenomenon involving the Fokker frequency, and its existence implies that the applicability (...) of the post-Newtonian approximation of general relativity is limited in time. The dynamical significance of the new effect for the relative motion of neighboring test masses in the field of a rotating mass as well as for the restricted three-body problem in general relativity is investigated and the possibility of its detection is briefly discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe and assess the energetic-metabolic activity of selected muscles of upper and lower extremities during Rotational Training (RT). The influence of RT on temperature changes in the biceps and triceps brachii muscles as well as the quadriceps and biceps femoris muscles of healthy university students were verified, in addition to temperature differences between the left and right side before and after RT. The study was conducted on 18 subjects. RT was conducted in accordance (...) with accepted forms of training methodology of collective fitness. An important part of RT was the performance of circular and rotational movements. Thermograms taken before and immediately after RT focused on 4 regions of selected agonists and synergists in the upper and lower body. The camera used was the infrared hand-held CEDIP Titanium 560M IR (USA), located at a distance of 10 m from the subject. After RT, median Tsk (skin temperature) decreased in almost all of the examined ROIs, except for the left and right Qf (the quadriceps femoris, rectus femoris, and sartorius muscles) as well as the left Tb (triceps brachii) in female subjects. In male subjects, left and right Tsk of Qf increased both for the left and right Tb. Left-Right ΔTsk (temperature difference) was statistically significant (p <0.05) for Of, Bf, Bb, Tb in female as well as male subjects. It was concluded that thermography is a non-invasive, safe, and low-cost method for the recording of physiological response of the skin to RT. (shrink)

Body integrity identity disorder is a very rare condition in which people experience long-standing anguish because there is a mismatch between their bodies and their internal image of how their bodies should be. Most typically, these people are deeply distressed by the presence of what they openly acknowledge as a perfectly normal leg. Some with the condition request that their limb be amputated. 1 We and others have argued that such requests should be acceded to in carefully selected patients.1–4 (...) Consistent with this view, a group at the University of Sydney is developing a programme to better understand and treat BIID and to offer amputation if appropriate. In a recent paper, Patrone argues that such amputations should be prohibited.5 He suggests that authors supporting amputation in BIID depend on analogies with more familiar conditions and then claim that the ‘the desires, choices and requests of BIID patients should be held to exactly the same standards and treated with exactly the same respect as the desires, choices and requests of any more conventional patient’.5 He believes that these analogies are invalid and that therefore the arguments for amputation are invalid.Patrone concentrates a great deal upon whether a decision to have a particular medical intervention is to be regarded as ‘rational’. Unfortunately, he makes no attempt to define what he …. (shrink)

In Metaphysics Λ.6-7 Aristotle argues that an unmoved substance causes the outermost sphere to rotate. His argument has puzzled and divided commentators from ancient Greece to the present. I offer a novel defense of Aristotle's argument by highlighting the logic of classification that Aristotle deploys. The core of Aristotle's argument is the identification of the unmoved substance on the 'table of opposites' as simple and purely actual. With this identification in place, Aristotle argues that the outermost sphere activates its capacity (...) to relocate its body by rotating because this is how it can be a simple and actual substance. But unlike traditional attempts to rehabilitate Aristotle's argument, I argue that the sphere does not rotate in order to imitate the Prime Mover. Rather, the sphere rotates because that is good for it to do, and the Prime Mover is a metaphysically necessary source of simple and actual substantial being, which the sphere acts for the sake of. (shrink)

Body Dissatisfaction The author concentrates on the preference of the values of "the cult of the body" increasingly affecting the behaviour of young people and their position in the value system relating to generally recognized values. Too much emphasis on physical beauty and outward appearance significantly determines behaviour and can lead to a reduction in values relating to the body and body shape but also to unhealthy eating disorders such as bulimia or anorexia nervosa. The focus (...) is on the pathological perception of the body, on how culture and cultural norms affect body dissatisfaction. A research questionnaire on universal values and the cult of the body (2006) was used. The research sample consisted of 508 respondents aged between 18 and 26 (292 women and 216 men). (shrink)

The paper brings into light and discusses a concentric solar model briefly described in Chapter 5 of Section III of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Khāzinī’s On experimental astronomy, a treatise embedded in the prolegomenon of his comprehensive Mu‘tabar zīj, completed about 1121 c.e. In it, the Sun is assumed to rotate on the circumference of a circle concentric with the Earth and coplanar with the ecliptic, but the motion of the vector joining the Earth and Sun is monitored by a (...) small eccentric hypocycle. The ratio between the distance of the hypocycle’s center from the Earth and the hypocycle’s radius is equal to the solar eccentricity in the eccentric model. The model is to account for the constancy of the apparent diameter of the solar disk as held by Ptolemy. The source of the model is unknown. Since the mechanism employed in it clearly resembles the pin-and-slot device, whose use in mechanical astronomical instruments has a long history from the Antikythera Mechanism to the medieval solar, lunar, and planetary equatoria and dials, we argue that the solar model can be positioned within this long-standing tradition and considered the result of the correct understanding of some Byzantine prototype and thus a typical example of the transmission of astronomical ideas via media of the material culture. (shrink)

This first extensive study of Spinoza's philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher's thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind's relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza's positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of his metaphysical system: his denial of causal or explanatory relations between the mental and the physical. In this way, (...) Della Rocca's exploration of these two problems provides a new and illuminating perspective on Spinoza's philosophy as a system. (shrink)

This publication presents manuscript of the famous Russian-Lithuanian philosopher Vasily Seseman accompanied by a preface. The manuscript "Sport and Contemporary Culture" is the text of Seseman's manuscript collection, which is located in Vilnius University. Manuscript is a preparatory text for the article "Time, Culture and Body". In "Time, Culture and Body" Sesemann develops his ideas concerning the objectifying attitude, which leads to human's alienation towards body and time. Sesemann claims that the time is perceived as a meaningful (...) entirety only when the time is contemplated from the point of view of work. Work is a purpose-attaining activity where subjective creativity is oriented towards an objective result in future. Working in pursuit of one's goals helps to avoid facing the emptiness of time, but at the same time it alienates the present. Work helps the subject to overcome his individual limitations and to become a part of the objective culture. By hiding behind the results of an objective activity people avoid direct contact with the time because it may appear as an interruption of meaningful relations and as a boredom. The tendency to objectify time is accompanied by the process of objectification of body. Previously, a primitive person could trust his body more than tools. In the modern culture body is gradually downgraded because tools, machinery and even separate institutions take over its functions. In this way the centre of culture is moved to the world of objects which is beyond a subject's control and body plays a merely auxiliary part. A person can overcome his alienation towards time and body only by being wakeful - here and now, by self-knowledge and self-control. Sesemann describes the self-control as the practical ability and mood, which he called "presence of mind". In this state of mind person is able to fing oneself, concentrate and mobilise all his strength to his utmost, maintain inner composure, calmness and balance of spirit. (shrink)

Della Rocca concentrates on two problems crucial to Spinoza 's philosophy of mind: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind's relation to the body. He contends that for Spinoza these two problems are linked and thus part of a systematic philosophy of mind.

The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how our mental states, events and processes—like beliefs, actions and thinking—are related to the physical states, events and processes in our bodies. A question of the form, ‘how is A related to B?’ does not by itself pose a philosophical problem. To pose such a problem, there has to be something about A and B which makes the relation between them seem problematic. Many features of mind and body have been (...) cited as responsible for our sense of the problem. Here I will concentrate on two: the fact that mind and body seem to interact causally, and the distinctive features of consciousness. A long tradition in philosophy has held, with René Descartes, that the mind must be a non-bodily entity: a soul or mental substance. This thesis is called ‘substance dualism’ (or ‘Cartesian dualism’) because it says that there are two kinds of substance in the world, mental and physical or material. One reason for believing this is the belief that the soul, unlike the body, is immortal. Another reason for believing it is that we have free will, and this seems to require that the mind is a non-physical thing, since all physical things are subject to the laws of nature. (shrink)

Medicine does not usually consider the human body from an aesthetic point of view. This article explores the notion of the lived body as aesthetic object in anthropological medicine, concentrating on the views of Buytendijk and Straus on human uprightness and gracefulness. It is argued that their insights constitute a counter-balance to the way the human body is predominantly approached in medicine and medical ethics. In particular, (1) the relationship between anthropological, aesthetic and ethical norms, (2) the (...) possible danger of a naturalistic fallacy, (3) the implications for the care of disabled people and (4) the intrinsic aesthetic quality of the human body are dealt with. (shrink)

Within the framework of general relativity, in some cases at least, it is a delicate and interesting question just what it means to say that an extended body is or is not "rotating". It is so for two reasons. First, one can easily think of different criteria of rotation. Though they agree if the background spacetime structure is sufficiently simple, they do not do so in general. Second, none of the criteria fully answers to our classical intuitions. Each (...) one exhibits some feature or other that violates those intuitions in a significant and interesting way. The principal goal of the paper is to make the second claim precise in the form of a modest no-go theorem. (shrink)

In his De Natura et Origine Animae, an answer to a work by Vincentius Victor, Augustine was drawn into attempting to answer some questions about what kind of reality dream-bodies, dream-worlds and dream-pains have. In this paper I concentrate on Augustine's attempts to show that none of Victor's arguments for the corporeality of the soul are any good, and that Victor's inflated claims about the extent of the soul's self-knowledge are the result of mistaking self-awareness for self-knowledge. Augustine takes the (...) position that the feelings we have in dreams and the feelings of the dead, although they are real feelings, are not always the feelings they seem to be. This position is consistent with Augustine's later works, though it departs from his understanding of these issues in his earliest works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE BODY AND THE BLOOD: SACRIFICIAL EXPULSION IN A UREVOIR LES ENFANTS Diana Culbertson Kent State University In Scene 6 ofthe screenplay ofAu Revoir Les Enfants the students are at morning Mass and Father Jean is reading the Gospel: "Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless you eat the flesh ofthe Son ofMan and drink his blood, you will have no life in you." A student with the (...) curiously ironic name of Boulanger ("baker") faints. François comments to his younger brother Julien, "There's nothing to eat... we can't have breakfast before communion." In the back of chapel sit three new students—Bonnet and two other Jewish boys disguised as Christians, protected from the Gestapo by the monks, but prohibited because of their religious identity from Eucharistie communion. Food as scarcity, as plenitude, and as life functions as the signifier ofvalue and of every victim in Louis Malle's unforgettable portrayal of the loss of innocence in the occupied France ofhis childhood. Access to food was access to life in community—both religious and political—and the exchange offood, for what could not be consumed, plunges the small school society into its death. The cause ofthe dissolution of the school society is a failed sacrifice. The farewell to childhood which the title ofthe film suggests is Julien's entry into the world ofviolence and victims, ofmimetic rivalry, ofsacrificial expulsion, and societal destruction. The angle ofperception (Julien Quentin is Malle's quasi-autobiographical alter-ego) lures viewers out their own innocence and shocks theater audiences once again with the implications of all Final Solutions. Three concentric levels identify the communities in dissolution represented in Malle's portrayal: France under the occupying military force, the school administrators and staff, and the pupils in their charge. At each level the Diana Culbertson47 mimetic conflict is at a different state ofsocietal crisis. At the highest level, the German occupation troops and their collaborators represent a moment of Violence Triumphant, a Monstrous divinity who can impose control over the group by terrorizing everyone. This persecutory violence, which has co-opted the judicial system, drives the community of French people into (at least outward) submission and passivity. When the Monster requires victims, the community must consent to offer them. The persecutor's need for victims in this film has its own demonic rationale: "... to rid France of strangers, of Jews," says Müller, the Gestapo officer in one of the final scenes. When persecutory violence is resisted, however, when someone refuses to offer the designatedvictim for expulsion, the unity ofthe submissive society dissolves. Those who will not conform may suffer the violence of those who find their private well being in an alliance with public persecution. Father Jean, director ofthe school where Malle's scenario takes place, is one ofthe instruments ofresistance. Only the other instructors and staff are aware ofhis activities in the French underground. The audience is admitted to his dangerous secret, even as it observes the contrasting immaturity of the students, especially Julien, who cannot bear to leave his mother and is still wetting his bed. When he asks his older brother, "What is a Jew?" he is given the alimentary explanation: "Someone who doesn't eat pork." In this cultural situation, the Jew is more frequently someone who doesn't eat. Quentin's half truth is only one side ofa more ominous reality. Father Jean, aware of that reality, first appears in the film to introduce Bonnet, the "new classmate" and to show the boy his dormitory bed. As the director leaves, the schoolboys display their own societal dynamics, resuming their customary internecine, frenzied battles and rivalries. They throw pillows; they mock the outsider, focusing their ridicule on his name. Later in a classroom scene, they will hiss, "Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet...."—an apt thematic detail with its allusion to wine and its liturgical translation into blood. In the morning Boulanger leads the attack against the stranger, slipping an icicle behind Bonnet's shirt collar. At recess games disintegrate into private quarrels. Their small brutal society is a microcosm of the larger world of which the schoolboys are apparently innocent but which they are grooming themselves to live in without remorse... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities:A Plea for SomaestheticsRichard Shusterman (bio)IWhat are the humanities, and how should they be cultivated? With respect to this crucial question, opinions differ as to how widely the humanities should be construed and pursued. Initially connoting the study of Greek and Roman classics, the concept now more generally covers arts and letters, history, and philosophy.1 But does it also include the (...) social sciences, which are often distinguished from the humanities and grouped as a separate academic division with greater pretensions to scientific status? And should our pursuit of humanistic study be concentrated on the traditional methods and topics of high culture that give the humanities an authoritative aura of established nobility, or should it extend to new and funkier forms of interdisciplinary research such as popular culture or race and gender studies?Despite such questions and controversy, it is clear (even from etymology) that the meaning of the humanities essentially relates to our human condition and our efforts to perfect our humanity and its expression. But what, then, does it mean to be human? I cannot pretend here to adequately answer such a complex and difficult question. I will, however, argue that because the body is an essential and valuable dimension of our humanity, it should be recognized as a crucial topic of humanistic study and experiential learning. Though the truth of this thesis should be obvious, it goes sharply against the grain of our traditional understanding of the humanities. One striking example of such antisomatic bias is the very term that German speakers use to designate the humanities, "Geisteswissenschaften," whose literal English translation would be "spiritual (or mental) sciences," as contrasted to the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) that treat physical life, [End Page 1] with which, of course, the body is clearly linked. Hence, given the pervasive physical/spiritual opposition, the body is essentially omitted or marginalized in our conception of humanistic studies.2We humanist intellectuals generally take the body for granted because we are so passionately interested in the life of the mind and the creative arts that express our human spirit. But the body is not only an essential dimension of our humanity, it is also the basic instrument of all human performance, our tool of tools, a necessity for all our perception, action, and even thought. Just as skilled builders need expert knowledge of their tools, so we need better somatic knowledge to improve our understanding and performance in the arts and human sciences and to advance our mastery in the highest art of all—that of perfecting our humanity and living better lives. We need to think more carefully through the body in order to cultivate ourselves and edify our students because true humanity is not a mere genetic given but an educational achievement in which body, mind, and culture must be thoroughly integrated. To pursue this project of somatic inquiry, I have been working on an interdisciplinary field called somaesthetics, whose disciplinary connections extend also beyond the humanities to the biological, cognitive, and health sciences, which I see as valuable allies for humanistic research.3Somaesthetics, roughly defined, concerns the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning. As an ameliorative discipline of both theory and practice, it aims to enrich not only our abstract, discursive knowledge of the body but also our lived somatic experience and performance; it seeks to enhance the meaning, understanding, efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the environments to which our movements contribute and from which they also draw their energies and significance. Somaesthetics, therefore, involves a wide range of knowledge forms and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it. Recognizing that body, mind, and culture are deeply codependent, somaesthetics comprises an interdisciplinary research program to integrate their study. Mental life relies on somatic experience and cannot be wholly separated from bodily processes, even if it cannot be wholly reduced to them. We think and feel with our bodies, especially with the body parts that constitute the brain and nervous system. Our bodies are likewise affected by mental life, as when certain thoughts bring a blush to... (shrink)

History can be understood as involving a problematic interplay between the long-term legacy of human evolution, still tempered into the human body today, and the shorter-term heritage of civilization from its beginnings to the present. Each of us lives in a tension between our indigenous bodies and our civilized selves, between the philosophy of the earth and that which I characterize as “the philosophy of escape from the earth.” The standard story of civilization is one of linear upward progress, (...) a story that I contest with an alternative philosophy of history, picturing history instead as a set of concentric circles. I have devised a new philosophy of history with a three-part approach to understanding human development, taking civilization not as a linear advance of progress, but rather as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regression in mind: history as a contraction of mind. I describe three stages in the contraction of mind: 1) animate mind as the evolved outlook of foraging life; 2) anthropocentric mind as representing the contracting transformation of consciousness produced by agriculturally-based civilization; 3) mechanico-centric mind as representing a further contraction from human-centered to a machine-centered consciousness, produced by the rise of modern civilization and the mechanical scientific worldview. Hence, this progressive contraction is marked by a turn from original practical and reverential attunement to the living earth in hunting and gathering societies, or animate mind, to a narrower focus of anthropocentric mind beginning with the development of early civilizations, where the human element became central and the wild devalued. And it moves to an even more narrow focus of mechanico-centric mind, expanding out of late medieval Europe and the development of modern science, where the machine became model of the ultimate, the objectivist filter through which the world is to be understood and made to fit. Far from controlling nature, humans have been consuming it in an unsustainable Malthusian-like trajectory whose limits are being reached in our time. (shrink)

This essay develops its idiosyncrasy by concentrating primarily on the trend of body hacking. The practitioners, self-defined as body hackers, self-made cyborgs or grinders, work in different ways to develop functional and physiological modifications through the contributions of technology. Their goal is to develop by themselves an empirically man-technique fusion. These dynamic “scientific” subcultures are producing astonishing innovations. From pocket-sized kits that sample human DNA, microchip implants that keep tabs on our internal organs, blood sugar levels or moods, (...) and even 3D printers that produce tailored hip replacements, the technical innovations of the body hacking trend are beginning to filter into mainstream use, and the repertoire increases every day. These physical transformations with intersecting techniques actively challenge long-held normative beliefs about what bodies do, what they should look like and how they should behave. They provide an alternative discourse on man’s correlation with the world and its biocenosis. Sculpting oneself has become an existential data. Medical technoscience crystallizes the effectiveness of new powers over the organism. Scientific temptation to recreate and enhance the human according to its normative principles has brought up experimental practices that have become the edge of a radical activism operating in the core of western societies, which will be the theme of this paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics by Alexander R. PrussBenedict M. Guevin O.S.B.One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics. By Alexander R. Pruss. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 465. $45.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-268-03897-7.As a professor of moral theology in general and of sexual ethics in particular, I found Alexander Pruss’s largely philosophical account of sexual ethics (...) to be refreshing. As much as I try to dissuade my students from using religious legalism to justify the rightness or wrongness of certain sexual practices, I find it almost impossible to break them of the bad habit of using such phrases as “Because the Church teaches...” or “Because the Bible says...”. Even when I counter by saying, “The Church teaches that something is good because it is good and not because the Church says it is good, and such goodness is grounded in the natural law and a sound anthropology,” such legalism still persists. And so, to read Pruss’s extensive analysis of sexual ethics using both personalist and Thomistic principles as well as what we have received from divine revelation is a much-needed tonic not only for students of theology and philosophy but for all those interested in discovering the role of human reason and biology in crafting a sexual ethic.After an introduction, the proper beginning of Pruss’s analysis is found in chapter 2. Here, the author discusses love and its forms with a particular focus on the meaning of agapē in the New Testament. Pruss argues that, philosophically speaking, we should love everyone. But love should not be understood as monolithic. There are various kinds of love: agapē, philia, and erōs. The New Testament understanding of agapē contains the other two, for it is love itself. This kind of love is a love that loves the other as the other is, for the other’s sake, and in a way that is appropriate to that person in the light of objective facts. Moreover, this kind of love is not simply a feeling or an emotion but is concentrated in an action that is an expression of one’s will.In chapter 3, Pruss takes up the issue of desire. He evaluates desire in two ways: (1) desire and libido, and (2) sexual desire, need, and pleasure. He [End Page 485] concludes that sexual desire is not a need in the same way that we desire food, drink, communication, love, and to be loved. Without these latter, human life would be seriously lacking or, in the case of food and drink, quickly cut short. Second, he observes that circumstances may not be appropriate for fulfilling one’s sexual desire. Finally, while human life would be seriously compromised by the lack of food, drink, communication, love, and the need to be loved, abstaining from the fulfillment of sexual desire even over a long period of time would not be detrimental to human well-being in the same way.Pruss does not imply by the preceding that sexuality does not matter. Chapter 4, in fact, deals with the meaningfulness of sexuality. There are two sets of rules regarding sexuality and its expression. Some rules are moral in nature, like the prohibition against rape. Other rules are customs, for example, the exchanging of rings after the exchange of marital vows. With respect to the moral rules regarding sexuality, Pruss highlights casual sex, sexual assault, gay rights, and romantic love. Apart from sexual assault and rape—both of which lack consent—casual sex, homosexual sex, and romantic love have the following in common, namely, that sex is indeed innately important to human beings and that sex aspires to be romantic in nature. While, as in the case of casual sex, romantic love does not necessarily give rise to true love, romantic love is often the prelude to a deep and unique form of love. Why this is so has to do with the meaning of sexual union.Sexual union is the topic of chapter 5, presented under the title “One Flesh, One Body.” Scripture, Pruss affirms, describes the person as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion and the Body in Medical ResearchCourtney S. Campbell (bio)AbstractReligious discussion of human organs and tissues has concentrated largely on donation for therapeutic purposes. The retrieval and use of human tissue samples in diagnostic, research, and education contexts have, by contrast, received very little direct theological attention. Initially undertaken at the behest of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, this essay seeks to explore the theological and religious questions (...) embedded in nontherapeutic use of human tissue. It finds that the “donation paradigm” typically invoked in religious discourse to justify uses of the body for therapeutic reasons is inadequate in the context of nontherapeutic research, while the “resource paradigm” implicit in scientific discourse presumes a reductionist account of the body that runs contrary to important religious values about embodiment. The essay proposes a “contribution paradigm” that provides a religious perspective within which research on human tissue can be both justified and limited.The retrieval and use of human tissue samples for diagnostic, therapeutic, research, and educational purposes represent further developments in scientific study of the human body as a source of medical information. Following the completion of its examination of the ethical and policy issues pertaining to human cloning in the spring of 1997, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) returned to the set of questions for which it had been originally constituted, including ethical issues that arise in human subjects research. One issue that proved controversial for the human genetics subcommittee of NBAC was the scientific, philosophical, and legal status of tissue and other body parts (usually surgical specimens) that had been retrieved from patients (not research subjects) who had given general consent to the use of their body materials for research and educational purposes. The subcommittee addressed questions about the adequacy of general versus specific [End Page 275] consent, the scientific merits of identifiable versus anonymous samples and claims about patient confidentiality, and the justification for patient refusals and requests that the materials be returned to the patient or discarded rather than made available for scientific research. In an effort to better understand the ramifications of research on human tissue, the subcommittee commissioned several background papers that examined these questions from ethical, legal, research, and religious perspectives. What follows is a modified version of the report on religious considerations originally presented to the genetics subcommittee of NBAC.The central question examined in this article is whether tissue banking for purposes of research presents distinctive theological issues or prompts objections from religious communities or scholars. Religious discussion of human organs and tissues has focused largely on donation for therapeutic purposes (what I describe as the “donation paradigm”); hence, there is very little direct consideration of nontherapeutic uses of such tissue. It is possible, however, to describe implications and suggest inferences by considering (1) religious attitudes to the human body and to organs, tissues, and cells removed from the body, and (2) religious discussions of modes of transfer of body parts, such as donations, offerings, sales, and abandonment. By and large, this discussion will reflect themes that emerge from the central Western religious traditions, with some attention given to Eastern and Native perspectives.The Body: Religious Holism, Scientific Reductionism, Private PropertyThe human body as an organic totality has long been the subject of theological reflection and a symbol for religious communities. However, much less attention has been devoted to the religious status of organs, tissues, cells, and DNA. The reflection of religious scholars and communities on the status of body parts has been prompted by the necessity to confront practical questions in personal and public health and in communal life, such as justifications for surgery, autopsies, organ donation, or burial. Scientific and research interest in parts of the body can sometimes conflict with religious values about bodily integrity. Indeed, E. Richard Gold cites the “disparate claims of scientific investigation and religious belief on the body” as the exemplary case of incommensurate values regarding the body. According to Gold (1996, p. 149), “The body, from a scientific viewpoint, is a source of knowledge of physical development, aging, and disease. From a religious perspective, the body is understood [End Page 276] as a sacred object, being created in the image... (shrink)

The recent studies on the relations between humanism or humanists and jurisprudence convince that Reneaissance, especially in XVIth century, when the national states began to raise, belonged to the periods of increased interest in the issue of law. Although Erasmus was not a layer, nor he introduced in any of his works a complete theory of law, he maintained close relations with many leading theoreticians of the law and jurists and sometimes spoke in the legal discussions of his age. Among (...) hist most important works concerning the matter of law were: Institutio principis Christiani, Ratio seu Methodus verae theologiae, Christiani matrimonii institutio, De interdicto esu carnium and Ecclesiastes. In the paper I’m going to concentrate on this latter work, in which Erasmus discusses the significance of preaching, preacher and widely understood Christian rhetoric. In the Ecclesiastes Erasmus touches the law subject with the special emphasis on historical character of law and relations between the divine law, the law of Christ and the law of Nature. After a short discussion about his understaning of law I will concentrate on the essential differentiation between the letter of law and the spirit of law, and I will point at proposed by Erasmus ways of introduction of law into human life. Erasmus, on the one hand, escaped a rigidity and abstraction of law and, on the other, he neutralised an aspect of the coercion of law. In his solution Erasmus appreciated the political dimension of preaching and acknowledged preacher as a more important guide of the people, than ruler. I’m going to interpret the Erasmian concept of preaching as an rhetorical mean of introduction of law in analogical way to “introduction” proposed by Plato in his Nomoi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 209-214 [Access article in PDF] Body-Subjects Martin Wyllie Keywords embodied subjectivity, dialectical relationships, body-subject A complete description of melancholic ex-perience and the experience of suffering can only be given by considering the human being as an embodied subject (body-subject) that is already and always situated in the world (body-subject-in-the-world). A full understanding of the body-subject eliminates the mutual (...) exclusivity of certain conceptual categories. There is no need to preserve the dichotomies of subject/object, inner/outer, mind and body within the field of psychopathology because body and mind and world may be reconciled through the concept of the body-subject. The concept of the body-subject provides a means of evolving a common language that could unify many descriptive levels of explanation into a single integrative descriptive framework.Each of the four excellent commentaries moves the debate forward and I attempt to do the same by engaging in some of the issues raised. Without doubt there is more to lived time than outlined within my paper. For example, the useful "implicit/explicit" distinction of temporality (Fuchs 2005) and "cognitive temporal experience" (Kupke 2005) are important for any developing description of lived time. Kupke identifies that the processes and structures in relation to lived time, intersubjective time (subject–other) and cognitive temporal experience (subject–object) as articulated, in my paper, remain ambiguous. This short reply attempts to clarify some of this ambiguity by placing the concept of lived time within a wider "body-subject-in-the-world" framework (Wyllie 2003). This "body-subject-in-the-world" framework attempts to integrate the universal structures of embodiment, lived time, lived space, and intersubjectivity into a unified description of human experience. Concentrating on some of the problems with this framework, I attempt to clarify some of the ambiguity and show how this slowly developing framework can be of benefit in describing psychopathologic phenomena.One problem in articulating any developing conceptual framework, particularly within the domain of philosophical phenomenology, is attempting to find language that is neutral and does not carry with it a large theoretical payload. This "view from nowhere" approach is, however, doomed to failure as one has to inevitably build on and appropriate meanings, concepts and terms that are already given. Broome (2005) clearly demonstrates the importance of scientific models and outlines how scientific explanatory models are necessary and complementary companions to phenomenological models of melancholia. Matthews (2005) argues that "causal relationships" and causal terms are more appropriate to a scientific understand of melancholia and that the use of reductive subject/object, cause/effect language may be inappropriate because I attempt to holistically understand the phenomena of melancholia. Nonetheless, such a holistic approach ultimately includes the language of the molecular (scientific), the subjective [End Page 209] (intentional), and the communal (intersubjective). There flows from Matthews's point the rational for attempting to evolve a common language that could unify descriptive "phenomenological" and prescriptive "scientific" levels of "explanation" into a common integrated explanatory framework. This, however, is no easy task because one has in developing an inclusive description of melancholia to liberate both the "objective" and "subjective" without losing the force of either polarity. For this to occur something in addition to causal relationships needs to be considered when attempting to describe melancholia. A small part of this "something in addition" may be supplied by considering dialectical relationships.The concept of a causal relationship, as opposed to a dialectical relationship, attempts to understand processes in an atomistic fashion and this may be a wholly inadequate way of characterizing the phenomenology of melancholia or, for that matter, human experience. For example, the objects of my immediate experience only constitute a small minority of that which I can experience in that moment, and this is because I can have the experience of absent objects, impossible objects, future objects, past objects, and ideal objects. The directedness of my experience at those moments toward these objects is not brought about because I am causally influenced by the spatial world proximity of the objects in question. It maybe argued my relation to these... (shrink)

In recent intervention campaigns sensitizing about harmful practices in eastern Africa, the beliefs and institutions of rural populations are marked out: culture is the culprit. This article concentrates on the most targeted region, Sukuma-speaking communities in Tanzania, to verify the stigmatizing impact of institutions: whether bridewealth treats women as commodities, whether children with nsebu disorder are stigmatized, and why children living with albinism are stigmatized. Complementing the situational analysis of power relations, cultural analysis approaches institutions as established practices in a (...) group and as generated from the palette of experiential frames constituting the cultural system prevailing in that group. The method’s sensitivity to intracultural diversity highlights the local capacity of applying cultural logics, ethically framing situations and creating new institutions, for instance by female healers protecting their clients against stigmatization. The method permits to conclude, for the cases studied, that institutions categorizing people prevent rather than cause the discreditable social status known as stigma. (shrink)

This article analyses the depiction of mental and physical pain in Sophoclean tragedy, showing how Sophocles uses medical imagery to explore fundamental problems in the personality and behaviour of his protagonists. It argues that the concentration of medical language at certain moments in particular plays not only makes the scenes more graphic and credible, but also articulates the causes and consequences of the characters’ predicament. Particular attention is given to Ajax’s delusions and maddening shame, Heracles’ agony and Deianeira’s mistake, and (...) Philoctetes’ intransigence and resentment. Sophocles’ sustained and detailed engagement with medical language and thought reveals him to be (no less than Aeschylus or Euripides) deeply interested in the wider intellectual and scientific issues of his time. (shrink)

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann , the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in (...) an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we will locate the points of convergence among the factors (the war on terror, sovereignty, and the media) that have produced and reconstituted the legal and ethical status of Guantánamo detainees. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how our mental states, events and processes—like beliefs, actions and thinking—are related to the physical states, events and processes in our bodies. A question of the form, ‘how is A related to B?’ does not by itself pose a philosophical problem. To pose such a problem, there has to be something about A and B which makes the relation between them seem problematic. Many features of mind and body have been (...) cited as responsible for our sense of the problem. Here I will concentrate on two: the fact that mind and body seem to interact causally, and the distinctive features of consciousness. A long tradition in philosophy has held, with René Descartes, that the mind must be a non-bodily entity: a soul or mental substance. This thesis is called ‘substance dualism’ (or ‘Cartesian dualism’) because it says that there are two kinds of substance in the world, mental and physical or material. One reason for believing this is the belief that the soul, unlike the body, is immortal. Another reason for believing it is that we have free will, and this seems to require that the mind is a non-physical thing, since all physical things are subject to the laws of nature. To say that the mind (or soul) is a mental substance is not to say that the mind is made up of some non-physical kind of stuff or material. The use of the term ‘substance’ is rather the traditional philosophical use: a substance is an entity which has properties and persists through change in its properties. A tiger, for instance, is a substance, whereas a hurricane is not. To say that there are mental substances— individual minds or souls—is to say that there are objects which are non-material or non-physical, and these objects can exist independently of physical objects, like a person’s body. These objects, if they exist, are not made of non-physical ‘stuff’: they are not made of ‘stuff’ at all.. (shrink)

In his book Elements of Mind, Tim Crane gives us a very clear and interesting introduction to the main problems in the philosophy of mind. The central theme of his book is intentionality, but he also gives an account of the mind-body problem, consciousness, and perception, and then he suggests his own solutions to these problems. In this paper I will concentrate on a part in which he discusses the mind-body problem. My main aim will be to look (...) at different physicalistic positions in relation to the mental causation problem, particularly at emergentism as Crane’s favourite position. (shrink)