Decision making is an area of profound importance to a wide range of specialities - for psychologists, economists, lawyers, clinicians, managers, and of course philosophers. Only relatively recently, though, have we begun to really understand how decision making processes are implemented in the brain, and how they might interact with our emotions.'Emotion and Reason' presents a groundbreaking new approach to understanding decision making processes and their neural bases. The book presents a sweeping survey of the science of decision making.
In a wide-ranging study of unusual interest, Paul Weiss, Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, applies the principles and methods of philosophy to athletics. Every culture, he notes, has games of some kind; few activities seem to interest both children and young men as much as sports do; and few attract so many spectators, rich and poor. Yet none of the great philosophers, claiming to take all knowledge and being as their province, have made more than a passing (...) reference to sport, in part, Professor Weiss suggests, because they thought that what pleased the vulgar was not worth sustained study by the leisured. This seminal book breaks new ground and explores new paths: psychological and sociological forms of human behavior exhibited in games; the physiology of athletics, and the efforts of training and conditioning; and the motivation of athletics—the rhythm and aims of contests and games, and the meaning of team play. More importantly, however, Professor Weiss’s unique contributions lie in his discussions of the distinct contributions that sport makes to civilization. Professor Weiss discusses at length such topics as the Olympic Games and men and women as amateur and professional athletes—and their sacrifices, defeats, and humiliations. And he delineates the stages the athlete must go through in his progress toward self-completion. (shrink)
In Telling Flesh, Vicki Kirby addresses a major theoretical issue at the intersection of the social sciences and feminist theory -- the separation of nature from culture. Kirby focuses particularly on postmodern approaches to corporeality, and explores how these approaches confine the body within questions about meaning and interpretation. Kirby explores the implications of this containment in the work of Jane Gallop, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell, as well as in recent cyber-criticism. By analysing the inadvertent repetition of the nature/culture (...) division in this work, Kirby offers a powerful reassessment of dualism itself. (shrink)
In this paper the Romantic ballet Giselle is used as a case study through which to examine the themes of madness and death. Giselle is a heartrending story of the intertwining of love and death. It is argued that Giselle is an evocative example of narratives of hysteria and suicide, and literature in the field of medical history is drawn upon to demonstrate the relations between the cultural fields of ballet, medicine, and the wider social world at (...) the time of Giselle. Finally, it is suggested that the notion of the embodiment of vulnerability provides a fruitful way to meld our understandings of the interconnections between the arts, society, and medicine. (shrink)
Clinicians at quaternary centers see part of their mission as providing hope when others cannot. They tend to see sicker patients with more complex disease processes. Part of this mission is offering longshot treatment modalities that are unlikely to achieve their stated goal, but conceivably could. When patients embark on such a treatment plan, it may fail. Often treatment toward an initial goal continues beyond the point at which such a goal is feasible. We explore the progression of care from (...) longshot to fantasy using two pediatric cases. This progression may be differentiated into four distinct stages of care related to the potential of achieving the initial goals of care. Physicians are often ill prepared for the progression of treatments from a longshot hope to an unfeasible and, therefore, typically unjustified intervention. We present a structured approach to guide clinicians at referral institutions where these situations may be common. The transition of care from “longshot” to “fantasy” is an inherent part of quaternary care for the sickest of patients that has been underexplored. Physicians are often poorly equipped to approach that transition. We advocate this approach to the shift from longshot to fantasy with the belief that such a structured method will have multiple benefits, including: reduced suffering for the patient; decreased emotional burden on patient and family; decreased provider moral distress; increased likelihood of seeking high quality palliative care earlier; and provision of honest and straightforward information to patients and their families. (shrink)
If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience (...) the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009. (shrink)
In The Socratic Paradox and Its Enemies, Roslyn Weiss argues that the Socratic paradoxes—no one does wrong willingly, virtue is knowledge, and all the virtues are one—are best understood as Socrates’ way of combating sophistic views: ...
We have chosen to include here two unpublished texts by Giselle which seemed to us to express the originality of her truly political life, as someone who was both extremely close to Felix Guattari in theoretical terms, and was a very concrete actor on the front lines of various citizen movements, which assert a specific relation to political action and to life.
In Socrates Dissatisfied, Weiss argues against the prevailing view that the personified Laws in the latter part of the Crito are Socrates' spokesmen. She reveals and explores many indications that Socrates and the Laws are, both in style and in substance, adversaries. Deft, provocative, and compelling, with new translations providing groundbreaking interpretations of key passages, Socrates Dissatisfied challenges the standard conception of the history of political thought.
I present a reconstruction of the logical system of the Tractatus, which differs from classical logic in two ways. It includes an account of Wittgenstein’s “form-series” device, which suffices to express some effectively generated countably infinite disjunctions. And its attendant notion of structure is relativized to the fixed underlying universe of what is named. -/- There follow three results. First, the class of concepts definable in the system is closed under finitary induction. Second, if the universe of objects is countably (...) infinite, then the property of being a tautology is \Pi^1_1-complete. But third, it is only granted the assumption of countability that the class of tautologies is \Sigma_1-definable in set theory. -/- Wittgenstein famously urges that logical relationships must show themselves in the structure of signs. He also urges that the size of the universe cannot be prejudged. The results of this paper indicate that there is no single way in which logical relationships could be held to make themselves manifest in signs, which does not prejudge the number of objects. (shrink)
This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment can be an extremely helpful ally for contemporary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, and disability studies scholars because his work suggests that the gender, race, and ability of bodies are not innate or fixed features of those bodies, much less corporeal indicators of physical, social, psychic, and even moral inferiority, but are themselves dynamic phenomena that have the potential to overturn accepted notions of normalcy, naturalness, and normativity. Taking seriously Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that (...) our bodies are the means by which we directly engage with the world, I suggest, encourages us to be attentive to how an individual’s or group’s gender, race, and bodily abilities differentially affect how their bodies are responded to by other bodies. The responses of others, in turn, directly influences the significance of an individual’s actions within that situation. This essay provides a critical examination of specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability theorists who creatively utilize Merleau-Pontian insights to illustrate, and ultimately combat, the insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and “compulsory able-bodiedness”, impoverish the lived experience of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (shrink)
Miguel de Cervantes, no último capítulo de sua obra O engenhoso fidalgo Dom Quixote de La Mancha, retrata o falecimento de seu protagonista, decorrente de uma profunda tristeza. O cavaleiro, depois de vencido, sente-se obrigado a retornar ao seu povoado e a renunciar à cavalaria andante, o que lhe causa a transformação de sua realidade e de seu estado mental - da loucura à cordura -, além do seu direcionamento à morte. Assim como faz Cervantes no início do século XVII, (...) Espinosa, ao final do mesmo século, também parece estabelecer analogias entre as ideias de transformação e morte, ao apontar, em sua Ética, a relação entre a natureza do ser e sua proporção de movimento e repouso, responsável pelas inconstâncias humanas. A partir de tais considerações, este trabalho pretende aproximar o último capítulo da obra Dom Quixote à proposição 39 da Quarta Parte da Ética espinosana, de forma a ressaltar as devidas semelhanças entre o conceito de morte como transformação, retratado tanto pelo escritor espanhol quanto pelo filósofo holandês, uma vez que a morte, para ambos, demonstra estar vinculada à mesma ideia. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1. Identity of meaning Adrian Poole; 2. Identity and the law Lionel Bently; 3. Species-identity Peter Crane; 4. Mathematical identity Marcus Du Sautoy; 5. Immunological identity Philippa Marrack; 6. Visualizing identity Ludmilla Jordanova; 7. Musical identity Christopher Hogwood; 8. Identity and the mind Raymond Tallis; Notes on the contributors; Index.
Essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy of language and mind, Reading Brandom is also an excellent companion volume to Reading McDowell: On ...
One of very few monographs devoted to Plato's Meno, this study emphasizes the interplay between its protagonists, Socrates and Meno. It interprets the Meno as Socrates' attempt to persuade his interlocutor, by every device at his disposal, of the value of moral inquiry—even though it fails to yield full-blown knowledge—and to encourage him to engage in such inquiry, insofar as it alone makes human life worth living.
Chopra and Weiss address perhaps the fundamental issue in international relations today: the sacrosanct sets of sovereignty. The word "sovereignty" explains why the international community has difficulty countering human rights violations.
The fate of women in times of war has always been considered something a non-issue, buried as it was, and made banal as part and parcel of the lot of civilian population in general, since women were non-combatants. But looking at more recent conflicts we can no longer pretend that women are in a home front of sorts, as opposed to soldiers in battle, because there is no home front anymore, and women are now right in the middle of armed (...) conflicts, as, for instance, in Algeria and in Bosnia. (shrink)
In its effort « to reconsider the sexist and racist biases that lead to ignore the fundamental role played by migrant women in our society s, this collection of articles stresses both the invisibilization and the ethnicization of the work performed by migrant women, as it is inscribed within the sexual division of labor. The analyses provided here cover various European countries, Spain, France, Italy.
The urgency of today’s conjuncture calls to us in a number of ways : to develop planetary citizenship and the solidarities it implies ; to promote and help those subjectivities which gain autonomy in the processes of resistance and alternative construction ; to develop myriad transveral encounters ; and finally not to hand the planet over to destructive forces of all kinds.
Facing israelian intransigent Ilan Halevi explain the failure of Oslo’s agreement, from the first intifada to the second. The archaic structure of Israel in front of pluriethnic and multi-denominational society, holds only because the society defines as being in war. There is only an international intervention which can prevent, the risk to pass of hundred deaths to thousand deaths... This intervention is necessary, only because it can realize for the Israeli opinion which it is impossible to settle question by force. (...) The Israelis do not stop saying « we shall not negotiate under the fire », but Palestinians always knew that they are making peace, under the fire, colonial and military violence never broke off. (shrink)
This book by Anne Le Huérou, Aude Merlin, Amandine Regamey and Silvia Serrano reinscribes the Chechen conflict within the continuity of Russian colonization , within that of a Sovietization out of which the nationalist movement originally grew, within the immanent needs of the Putinian regime and within the complexity of the interactions between Islam, resistance, solidarity, identity and the fear of extermination. It focuses in particular on the role of women, including of the “kamikaze” women who tragically illustrate the change (...) in nature of the resistance. The book is published at a moment when it is urgent for Europe not to repeat in Chechnya the inconsequent reflexes it adopted during the wars in the ex-Yugoslavia. (shrink)
Women in black » of Jerusalem appeared during first Intifada. Every Friday, Place of France in Jerusalem-Fast their posters « End of occupation » say clearly in English, in Hebrew and in Arabic their refusal of the politics of occupation of territories, which there is no possible peace without the occupied territories are returned and constitute a Palestinian State. As Mothers of the May place which inspired them their tenacity paid: they became symbolic of the nonviolent resistance of the women (...) in a situation of injustice. The other groups of women in black built up themselves, through the world, in Colombia, Italy. Spain, USA.. (shrink)
