Greetings, and may this letter find you at peace and in prosperity! Forgive my writing to you out of the blue. Though you and I have never met, we are not strangers. We are, in a certain sense, the closest of kin. I am one of your possible futures.

The increased popularity of the label "cultural" within science studies, especially in relation to "cultural studies, " invites consideration of how it is and can be used in historical work. A lot more seems now to be invested in the notion of "cultural history. " This article examines some recent historiography of science as a means of considering what counts as cultural history in that domain and attempts to coordinate it with the sociologically informed studies of the past ten orfifteen (...) years. The label "sociocultural" seems a more useful term by which to capture recent developments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science by Ann BlairPeter DearAnn Blair. The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 382. Cloth, $45.00.Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum (1596) is the least celebrated of all the major publications by this outstanding figure of the French renaissance. It lacks the apparent political, historiographical, and philosophical relevance of Bodin’s well-known (...) earlier works (the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566, Les six livres de la République of 1576, and De la démonomanie des sorciers of 1580, all receiving much more attention then as now). Ann Blair focuses our attention on the Theatrum, as a text whose significance for her book exists on at least three interrelated levels: there is its relation to Bodin’s views in the more famous texts; its advantage as a treatise on natural philosophy about whose author we know much more (intellectually) than those of most such works; and in connection with the last, there is above all its value as a distinguished representative of a genre of natural philosophical writings that was prominent in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.It is the third consideration that motivates Blair’s book most centrally. She declares her wish to enrich our view of the history of science with works, like the Theatrum, that were not made by subsequently regarded stars such as Galileo or Descartes; the very typicality of its genre makes the Theatrum, she argues, a valuable window on contemporary understandings of what natural knowledge was and should be about. Bodin’s enterprise possessed a religious core: natural philosophy was for him a tool to be used in shoring up broadly irenical positions (of the kind associated with the Colloquium heptaplomeres, usually attributed, as here, to Bodin). This kind of “natural theology” avant la lettre characterized a good number of different thinkers and writers on natural philosophy in this period, many of them German (besides their discussion here, Blair is considering such people, and their project of pia philosophia, more fully in her current work). It is a subject that, more than anything, stands at the heart of her study.Bodin, rather conventionally, tried to establish a close liaison between natural philosophy and religious knowledge—that is, between those things to be inferred from experience of the natural world and the central dogmas of faith. Less conventionally, he attempted to demonstrate on occasion truths that were far from orthodox. Regardless of whether Bodin was “really” a Catholic or a Protestant (and Blair observes the great interest in the Theatrum shown by German Calvinists in the first few decades after its original publication), his general religious stance was one of accommodation. Thus good philosophizing could demonstrate (in the weak, rhetorical sense of that term) such doctrines as the existence and providence of God; contentious issues, such as the correct interpretation of the Eucharist, were left aside. Nonetheless, Bodin also argued, at such length and with such vigor as to have the propositions condemned by the Catholic church, that human souls and angels (as well as, more usually, demons) were corporeal beings. The importance to Bodin of this position stemmed from its sociopolitical implications: in particular, if human souls were incorporeal, it became unclear how rewards and punishments—necessary sanctions for restoring the social order threatened by the Wars of Religion—could be meted out after death. Curiously, such a view seems to imply that pleasure and pain are inextricably connected to bodies alone. [End Page 363]Among the historiographical strands informing Blair’s approach is recent literature on the “history of the book,” best known through the work of Roger Chartier. Accordingly, Blair discusses the vicissitudes of production of Bodin’s book in its various editions and emissions, and carefully considers, along with the likely reading practices by the aid of which Bodin came to compose it, the various uses to which its first readers put it. Her major interpretive trope is that of the commonplace book. While acknowledging the lack of direct material evidence for Bodin’s use of such a technique as his chief means of... (shrink)

This essay provides a literary history of the restitution narrative in colonial New England; using Cotton Mather's The Angel of Bethesda, I argue that Puritan medical texts employ theological and medical epistemologies to enable patient agency. In these texts, individuals must be involved in reforming the sinful behaviors that they believed caused their conditions, and must also engage in a form of public health by sharing their stories so that others may avoid future sins—and therefore illnesses. Ultimately, recognizing how restitution (...) has been historically defined allows for alternate understandings of recovery that place patients at the center. (shrink)

The vertebrate spleen has important functions in immunity and haematopoiesis, many of which have been well studied. In contrast, we know much less about the mechanisms governing its early embryonic development. However, as a result of work over the past decade‐mostly using knockout mice–‐significant progress has been made in unravelling the genetic processes governing the spleen's early development. Key genetic regulators, such as Tlx1 and Pbx1, have been identified, and we know some of the early transcriptional hierarchies that control the (...) early patterning and proliferation of the splenic primordium. In mouse and humans, asplenia can arise as a result of laterality defects, or the spleen can be absent with no other discernible abnormalities. Surprisingly, given the spleen's diverse functions, asplenic individuals suffer no major haematopoietic or immune defects apart from a susceptibility to infection with encapsulated bacteria. Recent evidence has shed light on a previously unknown role of the spleen in the development and maintenance of specific B cell populations that are involved in the initial response to infection caused by encapsulated bacteria. The lack of these populations in asplenic mice and humans may go some way to explaining this susceptibility. BioEssays 29: 166–177, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 129 Miriam Kienle Dear Data: Feminist Information Design’s Resistance to Self-Quantification Every Sunday for one year, information designers Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec sent each other a hand-drawn postcard that featured a data visualization of their week as it pertained to a single aspect of their daily lives: doors opened, clocks checks, sounds heard, smells perceived, and (...) so on (figs. 1–4). With this series of postcards exchanged between Brooklyn and London, Lupi and Posavec gained intimate knowledge of one another through their small/slow data, and at the same time, they produced a critical examination of the capture, interpretation, and visualization of their daily data from a uniquely feminist perspective. Although the field of information design prizes clear, efficient, and seamless presentations of quantified activity, Lupi and Posavec’s Dear Data (2015) is comprised of visualizations that underscore complexity over clarity, present questions rather simply display information, and expose the instability of data itself.1 Against the quantification of embodied experience into seemingly objective and all-encompassing datasets, Dear Data instead looks at data from a feminist perspective, as tied to concrete bodies, localities, and temporalities and visualized in a manner 1. The approach to infographics that prioritizes efficiency, accuracy, and elegance, and thus suppresses the constructed and interpretative nature of both data and its visualization, is perhaps most attributed to Edward Tufte. For Tufte’s aims and methods, see Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001). 130 Miriam Kienle that is incomplete, contingent, and constructed.2 This paper will analyze Lupi and Posavec’s designs as providing a model for a feminist approach to data visualization—a model imperative in an age in which the quantitative information (much like a binary understanding of gender) is too often treated as a self-evident fact rather than what feminist philosopher Donna Haraway famously called “situated knowledges.”3 Recently acquired by MoMA’s architecture and design collection, the Dear Data project not only stands out in the collection as the product of two female designers working in the male-dominated fields of technology and design, but also as a project that stresses feminist knowledge production by underscoring how data voids shape datasets and debunking the myth that the world is data that can be captured and visualized with neutral, distanced, and all-encompassing technologies of vision. As Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein describe in Data Feminism, data visualization from a feminist perspective understands that “bar charts might seem neutral and objective, but are in fact the result of very human and necessarily imperfect design processes.”4 Such a perspective is evident across Dear Data. Take, for example, “Week 42: A week of laughter” (fig. 5). On the key in Posavec’s visualization, she notes: “I tried to capture my laughs which was really hard + got in the way of the enjoying life, hence the data voids. / For a card about laughter I am sad about how this card turned out.”5 This willingness to show the gaps in her data, the complexities of her process, and the imperfections of her visualizations contrasts with the seamless and straightforward displays of information 2. For a feminist approach to data visualization, see Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), ebook; Catherine D’Ignazio, “What Would Feminist Data Visualization Look Like?” Center for Civic Media. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (blog), December 20, 2015, https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization; and Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 3. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 4. D’Ignazio and Klein, introduction to their Data Feminism. 5. Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, Dear Data (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), 231. Miriam Kienle 131 or what infographic guru Edward Tufte describes as “Designs so good that they are invisible.”6 Counter to the invisible and seemingly objective visualizations of our personal data to which we have become accustomed (on calorie counters, credit card statements, etc... (shrink)

What can be said about me is simply that I continue my studies without respite and instruct others without growing weary.We can read the list of Henry Rosemont's accomplishments—the books and papers he wrote, edited, and translated, and his classes and workshops, conference papers, and seminars. The 2008 collection of essays in his honor, Polishing the Chinese Mirror, edited by Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn,1 provides almost two dozen testimonies to the influence and reach of his work. In her introduction, (...) Marthe Chandler emphasizes as well Henry's political activism, quoting the ideal he expressed in 1991, in A Chinese Mirror, of a dream "that can be shared by all peoples, holding their humanity in... (shrink)

If we presume an organizational ontology of complex, dynamic change, then what role remains for strategic intent? If managerial action is said to consist of adaptive responsiveness, then what are the foundations of value on the basis of which strategic decisions can be made? In this essay, we respond to these questions and extend the existing strategy process literature by turning to the Aristotelian concept of prudence, or practical wisdom. According to Aristotle, practical wisdom involves the virtuous capacity to make (...) decisions and take actions that promote the "good life" for the "polis". We explore contemporary interpretations of this concept in literature streams adjacent to strategy and determine that practical wisdom can be developed by engaging in interpretative dialogue and aesthetically-rich experience. With these elements in view, we re-frame strategy processes as occasions to develop the human capacity for practical wisdom. (shrink)

One of Octavia Butler’s common sites of exploration concerns the impact of parenting on her main characters. She appeared to locate reproduction and child-rearing as parts of human life with great potentials for transformed futures. From a perspective of intergenerational survival, that hope appears perfectly reasonable. In this letter to Butler, I put the goal of intergenerational survival into question as an existential mandate by querying its relationship to gestative capture. Gestative capture here refers to the ready capacity to (...) reduce an existent to immanence via their abilities to gestate ‘human’ or ‘human-like’ progeny. The conversation this letter stages with Butler and her work, which is only possible because of how clearly Butler understood gestative capture and how much she built it into her stories, asks the questions: What is ‘transcendence’ for Black women who can bear children? How ought we to imagine intergenerational survival? And when, if ever, should we put down ‘survival at all costs’ commitments? (shrink)

I argue that the opening line of the _Phaedrus_ proleptically encapsulates the major themes of the dialogue and that paying attention to the opening line enables us to strengthen the identification of psychagogy as the key unifying thread of the whole dialogue. In particular, I argue that the opening line foreshadows the quarrel between Lysias and Socrates over the practical guidance of Phaedrus’ soul; the prominence of friendship in the philosophical form of life; the pertinence of Socrates’ one-on-one, custom-built speeches, (...) vis-à-vis the later conceptualization of rhetoric; the definition of the soul as a source of never-ending movement; as well as the origin (_arché_) and destiny (_télos_) of human souls, following the lines of the Palinode. (shrink)

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/ (...) class='Hi'>human dialectic. I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear and Symanski's comments on ‘animal rights’, followed in turn by discussions of moral value and value paradigms. I then introduce a value paradigm termed geocentrism as a geographical account of our moral relations to animals. Finally, I discuss the wider significance of this debate for geographical ethics, moral philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

The main purpose of these introductory remarks is to give the reader a sense of Philip Rossi’s philosophical project and its importance. I will then advance an interpretation of what motivates Kant’s commitment to community, and, on its basis, object to Rossi’s views on radical evil –a point which affects how one should conceive the moral vocation of humanity and the role that politics and religion play within it. My reconstruction concludes with a sketch of how the five contributions to (...) this Symposium fit together and deepen our understanding of Rossi’s overall project. (shrink)

We can make a difference in shaping the future by ensuring that computers "serve human needs." By making explicit the enduring values that we hold dear we can guide computer system designers and developers for the next decade, century, and thereafter. After setting our high-level goals we can pursue the components and seek the process for fulfilling them. High-level goals might include peace, excellent health care, adequate nutrition, accessible education, communication, freedom of expression, support for creative exploration, safety, (...) and socially constructive entertainment. Computer technology can help attain these high-level goals if we clearly state measurable objectives, obtain participation of professionals, and design effective human-computer interfaces. Design considerations include adequate attention to individual differences among users, support of social and organizational structures, design for reliability and safety, provision of access by the elderly, handicapped, or illiterate, and appropriate user controlled adaptation. With suitable theories and empirical research we can achieve ease of learning, rapid performance, low error rates, and good retention over time, while preserving high subjective satisfaction. To raise the consciousness of designers and achieve these goals, we must generate an international debate, stimulate discussions within organizations, and interact with other intellectual communities. This paper calls for a focus on the "you" and "I" in developing improved user interface research and systems, offers a Declaration of Responsibility, and proposes a Social Impact Statement for major computing projects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS JOHN F. CROSBY, III Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio I PROPOSE TO explore the idea that persons do not exist as replaceable specimens of or as mere instances of an ideal or type, but rather exist in some sense for their own sakes, each existing as incommunicably his or her own.1 I undertake this study in the conviction that the incommunicability of (...) persons is profoundly characteristic for them precisely as persons, and has a major role to play in any philosophy of the person. And there is an entirely different reason which attracts me to this subject. I think that most of what I have to say here can find acceptance across a broad spectrum of philosophical positions. At a time when thinkers are increasingly suspicious of universally valid truth about man, when many of them think that a vision of man is proper only to some tradition and valid only within that tradition and not beyond it, one can offer a salutary challenge to one's contemporaries by showing a centrally important truth about persons which, as I say, can be accepted by philosophers coming from the most various points of view. Suppose that you were to minimalize the death of someone by saying that at least the human species did not die with him or her, as if the immortality of the species more than compensated for the mortality of this individual : everyone understands that you would thereby radically depersonalize the deceased. Or suppose that you were grieving over the death of someone dear to you, and a friend tried to comfort you with the thought that the 1 My thanks to Josef Seifert, William Frank, Damian Fedoryka, and Katryna Fedoryka for their comments on earlier drafts of this study. The text of this article forms Chapter Two of my book, Essay on Personal Selfhood, which is close to completion. 403 404 JOHN F. CROSBY, III particular excellences of the deceased, which awakened your love, also exist in other human beings who are still living, as if you could continue to love in them what you had loved in the deceased. Again, everyone understands that if you treat people having excellences as if they were replaceable specimens of those excellences, then you lose your grip on them as persons. But why is this? Why is personhood driven out of human beings as soon as their species-membership, or their particular excellences, are thought to predominate in them? What is that incommunicability of each person which is obscured as soon as persons are thought to be only specimens? One commonly thinks that this aspect of personal selfhood has been recognized only in modern thought; in fact it was recognized already by St. Thomas Aquinas. Creatura autem rationalis divinae providentiae substat sicut secundum se gubernata et provisa, non solum propter speciem, ut aliae corruptibiles creaturae : quia individuum quod gubernatur solum propter speciem, non gubernatur propter seipsum; creatura autem rationalis propter seipsam gubernatur, ut ex dictis manifestum est. Sic igitur solae rationales creaturae directionem a Deo ad suos actus accipiunt non solum propter speciem, sed secundum individuum.2 Notice that Aquinas teaches here the metaphysical ultimacy of personal incommunicability; it exists even before God in the sense 2 " Now, a rational creature exists under divine providence as a being governed and provided for in himself, and not simply for the sake of his species, as is the case with other corruptible creatures. For the individual that is governed only for the sake of the species is not governed for its own sake, but the rational creature is governed for his own sake, as is clear from what we have said (ch. 112). And so, only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual." Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113 (Bourke translation). By the way, Chapters 111-114 of Book III seem to me to constitute the most " personalist " passage' in the entire corpus of St. Thomas. The modern reader sees to his amazement that St. Thomas here has already made his own the Kantian idea that each person in a sense exists for his... (shrink)

This paper explores the question: what happens to the ontology of the human individual if we take seriously the degree to which all life on this planet, including human life, is threaded through with relationships in which one creature sinks its ‘teeth’ into another and hangs on for dear life, deriving vital sustenance from that second creature, but sometimes imperiling the life of it as well? Or, to put the matter less colorfully, how ought we reconceptualize the (...) human individual in light of research into the complex relationships between humans and our resident colonies—relationships that run the gamut from mutualistic to parasitic? The relational conception of the human individual that emerges from my exploration is distinguished by two characteristics: its prioritizing of eating relationships, and its insistence on the role played by relationships that are harmful or destructive to the individual. (shrink)

Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870–1910, and Between Mind and Nature, both published in 2013, illustrate a claim dear to Roger Smith: namely, that history—including history of the human sciences—is central to the human sciences. Free Will charts a wide range of conceptions of the will, power, agency, activity, the self, and character, as well as causality, necessity, determinism, and materialism. Victorian physicians, physiologists, scientific and philosophical psychologists, and philosophers, as well as (though (...) that is not the distinctive focus of the book) novelists, politicians, and ordinary men and women combined those ideas in complex ways, at times merging together questions and concepts that we, instead, tend to separate (e.g., the question of the freedom of the will and the question of its efficacy). As Smith reminds us, the will attained unprecedented salience in a culture that made it into the “base of character” and, largely unable to theorize social agency, made character into “the pivot of personal relations and politics” (Free Will, pp. 8, 10). After analyzing arguments about automatism and free will (Ch. 2), Smith turns to intellectual debates on the nature of volition, mental activity, and causality. He highlights the links between those debates, arguments concerning “the form of knowledge found in the natural sciences,” and debates concerning the identity of psychology and history as sciences. The central chapters are largely organized on the basis of the actors’ distinction between “empiricists” (e.g., J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Shadworth Hodgson) and “idealists” (e.g., Francis Bradley, James Ward, and, for his theory of knowledge, G. F. Stout). In general, empiricists tended to deny the commonsense perception of the will as an actual agent (a power), endowed with substantive reality and freedom. They also tended to allow only Humean causes and to deny the existence of “efficient causes” (that is, in Thomas Reid’s terminology, causes understood as real agents; ibid., p. 83). Idealists, instead, usually rejected Hume’s constant conjunction account of causality and inclined to view the “individual will” as “the agent of spirit in the world” (ibid., p. 66). However, Smith persuasively shows that the divides between the two camps were far more fluid than is usually thought, allowing for many exceptions and surprising convergences between self-avowed idealists and empiricists. (shrink)

History indicates that science is primarily not a theoretical but a practical enterprise. It represents the symbiosis of two human activities, namely, on the one hand, natural philosophy, which seeks to make sense of the world, and, on the other hand, instrumental thinking, which seeks to control the world.

Shortly after his accidental transformation into an ass, Lucius attempts to return to his human form by grabbing some roses decorating a statue of the patron goddess of the quadrupeds, Epona. But hisservulusfeels outraged at the sacrilegious act. Jumping to his feet in a temper and acting as a faithful defender of the sacred place, he addresses his former human owner as a new ‘Catiline’ (Apul.Met.3.27):Quod me pessima scilicet sorte conantem servulus meus, cui semper equi cura mandata fuerat, (...) repente conspiciens indignatus exurgit et: ‘quo usque tandem’ inquit ‘cantherium patiemur istum paulo ante cibariis iumentorum, nunc etiam simulacris deorum infestum? Quin iam ego istum sacrilegum debilem claudumque reddam.’My attempt was frustrated by what seemed to be the worst of luck: my own dear servant, who always had the task of looking after my horse, suddenly saw what was going on, and jumped up in a rage. ‘For how long’, he cried, ‘are we to endure this clapped-out beast? A minute ago his target was the animals' rations, and now he is attacking even the statues of deities! See if I don't maim and lame this sacrilegious brute!’A self-evident instance of parody, the servant's words ironically reformulate one of the most familiar texts of Republican oratory, the famous opening of Cicero's first invective against Catiline, delivered before the assembled senate in the Temple of Jupiter Stator on 8 November 63b.c.: the substitution of a low and familiar word such ascantheriumforCatilinamunderpins the comic undertone of the entire passage, imbued with further reminiscences of Cicero. Scholars debate whether the servant's verbal attack against Lucius is a parodic adaptation of Cicero's opening invective or rather a spoof on Catiline's paradoxical reading of Cicero's phrase in Sallust (Sall.Cat. 20.9). It is safer to assume a case of double imitation, not unusual in Apuleius' work. (shrink)

I should first of all like to greet His Excellency Msgr Josip Bozanic, Archbishop of Zagreb, His Excellency Msgr Giulio Einaudi, Apostolic Nuncio in Croatia, Their Lordships the Bishops, the authorities both civil and academic, the teaching and non-teaching staff, the students, my fellow Jesuits, and all the colleagues and friends present at this solemn opening of the new Chair in the Faculty of Philosophy and of Theological Study of the Society of Jesus at Zagreb. I thank heartily all those (...) who have in any way helped to bring this project to completion. I hope that it will enable us to render a valuable service to the Church in Croatia and to the culture of the Croatian people, a service that the Society of Jesus has held dear from its very beginning, striving to contribute, through its intellectual endeavours, to the understanding of the work of creation. (shrink)

I should first of all like to greet His Excellency Msgr Josip Bozanic, Archbishop of Zagreb, His Excellency Msgr Giulio Einaudi, Apostolic Nuncio in Croatia, Their Lordships the Bishops, the authorities both civil and academic, the teaching and non-teaching staff, the students, my fellow Jesuits, and all the colleagues and friends present at this solemn opening of the new Chair in the Faculty of Philosophy and of Theological Study of the Society of Jesus at Zagreb. I thank heartily all those (...) who have in any way helped to bring this project to completion. I hope that it will enable us to render a valuable service to the Church in Croatia and to the culture of the Croatian people, a service that the Society of Jesus has held dear from its very beginning, striving to contribute, through its intellectual endeavours, to the understanding of the work of creation. (shrink)

It might be appropriate to begin my commentary by disclosing the fact that Brad Lewis and I are good friends. “Oh, no,” you might think, “this will be one of those cozy, mutual back-patting, insider sessions that so often take place in the American Philosophical Association group meetings.” But never fear. For one thing, I’m no insider to the intellectual circles represented in Dr. Lewis’ bibliog- raphy. Indeed, I’ve read only two of the 32 works listed there. (Depending on how (...) you look at it, that may make me either completely unqualified to comment on this paper or exceptionally well-qualified for reasons of critical distance.) Also, friendship and constructive criticism are entirely compatible in my book. And, to paraphrase a philosopher of some importance, “Brad is dear, but the truth is dearer.” I will begin my commentary by identifying some of Brad’s theses that I find interesting, important, and well-supported. The second part of my commentary will elaborate my major concerns about the paper. This part will be longer, not because my overall reaction is more critical than favorable, but because exploring different viewpoints generally takes more space and time than noting points of agreement. In my conclusion, I will suggest that many of the paper’s insights are likely to sail better if some of the baggage from postmodernism and cultural studies is thrown overboard. (shrink)

Sartre was strongly attracted by what he had heard about German phenomenology. Raymond Aron was spending a year at the French Institute in Berlin and studying Husserl simultaneously with preparing a historical thesis. When he came to Paris he spoke of Husserl to Sartre. We spent an evening together at the Bec de Gaz in the Rue Montparnasse. We ordered the speciality of the house, apricot cocktails; Aron said, pointing to his glass: "You see, my dear fellow, if you (...) are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years-to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, p. 112). (shrink)

Dear Mother Nature: Sorry to disturb you, but we humans – your offspring – come to you with some things to say. (Perhaps you could pass this on to Father, since we never seem to see him around.).

Dear readers, Welcome to the 25th Volume 3rd Issue - Basic Islamic Sciences Special Issue- of Cumhuriyet Theology Journal. We are excited and happy to present you many current researches in this issue. We would like to express that we make all our efforts with a large team to carry the valuable works entrusted to us to the international arena. In our special issue we allocated to articles with the theme of Basic Islamic Sciences, 26 articles have been presented (...) to the attention of our readers. We sincerely thank the contributors for their submission, the editorial and review board, and particularly to the assistant editors, Dr. Mehmet Çetin, Dr. Ayşe Mine Akar, Dr. Necati İşler, Res. Asst. Maruf Çakır, Res. Asst. Esma Güneş, Res. Asst. Bayram Ünce, Res. Asst. Sena Kaplan, Res. Asst. Gülistan Kızıleniş, Res. Asst. Hamit Demir, Res. Asst. Merve Yetim, Res. Asst. Rukiye Göğen, Res. Asst. Ömer Faruk Özbek, Res. Asst. Salime Bera Kemikli, Res. Asst. Naim Yaman, Res. Asst. Sema Tombul, Res. Asst. Nurgül Akdoğan, Res. Asst. İlknur Bahadır, Res. Asst. Adil Koyuncu, Res. Asst. Yakup Esenboğa, Res. Asst. Abdurrahman Poyraz and the editors of the language review-process Prof. Dr. Ömer Faruk Yavuz (Arabic), Dr. Miyase Yavuz Altıntaş, Assoc. Prof. Zuhal Ağılkaya Şahin, Dr. Metin Güven, Dr. Kenan Tekin, Dr. Hakime Reyyan Yaşar, Dr. Meryem Berrin Bulut, Dr. Elif Hilal Karaman (English), Dr. Fatümetül Zehra Güldaş (English) and and statistics editor Assoc. Prof. Murat Akyıldız. For the next issue, which will be published on June 15, 2022 we remind acceptance dates from January 1 to February 28. We wish you convenience in your studies. Our journal now has been indexed by various international indexes: TURKISH NATIONAL DATABASE Social Sciences and Humanities Database (Accepted: 13/11/2015) The European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (Accepted: 25/03/2016) ATLA RDB©: ATLA Religion Database© (Indexing and Abstracting Start: 20/05/2016) BROWZINE Academic Journal Collections (Accepted: 07/07/2016) J-GATE: E-Journal Gateway (Accepted: 07/07/2016) ROAD: Directory Of Open Access Scholarly Resources (Accepted: 24/08/2016) DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals (Accepted: 02/09/2016) MLA International Bibliography (Indexing and Abstracting Start: 14/06/2016) CEEOL: Central and Eastern European Online Library (Accepted: 06/10/2016) EBSCO Humanities International Index (Indexing and Abstracting Start: 07/01/2016) EBSCO Humanities Source Ultimate Database (Indexing and Abstracting Start: 07/01/2016) PHILPAPERS: Bibliography of Philosophy (Accepted: 01/01/2016) ROOT INDEXING: Journal Abstracting and Indexing (Accepted: 12/02/2017) ESCI: Emerging Sources Citation Index (Indexing and Abstracting Start: 01/01/2016) ProQuest Central (Accepted: 15/01/2017, 21/1) ProQuest Turkey Database (Accepted: 15/01/2017, 21/1) mIndex Islamicus (Indexing and Abstracting Start: 13/12/2017) Scopus (S.Date: 01/01/2016; Accepted: 23/01/2018). (shrink)

Human Rights have in the past been defined legalistically, a practice that tends to restrict their full import, and renders them inaccessible to those who need them. In this essay, I attempt to operationalize human rights without necessarily tying such rights to the legal meaning often attached to them. Definitions of `dignity,' 'access to resources,' `equality,' and `entitlement' are worked out in relation to the local context while simultaneously drawing on the aspirational model of Human Rights that (...) I have developed in this slum area within the city of Salé in Morocco. My research is guided by not only this aspirational concept of Human Rights, but also by Islam as an open and evolving entity and a fan of meanings that structures people's lives. The second component of this project is an examination of the sum of religious beliefs and practices that inform and structure the life of individuals in this slum. I try to establish what Islam is in its life-world dimension, particularly for the slum inhabitants, as a way of understanding and explaining their living conditions. The objective is to locate and emphasize the possible links and compatibilities between Islam and Human Rights in keeping with An-Na'im's postulations. This work then aligns itself with the line of inquiry which probes into the particularity and the preparedness of a context to adopt and/or translate Human Rights in a language that is dear and clear to its members. (shrink)

Human beings have a preference to hold some people closer and dearer than the rest of the human species. Furthermore, we have a tendency to spend more time with these close others, to share with them our activities, interests, the narratives of who we are, as well as our life energy and other resources. The reason for this is that, as Frank Jackson puts it, “[o]ur lives are given shape, meaning and value by what we hold dear, (...) by those persons and life projects to which we are especially committed.” Samuel Scheffler adds that because we value them, personal projects and close relationships give us reasons for action. Therefore, close relationships and personal projects are what makes life worth living and what makes our actions worth performing. If a life worth living is an examined life, and close relationships constitute an important part of what makes life worth living, it is worthwhile to examine the topic of interpersonal closeness. Guided by this reasoning, a group of academics have come together to produce this volume of Etyka—a volume dedicated to the ethics of close relationships. (shrink)

Dear Readers,Welcome to this issue of our beloved Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics! In this sweltering heat we are all seeking for some cool and comfort. We bring this issue of BJB on different ethical practices and bring up related questions. Are we respecting the rights of every human being when we are either doing research or practicing health service provision? What are the minimum norms and standards to be maintained or are we circumventing those? The issue looks into (...) different issues and provides us with indepth information, queries, fears and reservations.In the article on Knowledge, attitude and practice of medical ethics among medical intern students in a Medical College in Kathmandu, Ramesh P Aacharyaand Yagya L Shakya, report on a Knowledge Attitude and Practice survey of 46 medical undergraduate interns of Maharajgunj Medical Campus. The result of the survey is quite interesting. ‘Doctors know the best irrespective of patients’ opinion was agreed upon by 35 %, ‘Confidentiality cannot be kept in modern era and should be abandoned’ was strongly disagreed by 34.8% and disagreed by 60.9%. The Authors hope that the findings will assist the faculties to strengthen the teaching of medical ethics and guiding the interns for ethical professional conduct. In the article titled Organizational Justice and Employee’s Service Behavior in the Healthcare Organizations in Bangladesh is an agenda for Research, Md. Nuruzzaman and Md. Humayun Kabir Talukder present a conceptual framework and a set of hypotheses regarding the relationships among distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, employee’s citizenship behaviour, role prescribed behaviour and counterproductive behavior in the healthcare organizations in Bangladesh. The authors state that the purpose is to assist the policy makers and service providers in identifying desirable and undesirable HRM practices in order to maintain optimum level of employee commitment for ensuring quality and efficient service delivery to the communities. Though the article is theoretical it may be useful for the policy makers and service providers. If an operational research could be carried out to test the hypothesis the practical utility of the concept could be tested in Bangladesh.Zoheb Rafique in the article Ethical Justification of Conducting Research Trials in Lower and Middle Income Countries Including Pakistan: The Responsibilities of Research Enterprises explores the ethical aspects of research sponsored by commercial agencies. He looks into the factors that influence selection of a study site for a sponsored trial particularly in traditional countries like Pakistan where cultural values add to the problem in assuring that research is conducted in an ethical manner. In this paper, the Author discusses the responsibilities of researchers and funders in low and middle income countries like Pakistan and the ethical justifications of doing research trials in developing countries. He concludes that research participants should be fully informed about the research trial and their participation and it is their right to know all risks and benefits so that they have the option of rejecting participation.The article on Ethical aspects of Dhaka University Tele-medicine System by Ahmed Raihan Abir provides and analysis of the tele- medicine system in Dhaka University. The Author is a member of an extended group at Dhaka University (DU) which has been developing telemedicine equipment and data acquisition software to promote telemedicine practice in Bangladesh. Recently the Telemedicine group of DU and a local NGO named SAMAMA with support from Service innovation fund (SIF) of the Prime Minister Office (PMO) of Bangladesh took the initiative to establish eight rural telemedicine centers and one expert center for the field trial of telemedicine in Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to examine the ethical challenges of such health care system and the effort to overcome these problems before starting the field trial. The author looks into the details of Data confidentiality and security, Responsibilities of Doctor and Rural Technician, Quality of service and Implications of telemedicine in Bangladesh. He concludes that DU telemedicine project will essentially bring the services of qualified medical experts to the doorsteps of the common people throughout the country, even in the remote rural areas. Although a telemedicine cannot match a face to face consultation, DU tele-medicine system is much better than no consultation at all.Sifat Rahman in the article on Ethical Issues of Fair Subject Selection in Research provides an overview of the criterion for maintaining ethical standards for conducting research. The Author reviews the three fundamental conditions to be met for adhering to strict ethical standards which are: Respect for Persons by protecting the autonomy of people, treating them with courtesy and respect and obtaining informed consent.; Beneficence which incorporates the philosophy of "Do no harm" while maximizing benefits for the research project and minimizing risks to the research subjects; and Justice by ensuring that reasonable, non-exploitative, and well-considered procedures are administered fairly. Finally the Author concludes that Researchers must be truthful and conduct no deception.Dear Readers, as you can see from the above ethics and maintaining the values in research and services are of utmost importance in the improvement of the quality of life. Through our queries, questions and sense of respect for every living being can our endeavors to ensure ethics in all spheres of development be successful.Dear Readers, please keep on sending your articles, notes or thoughts to us. Your participation will make a difference in the quality of our lives.Best regardsTahera AhmedEditor. (shrink)

Dear Colleague: Your letter shook me so profoundly that I was unable to answer it as soon as I should have. I am continuously concerned with it in my thoughts. Judge for yourself whether I have not inflicted more pain on myself than on you, and whether I may not ethically regard this guilt towards you and blame towards myself as stemming from the best conscience, something I have had to accept, and still must accept, as my fate. Clarifing (...) the matter requires that I lay out a part of my life history. I had quickly realized that the project for Parts II and III of my Ideas was inadequate, and in an effort (beginning in the autumn of l9l2) to improve them and to shape in a more concrete and differentiated fashion the horizon of the problems they disclosed, I got involved in a new, quite far-ranging investigations. (These included the phenomenology of the person and personalities of a higher order, culture, the human environment in general; the transcendental phenomenology of “empathy” and the theory of transcendental intersubjectivity, the “transcendental aesthetic” as the phenomenology of the world purely as the world of experience, time and individuation, the phenomenology of association as the theory of the constitutive achievements of passivity, the phenomenology of the logos, the phenomenological problematic of “metaphysics,” etc.) These investigations stretched on all through the workfilled Freiburg years, and the manuscripts grew to an almost unmanageable extent. As the manuscripts grew so too did the ever greater the apprehension about whether, in my old age, I would be able to bring to completion what had been entrusted to me. This impassioned work led to repeated setbacks and repeated states of depression. In the end what I was left with was an allpervasive basic mood of depression, a dangerous collapse of confidence in myself. It was in this period that Heidegger began to mature -— for a number of.. (shrink)

Dear Editor,The April 2014 issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics [1] presented eight essays regarding the use of nonhuman animals in biomedical research. While I appreciate the essays concerning contemporary research—which were well written and offered new thinking from the fields of ethics and ethology—I believe the journal, via the topics and the authors chosen, failed to communicate the most important fact regarding the current science pertinent to the use of nonhuman animals in research.The foundational reason for using chimpanzees (...) and other animals in research is their predictive value for human response to drugs and disease. This was alluded to by several of the authors when they discussed the necessity of using nonhuman animals. For example, Smith writes: “A common assumption in the selection of nonhuman animal subjects for research and the approval of research is that, if the risks of a procedure are too great for humans, and if there is a so-called scientific necessity, .. (shrink)

Dear Readers,After a long break caused, on the one hand, by staff changes in the Editorial Board and, on the other, by the lingering coronavirus pandemic, another issue of the Ignatianum Philosophical Yearbook is coming out. The new editorial team has decided to expand the journal’s formula to include texts from the general humanities; thus, there will be articles not only on philosophy, but also on history, cultural and religious studies, and theology, on top of Polish and foreign literature. (...) The journal is also open to a wide range of issues that take into account the mission of the Jesuit University Ignatianum as a Catholic research center. An important element of this approach is the issue of the Mediterranean civilizational tradition and cultural heritage, which in our understanding are the most important sources of knowledge and inspiration for the study of contemporary problems of individual people, societies and states as well. (shrink)

Dear Readers,In this issue, we bring you four longer explorations of topics central to Nietzsche’s thought. Alexander Nehamas revives the discussion of “falsification” in Nietzsche’s work, challenging the notion that Nietzsche is committed at any time in his life to the view that all human beliefs “falsify” reality—what has come to be known as the “falsification thesis”— and reopening questions about the value of truth, and of falsehood, for Nietzsche. Professor Nehamas was among the first to draw the (...) attention of scholars interested in Nietzsche to these important issues, and in his contribution he answers many of the voices who have joined this debate over the years. Deeply connected to the themes of truth and... (shrink)

Quantum mechanics is humanity's finest scientific achievement. It explains why the sun shines and how your eyes can see. It's the theory behind the LEDs in your phone and the nuclear hearts of space probes. Every physicist agrees quantum physics is spectacularly successful. But ask them what quantum physics means, and the result will be a brawl. At stake is the nature of the Universe itself. What does it mean for something to be real? What is the role of consciousness (...) in the Universe? And do quantum rules apply to very small objects like electrons and protons, but not us? In What is Real?, Adam Becker brings to vivid life the brave researchers whose quest for the truth led them to challenge Bohr: David Bohm, who picked up Einstein's mantle and sought to make quantum mechanics deterministic, all while being hounded by the forces of McCarthyism; Hugh Everett, who argued that everything, big and small, must be governed by the same rules; and John Bell, who went to great lengths to eradicate the power of the god-like observer from the core of quantum physics. And they paid dearly, their reputations, careers, and sometimes lives ruined completely. But history has been kinder to them than their contemporaries were. As Becker shows, the brave intellectual giants have inspired a growing army of physicists and philosophers intent both on making a philosophically more satisfying theory of the universe and a more useful one as well. A gripping story of some of humanity's greatest ideas and the high cost with which many have pursued them, What is Real? is intellectual history at its passionate best. (shrink)

Your Eminences,Dear Brother Bishops and Priests,Dear Brothers and Sisters,Good morning and welcome. I greet Cardinal Farrell and I thank him for his words of introduction. My greeting also goes to all taking part in this international Conference, “Yes to Life! Taking Care of the Precious Gift of Life in its Frailty,” organized by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, and by the Foundation Il Cuore in una Goccia, one of the groups that work daily in our world (...) to welcome children born in conditions of extreme frailty. These are children that the throw-away culture sometimes describes as being “unfit for life,” and thus condemned to death.No human being can ever be unfit for life, whether due to age, state of... (shrink)

Two topics dear to James Robert Brown are discussed, and brought together. First, the applicability of mathematics: it is claimed that applicability offers an a posteriori justification of our mathematical beliefs, on a reflective, rather holistic level in a two level hierarchy. Second, the answer to Benacerraf’s dilemma. A non-empirical mathematical property M is realized in empirical reality through realizers, concrete numerical patterns. The realizers have been interacting causally with human thinkers throughout evolution, which has, through a kind (...) of evolutionary abstraction process, left a proto-representation as of M in human mental apparatus. The innate proto-representation, and its ontogenetic avatars, guide actual humans in recognizing instances of M in the empirical reality. But does the evolutionary production of mechanisms for M-representation track truth? Hopefully yes; the applicability and indispensability of math are a testimony to the truth-tracking. (shrink)

This short and highly accessible volume opens up the subject of the philosophy of biology to professionals and to students in both disciplines. The text covers briefly and clearly all of the pertinent topics in the subject, dealing with both human and non-human issues, and quite uniquely surveying not only scholars in the English-speaking world but others elsewhere, including the Eastern block. As molecular biologists peer ever more deeply into life’s mysteries, there are those who fear that such (...) ‘reductionism’ conceals more than it reveals, and there are those who complain that the new techniques threaten the physical safety of us all. As students of evolution apply their new-found understanding to our own species, some people think that this is merely an excuse for racist and sexist propaganda, and others worry that the whole exercise blatantly violates the religious beliefs many of us hold dear. These controversies are the joint concern of biologists and philosophers—of those whose task it is to study the theoretical and moral foundations of knowledge. The comprehensive and fully up-to-date bibliography makes this an invaluable and indispensable guide. (shrink)

Open Access: Appreciating the relationship of the living to our dead is an aspect of human life that seems to be neglected in philosophy. I argue that living individuals can have ongoing, non-imaginary, valuable relationships with deceased loved ones. This is important to establish because arguments for such relationships better generate claims in applied ethics about our conduct with respect to our dead. In the first half of the paper I advance the narrower claim that psychological literature affirmative of (...) “imaginal relationships” with the dead is relevant to philosophical literature on metaphysical arguments for the dead as relata. The relevance of those psychological insights to philosophers’ metaphysical insights matters for understanding the value of relationships with deceased loved ones. In the second half of the paper I advance the wider claim that the importance of one’s most dearly held relationships with living individuals is best explained in terms of imaginal content, as well; in other words, some interpersonal relationships between the living are personally important because of their imaginal content. Once we appreciate this, it is clearer why recognizably real, imaginally informed relationships with the living are not necessarily cut off on the day someone dies, and permit the possibilities for ethical activities including forgiving the dead, honoring the dead, and carrying out their wishes after they are gone. (shrink)

I take friendship to be a practical and emotional relationship marked by mutual and (more-or-less) equal goodwill, liking, and pleasure. Friendship can exist between siblings, lovers, parent and adult child, as well as between otherwise unrelated people. Some friendships are valued chiefly for their usefulness. Such friendships are instrumental or means friendships. Other friendships are valued chiefly for their own sakes. Such friendships are noninstrumental or end friendships. In this paper I am concerned only with end friendships, and the challenge (...) they pose to consequentialism. In an end friendship, one loves the friend as an essential part of one's system of ends, and not solely, or even primarily, as a means to an independent end - career advancement, amusement, philosophical illumination, or greater happiness in the universe. In such love, one loves the friend for the person she is, i.e., for her essential rather than incidental features. These include both her character traits - the fundamental intellectual, psychological, moral, and aesthetic qualities that constitute an individual's personality - and her unique perspective on herself and others: her view of the important and unimportant, her interest in herself and others. Thus in end friendship the friend cannot be replaced by another, for no other can have her essential features. Nor can she be replaced by a more efficient means to one's ends, or abandoned on their achievement, for it is not as a means that one 2 loves her. It is this necessary irreplaceability that most obviously marks off end friendship from means or instrumental friendship, in which the friend is replaceable.i Hence to love a friend as an end is to place a special value on her - to believe that her value is not outweighed, say, simply by the greater needs of others - or the needs of a greater number of others ("Sorry dear, there are more drowning on this end").ii End friendship (hereafter simply "friendship") is a cardinal human value.. (shrink)

_Hyperdream_ is a major new novel by celebrated French author Hélène Cixous. It is a literary tour de force, returning anew to challenge necessity itself, the most implacable of human certainties: you die in the end – and that’s the end. For you, for me. But what if? What if death did not inevitably spell the end of life? _Hyperdream_ invests this fragile, tentative suspension of disbelief with the sheer force of its poetic audacity, inventing a sort of magic (...) telephone: a wireless lifeline against all the odds to the dearly departed. It is a book about time, age, love and the greatest loss. A book which turns on death: on the question or the moment of death, depending on it, expecting it, living off it, taking place at once before and after, but at the same time turning against it, contesting it, outwriting it hopefully, desperately, performatively, as an interruptible interruption. _Hyperdream_ is a book of mourning, but also of morning, a tragedy-with-comedy and a universal family romance in which it transpires that the narrator is the veritable offspring of a “treasure of literature” in the form of a bed, purchased by her mother from a certain W. Benjamin in 1934, slept on for 40 years by her brother and dreamt of by her friend “J.D.”. (shrink)

In responding to the challenge that we cannot know that animals feel pain, Peter Singer says: We can never directly experience the pain of another being, whether that being is human or not. When I see my daughter fall and scrape her knee, I know that she feels pain because of the way she behaves—she cries, she tells me her knee hurts, she rubs the sore spot, and so on. I know that I myself behave in a somewhat similar—if (...) more inhibited—way when I feel pain, and so I accept that my daughter feels something like what I feel when I scrape my knee. The basis of my belief that animals can feel pain is similar...1 . Singer here suggests that the epistemological problem facing animal ethics is really the more general problem of other minds: the Cartesian problem of how to escape solipsism, how to cross the bridge from my own thoughts and feelings to the thoughts and feelings of any other being. The suggestion is that no-one can seriously be in the thrall of this sceptical problem. The method for building the bridge to other minds is familiar to us all: we use it every day in our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to people near and dear, and to those far away. And we use it every day in our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Barbarous On Either Side: The New York Blues Of Mr. Sammler’s PlanetStanley CrouchThere are no two ways about virtue, my dear student; it either is, or it is not. Talk of doing penance for your sins! It is a nice system of business, when you pay for your crime by an act of contrition! You seduce a woman that you may set your foot on such and such (...) a rung of the social ladder; you sow dissension among the children of a family; you descend, in short, to every base action that can be committed at home or abroad, to gain your own ends for you own pleasure or profit.... That man with yellow gloves and a golden tongue commits many a murder; he sheds no blood, but he drains his victims as surely; a desperado forces open a door with a crowbar, dark deeds both of them! You yourself will do every one of the things that I suggested to you today, bar the bloodshed. Do you believe there is any absolute standard in this world?—Vautrin, Père GoriotWe are now mightily perplexed by the vulgarity and the brutal appetites of our culture, which Mr. Sammler sees so, so clearly, startled from page to page and in passage after passage of Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel. The terrible children of our day, the worst of our politicians, and the rampant sleaze that slides up and down the classes, across the races and religions, from the cynical students to the unrepentingly jaded and old, can be traced back to the elements that are so alarming to the protagonist of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. As a well-educated man who has smelled the molten breath and felt the bloody teeth of European fascism, Mr. Sammler is obsessed with understanding what makes or breaks a society, what causes a civilization to embrace ruthlessness as the [End Page 89] best way to realize its ambitions and handle its fears. A veteran of World War II, he has seen killing and he has done it himself, which makes him a man for whom none of his questions exists in a speculative air unfouled by the odor of murder. His intellectual ponderings are thereby part of a drama in which he has seen the lowest the Western world has to offer. This lack of innocence makes him a hero and a thinker haunted by his past and startled to uneasiness by the present. Oh, yes: Artur Sammler knows firsthand how quickly the metamorphosis from the refined to the smugly savage can take place. “Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice.”The very conception of Mr. Sammler is expressive of Bellow’s gift for bringing together the intellect, the passion, the spirit, and the flesh. The physical responses to stimulation are rendered with the same attention given to all of the many things that Mr. Sammler contemplates as he tries to get a grip on New York, America’s financial capital and the pinnacle of the nation’s culture. Mr. Sammler’s ideas are counterpointed by feeling and sensuality to such a degree that the thoughts are themselves elements of emotion, which is something only our finest writers can bring off, the literary condition of character so complete that every aspect of consciousness takes form within the container of a body equal in the life of its senses to the spirit it carries. We get the feeling of a human being in repose, in grief, in rage, in self-protective contemplation, in unsparing self-examination, in attentive motion through Manhattan, on foot, in public transportation, in chauffeured limousine.New York’s power over the country was central to why it was chosen as the place of action. Mr. Sammler could not be in a better setting if he were to wrestle with the identity of the United States. One part of it obviously has to do with the character’s Jewishness. Manhattan and Hollywood are the two places where Jews have made their deepest imprints on the country. Unlike the dream factory of Hollywood, New York is the city... (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. (...) `Wise Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

This volume explores the arrangement of science, technology, society, and education. Using the concept of "feedback loop", this book processes subjects dear to the work of Joseph C. Pitt: technology as humanity at work, pragmatism, Sicilian realism, pragmatist pedagogy, instrumentation in science, and more.

Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and (...) responsible sense of self.Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity.Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ChatGPT:a psychomachiaChristopher Norris (bio)The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to (...) infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.—Satya P. MohantyIt remains to be seen whether AI poems will eventually go beyond intended or unintended parody and trigger emotional responses in human readers that run deeper than wry amusement.... Current AI poets are in essence mining the metaphors that humans have already formed and planted in texts–in the view of Robert Frost, 'The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled up." Could AI create genuinely novel metaphors, rather than only variations of those we humans have come up with already?—Keith HolyoakeNoteThis poem started out as a debate in clearly-marked dialogue form (alternating roman and italic print) between an advocate of ChatGPT who thinks that 'strong' AI is, or will soon be, capable of writing 'authentic' poetry, and a poet who resists that claim on various grounds, personal and philosophical. The opening, strict-form sonnet proposes that the issue be tested by running it (the poem itself) past the software and seeing what results as the sonnet-sequence unfolds from that speculative source-point. As it goes along, the sonnet-forms multiply, the contending viewpoints seem to merge or even change sides, the roman-italic alternation breaks down, and the project (theirs or mine?) loses its intended clarity of theme and treatment. I include the poem here as a kind of performative commentary on the way that thematic concerns or intentions may get lost once the AI software really starts doing its wondrous, intriguing, or humanly ominous thing.One way to test this thing, ChatGPT:Let's run a really strict-form poem on it,Like a Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet,Then input 'do thou likewise,' just to seeWhat comes out. Does the poem rhyme and scan [End Page 77] Correctly yet, as claimed, hit off the styleConvincingly, and thereby close the fileOn what's unique about the species 'man'?If so, you'll find it difficult to tellWhat's what with this example of the kind,Along with other cases you may findWorth putting to the online test as well.And don't get spooked if, like myself, you're proneTo think you're someone (something?) else's clone.You crease me up, you poets, with your fearsThat some new bit of software (albeit oneOf quite superior powers) might have outdoneYou in those self-apportioned special spheresOf excellence where you and some few peers,Each special, each unique, affect to shunAll thought that your fine poems may just runOn lines devised by AI gadgeteers.A nice idea, last refuge of the weakIn mind but good in heart, the valiant fewTo whose deluded faith it falls to holdOut still for what you fantasists may seekYet scarcely hope to find: new ways to doThe genius thing, transmute base stuff to gold!Read slowly, sensitively; don't permitYourself, dear reader, nobbled as no doubtYou've been by those who have the techno-clout,To take that stuff on board and let a bitOf pseudo-Keats, spoof Yeats, identikit'Stuffed-owl'-grade Wordsworth, or what else they toutAs the real deal demand you read withoutDiscerning what no moving finger's writ.Just hearken, let your quickened sense respondTo all that yet eludes the furthest reachOf AI artefacts. They had you connedAt first, though soon you missed the living speechUn-missed by those who cannot hear beyondWhat any tin-eared programmer could teach.Let's bring the reader in on this, I say.We've need of them, we disputants with much [End Page 78] At stake in different ways, they there to payOur... (shrink)

So far the "Science Wars" have generated far more heat than light. Combatants from one or the other of what C. P. Snow famously called "the two cultures" (science versus the arts and humanities) have launched bitter attacks but have seldom engaged in constructive dialogue about the central issues. In The One Culture?, Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins have gathered together some of the world's foremost scientists and sociologists of science to exchange opinions and ideas rather than insults. The (...) contributors find surprising areas of broad agreement in a genuine conversation about science, its legitimacy and authority as a means of understanding the world, and whether science studies undermines the practice and findings of science and scientists. The One Culture? is organized into three parts. The first consists of position papers written by scientists and sociologists of science, which were distributed to all the participants. The second presents commentaries on these papers, drawing out and discussing their central themes and arguments. In the third section, participants respond to these critiques, offering defenses, clarifications, and modifications of their positions. Who can legitimately speak about science? What is the proper role of scientific knowledge? How should scientists interact with the rest of society in decision making? Because science occupies such a central position in the world today, such questions are vitally important. Although there are no simple solutions, The One Culture? does show the reader exactly what is at stake in the Science Wars, and provides a valuable framework for how to go about seeking the answers we so urgently need. Contributors include: Constance K. Barsky, Jean Bricmont, Harry Collins, Peter Dear, Jane Gregory, Jay A. Labinger, Michael Lynch, N. David Mermin, Steve Miller, Trevor Pinch, Peter R. Saulson, Steven Shapin, Alan Sokal, Steven Weinberg, Kenneth G. Wilson. (shrink)

This article objects to two arguments that William MacAskill gives in What We Owe the Future in support of optimism about the prospects of longtermism, that is, the prospects of positively influencing the longterm future. First, it grants that he is right that, whereas humans sometimes benefit others as an end, they rarely harm them as an end, but argues that this bias towards positive motivation is counteracted by the fact that it is practically easier to harm than to benefit. (...) For this greater easiness makes it likely both that accidental effects will be harmful rather than beneficial and that the means or side‐effects of the actions people perform with the aim of benefiting themselves and those close to them will tend to be harmful to others. Secondly, while our article agrees with him that values could lock‐in, it contends that the value of longtermism is unlikely to lock in as long as human beings have not been morally enhanced but remain partial in favor of themselves and those near and dear. (shrink)

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean (...) evaluation of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come. (shrink)

There seems to be an important historical connexion between changes in the concept of evidence and that of the person capable of giving evidence. Michel Foucault urged that during the classical age the relationship between evidence and the person was reversed: scholasticism derived statements’ authority from that of their authors, while scientists now hold that matters of fact are the most impersonal of statements.1 In a similar vein, Ian Hacking defines a kind of evidence which ‘consists in one thing pointing (...) beyond itself’, and claims that until the early modern period ‘testimony and authority were primary, and things could count as evidence only insofar as they resembled the witness of observers and the authority of books’.2 This captures a rather familiar theme of the ideology of early modern natural philosophy. Nullius in verba was the Royal Society of London’s motto. Robert Boyle, doyen of the Society’s experimental philosophers, tried to build up the credit of laboratory objects at the expense of untrustworthy humans. He reckoned that ‘inanimate bodies … are not capable of prepossessions, or giving us partial informations’, while vulgar men may be influenced by predispositions, and so many other circumstances, that they may easily give occasion to mistakes’. So an inanimate body’s deeds could function as signs of some other state of affairs in a way that the stories of vulgar humans could not.3 1. See Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours: Leçon inaugurale au Collêge de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 .2. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference , pp. 34, 33.3. Quoted in Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump , p. 218. See also Peter Dear, ‘Totius in verba:’ Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis 76 : 145-61. Simon Schaffer lectures in history and philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the coauthor of Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life and coauthors of The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. (shrink)

In this paper I will show how the medical image, presented to the patient by the physician, participates in medicine's cold culture of abstraction, objectification and mandated normativity. I begin by giving a brief account of the use of anatomical imaging since the Renaissance to show how images have historically functioned in contrast to how they are currently used in medical practice. Next, I examine how contemporary medical imaging techniques participate in a kind of knowledge production that objectifies the (...) class='Hi'>human body. Finally, I elucidate how physicians ought to place the medical image within the context of the lived body so as to create a healing relationship with the patient. In all this I hope to show that the medical image, far from a piece of objective data, testifies to the interplay of particular beliefs, practices and doctrines contemporary medicine holds dear. To best treat her patient, the physician must appreciate the influence of these images and appropriately place them within the context of the patient's lived experience. (shrink)