This essay intends to criticize Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of language on the basis of which he justifies the proposition that learning is only possible through conversation. Although he understands as language non-verbal forms of communication such as gestures, physiognomic expressions, looks, Gadamer conceives language as word. However, I believe, and no one would deny it, language needs to be understood and, above all, learned. So here is the motivating problem of this essay: if language has to be understood as word, (...) how is it possible to learn it before mastering the word during childhood? To answer this problem, first, I clarify what I understand as philosophical conception of education. Then I demonstrate, in a broad examination of Gadamer’s essays written over five decades, the absence of a pre-predicative conception of language. Finally, I outline a pre-predicative conception of language by which I intend to show how it is possible to learn language before mastering the word. (shrink)

I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them responsible. None of this (...) rebuts responsibility skepticism. For instance, forward-looking theories might adopt Myisha Cherry’s proposal: anger as love without blameworthiness. (shrink)

Envisioning the future of positive psychology requires looking at its past. To that end, I first review prior critiques of PP to underscore that certain early problems have persisted over time. I then selectively examine recent research to illustrate progress in certain areas as well as draw attention to recurrent problems. Key among them is promulgation of poorly constructed measures of well-being and reliance on homogeneous, privileged research samples. Another concern is the commercialization of PP, which points to the need (...) for greater oversight and quality control in profit-seeking endeavors. Looking ahead, I advocate for future science tied to contemporary challenges, particularly ever-widening inequality and the pandemic. These constitute intersecting catastrophes that need scientific attention. Such problems bring into focus “neglected negatives” that may be fueling current difficulties, including greed, indifference, and stupidity. Anger, which defies easy characterization as positive or negative, also warrants greater scientific study. Going forward I advocate for greater study of domains that likely nurture good lives and just societies – namely, participation in the arts and encounters with nature, both currently under study. Overall, my entreaty to PP is to reckon with persistent problems from its past, while striving toward a future that is societally relevant and virtuous. (shrink)

One of the more interesting topics debated by Leibniz and Locke and one that has received comparatively little critical commentary is the nature of essences and the classification of the natural world.1 This topic, moreover, is of tremendous importance, occupying a position at the intersection of the metaphysics of individual beings, modality, epistemology, and philosophy of language. And, while it goes back to Plato, who wondered if we could cut nature at its joints, as Nicholas Jolley has pointed out, (...) the debate between Leibniz and Locke has very clear similarities to the topic that has dominated the philosophy of language from the 1970s on: namely, the challenge mounted by Kripke, Kaplan, Putnam, and others against Russellian and Fregean descriptivist accounts of meaning. Yet, this topic is also, as Jolley writes, one of the “most elusive” in the debate between Leibniz and Locke.2 The purpose of this paper is to examine in detail Leibniz’s critique of Locke’s distinction between real and nominal essences. In doing so, I hope to show certain virtues in Leibniz’s account of metaphysics and philosophy of language that usually escape notice. While I wish to provide a general account of Leibniz’s disagreement with Locke, I also plan to focus on the nature of species and natural kinds. In my opinion, those who have treated this topic have not paid sufficient attention to Leibniz’s claims that “Essence is fundamentally nothing but the possibility of the thing under consideration” and “essences are everlasting because they only concern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, AristotelesBrandon C. LookPaola-Ludovika Coriando. Individuation und Einzelnsein: Nietzsche, Leibniz, Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003. Pp. ix. + 318. €28,00.What is a singular thing? Is there a first or last principle that allows us to call something an individual or one? What is the relation between the particular and the universal? Does the being of a particular mean the separation from the universal, or, on (...) the contrary, is the universal a post facto aggregation of individual subjects? What constitutes the individuality of man? This book, based on a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg, addresses these difficult questions and their answers by Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle.The author claims to limit the discussion to these philosophers because their philosophies represent distinct stations in the development of the question of individuation and the nature of individuality and, at the same time, because their different positions are both explicitly and implicitly related to each other (15). Coriando begins her discussion with Nietzsche, a philosopher one might not have linked at all to the "problem of individuation" per se, and moves backward in time to Leibniz and finally to Aristotle. The point of this order of presentation, the reader is told, is to trace back the essentials of the question of individuation to its origin: Aristotle (16). This strategy is largely successful.Nietzsche's primary concern, of course, is with the nature of the individual, or more particularly, the individual Mensch, and how he is distinguished from or distinguishes himself from the rest of the world. The answer, for Nietzsche, is to be found in his concept of the "will to power," which provides what Coriando calls his "ontological principle of individuation": the inherent drive for perspectival self-affirmation and self-increase (131). There is also, however, an "ethical principle of individuation": the attitude of a person vis-à-vis the eternal recurrence of the same. In accepting and letting go of the entirety of the world and its eternal recurrence, one "becomes who one is," and one can know one's individuality.Whereas Nietzsche tries to approach the problem of individuation independently of the entire western tradition of metaphysics, Leibniz is squarely within this tradition. Indeed, [End Page 121] in his first philosophical work, the Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation, the sixteen-year-old Leibniz throws himself into a scholastic fray, carving out a strongly nominalist position. Leibniz's belief that only genuine individuals exist would, of course, stay with him throughout his career; the problem will be, as Coriando nicely shows, to give a precise account of the nature of individual substance. Coriando focuses on two works in her discussion, On the Correction of Metaphysics and the Concept of Substance and, to a much greater extent, the Monadology. The view that she extracts from these works should not be surprising. The principle of individuation, for Leibniz, rests in the active force of a monad and in the particular representation of the rest of the world from the monad's own point of view. Put this way, there is an interesting commonality with Nietzsche at work here.A similar commonality is shown with the thought of Aristotle. Here the principal concern is to explicate Aristotle's conception of ousia in De anima and MetaphysicsZ, H, and Q. Naturally, this leads into an account of how matter can be living and a further explication of Aristotle's energeia and entelecheia. In the end, it becomes clear that the set of concepts—energeia, conatus, will to power—are all, if not equivalent, at least performing largely the same role in guaranteeing the being of individuals. What has become "lost" in Aristotle's philosophy, however, is a notion like the perspectivalism present in Leibniz and Nietzsche, something that Coriando does not discuss at any length.This book offers a broad perspective on the question of individuation, and the choice of Nietzsche, Leibniz, and Aristotle allows Coriando to highlight interesting answers to this metaphysical problem. I do have two small quibbles. First, the problem of individuation, or the desire for a principium individuationis is so much a problem associated with medieval philosophy that... (shrink)

With entries written by leading scholars in the field of Modern Philosophy, this Companion is an accessible and authoritative reference guide to Leibniz's life, work and legacy. The book includes extended biographical sketches, and an up-to-date fully comprehensive bibliography. Gathering all these resources in one place, the book is an extremely valuable tool for those interested in Leibniz and the era in which he wrote"--Back cover.

Mental simulation refers to the imagination of alternative, counterfactual realities. This chapter provides an overview of research on simulations of the past— retrospective simulation—and simulations of the future— prospective simulation. Two major themes run throughout. The first is that both retrospective and prospective thinking are inextricably linked, relying on a mixture of episodic and semantic memories that share common neural substrates. The second is that retrospective and prospective simulation present trade-offs for the individual. On the one hand, they are functional, (...) identifying causal inferences and potential obstacles that prepare us to try harder and perform better in the future. On the other hand, they sometimes produce bias—retrospective thinking can enhance hindsight bias, whereas prospective thinking can evoke biased predictions about the likelihood of certain events as well as how one is going to feel about those events in the future. Fortunately, however, these biases can be diminished with debiasing techniques. (shrink)

Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust’s visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, (...) book illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Mary Bergstein is professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She won the 2012 “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published numerous books and articles on art and visual culture from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography. (shrink)

The ubiquity of the Internet has given rise to new hybrid types of online users such as hybrid consumers and prosumers. This paper looks at some of the new legal challenges raised by the exciting opportunities for active participation and co-creation by such users in electronic commerce transactions. The method employed, in homage to Jon Bing, is to look back in time to understand how users in sales transactions have been progressively regarded—alternatively exposed to risk, alternatively protected—and how (...) contract law has adapted to such new developments. The paper shows that, even following the emergence of the hybrid consumer and the prosumer, there are strong arguments for the consumer’s continued protection, not least because of the increase in technological sophistication and complexity. The paper seeks to test somewhat the limits where consumer protection ends and where general contract law—with its attendant doctrines like caveat emptor—would apply again with respect to the aforementioned new users. (shrink)

Following the 15th anniversary of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), one can definitely say that this relatively young society has come of age. Through regular meetings, a journal, a prize, fellowships and various other activities, the ESHS has been striving to create a space fostering diversity, plurality and internationalization among historians of science, located in Europe and elsewhere. This paper revisits my own research on the past of the sciences in Portugal, examining in particular the role (...) of the 18th century naturalist and diplomat Abbé Correia da Serra. As a member of an extended network of estrangeirados (Europeanized intellectuals), Correia da Serra played a decisive role in the circulation of knowledge in Europe and also in the world, a role forgotten by his peers within the time interval of a generation. This case study acts as a springboard to discuss the importance of geographical and methodological diversity in the past of the sciences in Europe. In the present historiographical predicament in which the international community finds itself, I advocate that one of the main challenges faced by the ESHS is to turn its historical gaze to Europe again, while fiercely repudiating Eurocentrism. This enables to show how much the building of the European spaces of scientific practice were never a prerogative of a few regions or a small set of countries, but, on the very contrary, took shape as the result of complex interactions between diverse spaces and cultures, not only intra-European but also non-European. (shrink)

The formal oversight of medical education in India occurred with the promulgation of the Indian Medical Degrees Act in 1916. Despite an awareness of the need to train ethical doctors and the formal discussion of this as early as 1955, the formal teaching of medical ethics has been restricted to a few colleges as it has not been part of a mandated requirement. In August, 2019, all medical colleges in India will adopt a new Medical Council of India mandated curriculum. (...) An embedded AETCOM module across all years of training is a part of this curriculum and is the first attempt to introduce medical ethics uniformly in close to 500 medical colleges in the country. This paper traces the historical attempts to include medical ethics in medical education in India, and describes the current plan to implement ethics teaching in the undergraduate medical curriculum in India. (shrink)

Patricia Hill Collins reflects upon her past, present, and future scholarship.

The aim of this essay is to look at where the American punishment system has been in hopes of finding lessons that can help shape where it goes. There are four sections. The first, short because it covers much trodden ground, sketches the reasons why indeterminate sentencing imploded and some of the ideas, proposals, and policies to which the implosion gave shape. The second, not much longer, sketches prevailing explanations for why the policies of the past quarter century took (...) the shape they did, and concludes that most are unconvincing. The third demonstrates that prevailing ways of thinking about punishment are obsolete and incapable either of encompassing current policies and practices or of guiding development of emerging 21st century punishment systems. The last immodestly sets out some of the elements of new ways of thinking that may do a better job. (shrink)

Publishers love titles that begin How or Why. Better still, How and Why, combining edification with utility. The target group is that overlap between the self-help audience and the idly curious—which is to say, most of us. And since emotions are very much about self-help and self-harm, they offer rich pickings in a burgeoning market. Flanagan's How to Do things with Emotions is a philosopher's take on moral emotions, the allusion to J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (...) chiming with the self-help milieu. Reviewing cases, Flanagan points out that most scientific work in this field derives from experiments on psychology students, about as unrepresentative a slice of humanity as you could find. For Flanagan, they are too WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) to tell us much about the non-weird majority. To learn to “do emotions better,” he argues, we have to look farther afield. Although the emotional lives of cultural others are surely different from those taking Psychology 101, at some functional level they might be similar. Work out the conceptual logic and practical rationale of culturally elaborated emotions—Minangkabau “shame,” Ifaluk “righteous anger,” American “road rage”—and there is scope for comparison. Indeed, anthropology has shown as much, and it is from anthropology that Flanagan takes his cues. To mention two famous cases, what can we learn about anger management from Utku igloo-dwellers and Ilongot headhunters? Mutually dependent for survival in their snowy isolation, the Utku cannot risk getting angry. (They mercilessly tease their children into learning the futility of anger.) In the jungles of Luzon, Ilongot youths cast away their anger in externally directed violence: headhunting as cathartic sport. We can think of parallels closer to home.Flanagan's vigorously argued book, a tour de force of its kind, is both an anatomizing of anger and shame—two moral emotions we tend to “do badly”—and a proposal to “change how we do these emotions.” Indignation is fine, but anger that is vengeful or “pain-passing,” rather than righteous, is irrational and socially harmful. Shame can be incapacitating and cruel (the undeserved burn of a Twitter pile-on). What we need is reflective anger directed at injustice and a “mature sense of shame” that reminds us of the social contract and stops us misbehaving.In its How-and-Why format, the book combines theory and practice, metaethics with moralism. Here is how a prof should do self-help. But if the diagnosis is well made, the remedy is hard to imagine. As Flanagan recognizes, moral sentiments and practices are embedded in intricate forms of life and not readily detachable. Anger Utku-style is not a transferable skill, nor are educative routines forged in social ecologies remote from our own. Lacking serviceable models, Flanagan falls back on the anthropological justification that knowledge of cultural diversity expands our sense of human possibility, of other roads taken. In a globalizing world, difference is its own reward. For me, an anthropologist, that maxim is enough. Yet difference bedevils comparison, jinxing the units, warping criteria. Most languages lack a word for emotion or an equivalent umbrella concept; nor do emotion words translate well across languages. Emotion may be an incoherent notion, or at best a heuristic.Flanagan's use of the WEIRD tag makes things a bit too easy. Does it cover farmhands and factory workers? Are we so democratic, anyway? More damagingly, a typological approach blurs the circumstances of family, community, and biography that define an emotional episode and shape its phenomenology, the way it is felt and experienced—what a violent outburst or fearful exit means in the context of a life. Take Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who flees a scene of failure and derails his life. It requires a long narrative to unravel the implications of his jumping ship and the paralyzing shame he experiences before the judgment of society. Or consider the scene in Anna Karenina in which the dignified and self-important Karenin, apprised of Anna's adulterous liaison, agonizes over the threat to his existence. To call his response jealousy would not scratch the surface. Characteristically for Tolstoy, the emotions go unnamed. Instead, we witness Karenin's fervid deliberations (emotions involve thoughts), vacillations (emotions have action tendencies), anguished calculations of impending scandal (emotions are appraisals), and bodily changes (emotions are cognized feelings). We shudder at the brutal metaphors through which he grasps his predicament and its cure: like rooting out a bad tooth, he decides. That welter of particularities escapes the theorist who needs clear-cut, comparable units, formulaic instances of jealousy or anger. But what are you left with if you omit the details? What would remain of Karenin's existential crisis?The novelist's privileged access to subjectivity is, of course, unavailable to the scientist, but the larger context of plot and character—a history of relations that gives emotional episodes their shape and power—has its analog in the ethnographic domain. Emotions are public as well as private events, their meanings and effects depending on a fit with social reality, a clash of perspectives. In thought and feeling, we are never really alone. All of which suggests that narrative, fictional or nonfictional, can capture the ongoing moment in a way that eludes other methods. If what we are after is living emotion, it is the movie, not the snapshot, that surely matters. No point in comparing “emotions” no one ever really experienced outside of an experiment.But there's the rub. In generalization—the goal of emotion theory—an emotion's social meaning, personal significance, pragmatic function, and narrative context get stripped out. All that makes it what it is! Even in doggedly empirical anthropology, detailed emotional episodes are rare (Jean Briggs's Utku ethnography Never in Anger, published in 1970, is still unsurpassed). Instead we get recollections and summary examples, lacking the constitutive detail, real-time evolutions, and consequences of the real thing. Yet these must serve for comparison, fodder for countless theoretical speculations. Are we at risk of analyzing faux emotions and building theories on cardboard constructions?An empty Arctic stage, a handful of characters, life simplified to survival: Briggs is a hard act to follow. Bare life does not make for basic emotions. On the white set, emotions prove hard to parse. That gruff hesitation, that flashing glint—are they tokens of anger? Empathy will not suffice. As Briggs shows, narrative context is all. And in our more cluttered emotional worlds, the value of backstory, interwoven biographies, and emotional plots is all the greater. Flanagan is right; we must do emotions better. (shrink)

All the authors who have contributed to Looking Back to See the Future have taken up the challenge to inter-disciplinarily investigate the ambiguous concepts of sins, vices and virtues. Their illuminating chapters test the definitions and applications of these religio-cultural categories in the contexts of the distant past as well as our contemporary, globalised, consumerist present; but they all do it for the sake of catching a glimpse of their and our future. By looking into religious and philosophical treatises, (...) paraliterary and literary texts as well as everyday practices, the authors prove that the interpretations of what constitutes sin, vice and virtue are becoming more and more difficult in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This July 2022 issue of the JME contains several articles addressing ethical issues related to COVID-19 as well as reproductive ethics—a timely topic, given the leaked U.S. Supreme Court document, anticipating the overturn of Roe v. Wade. On the COVID-19 front, original articles in this issue include an analysis of ethical issues related to sharing research samples and data between low/middle-income countries and high-income countries,1 a retrospective analysis of European scientific societies’ triage policies early in the pandemic,2 an assessment of (...) the fairness of the allocation framework used by the WHO for their COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility,3 balancing physicians’ freedom to express opinions on medical matters with public interest when they run contrary to each other,4 and a survey of Americans’ views on race-based and place-based COVID-19 vaccine prioritisation.5 The articles include a mix of looking back and …. (shrink)

In this article, I bring together the archive of institutional activism of Niara Sudarkasa in the U.S. and the posthumous impact of activist and public administrator Marielle Franco. The 1970s historical sources show Sudarkasa’s institutional solidarity with students and faculty in the creation of one of the first Africana Studies departments in the U.S. Reading them, I articulate an ethos for the curation ‘715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back,’ a public digital art gallery comprised of art and history found (...) in the DAAS Papers (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) housed in the Bentley Library’s digital and physical archives. The analysis of the primary sources is guided by an engagement with the ‘Marielle Effect,’ generating a historical parameter for Abolitionist solidarity between American, Brazilian, Latin American, African American, Diasporic, and ally scholarly communities. The discussion of these parameters is embedded in my discussion of the concept of pacification, a phenomenon of colonial and post-colonial policing that survives through the perpetuation of an extra-judicial policing impetus articulated along race, identity, legality, and sexual legitimacy of subjects. (shrink)

: The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments has correctly argued that persons and institutions can sometimes be held responsible for actions taken more than a half-century ago, when practices and policies on the use of research subjects were strikingly different. In reaching its conclusions, the Committee did not altogether adhere to the language and commitments of its own ethical framework. In its Final Report, the Committee emphasizes judgments of wrongdoing, to the relative neglect of culpability; it discusses mitigating conditions (...) that are exculpatory, but does not provide a thoroughgoing assessment of either culpability or exculpation. However, the Committee's shortcomings are mild in comparison to the deficiencies in the "Report of the UCSF Ad Hoc Fact Finding Committee on World War II Human Radiation Experiments" of the University of California at San Francisco. The latter report reaches no significant judgments of either wrongdoing or culpability. The findings that should have been reached by both committees are discussed. (shrink)

No two images of socialism or utopia were more influential a century ago than those of Marx and Bellamy. Marx and Engels famously denied the utopian dimension of their own project; Bellamy celebrated it. In this essay I sketch out some clues for revisiting images of utopia in Marx and in Bellamy. My claim is that Marx failed to develop a systematic utopia or image of socialism. We are left with a series of hints towards five different images of utopia (...) across the path of his life and work. Bellamy's image of utopia is more consistent, but contrary to common understanding, it reflects the unresolved tensions of nineteenth century American modernity expressed through the prism of New England small town radicalism. Bellamy's utopia is connected to the later image of the machine in the garden; contrary to William Morris's assertion, he was not an unmixed modern, and this is one quality at least that he shared with Marx, where the impress of romanticism remains profound. (shrink)

This article takes a look back at the historical and philosophical context of the International Map of the World, humans’ first attempt at mapping the entire surface of the earth in detail on a uniform scale. Albrect Penck’s initial idea for a thoroughly detailed topographic map of the world, proposed at Fifth International Geographical Conference in 1891 and securing the support, both symbolic and financial, of many of the world’s governments by the first decades of the twentiethcentury, consisted (...) of a uniform series of hypsometrically-colored topographical maps overlaid with human data and dividing the world into consistently-scaled quadrangles. Envisioned by some geographers and cartographers as a component of the peace, both following both the First and then the Second World War, the project would come to be administered by international and non-governmental organizations by midcentury, as primary governmental support for cartography at that time increasingly reflected territorial interests and claims over and above those in favor of employing concepts of geographical knowledge that were not explicitly political or territorial. The slow demise of the project can be understood to signify the ultimate difficulty of a project that disacknowledged the fundamentality of politically constructed boundaries by employing another scale, in this case, a geometric scale with systematically geographical content, in order to frame its maps. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the implementation of the “Bologna reform” of higher education in the Republic of Serbia during the last fifteen years. Emphasizing neoliberalism as the ideological basis of the reform, the authors subjected the reform to a critical analysis of its normative goals and achieved achievements. The authors conclude that the restructuring of universities based on market principles and their transformation into for-profit organizations leads to the gradual collapse of the basic function of a modern university embodied in the (...) search for truth and the production of knowledge. Contrary to the proclaimed “knowledge society”, the reform led to the lowering of scientific and educational standards and the neglect of immediately inapplicable knowledge, which completely changed the social evaluation of knowledge and science and resulted in the establishment of a “society of ignorance”. (shrink)

Güinope, Honduras was the site of a highly acclaimed people-centered development project in the 1980s. The ACORDE/Ministry of Natural Resource/World Neighbors Integrated Development Program (IDP) was unique for its time, since rather than relying on technology transfer, it promoted innovation skills for local generation of responses to needs. Furthermore, it was one of the first efforts in Latin America to employ villagers as principal agents of change. Fifteen years after the inception of the IDP and ten years after its completion, (...) the authors interviewed farmers in their fields and held a series of participatory workshops over eighteen months with ten outstanding farmers who had become project leaders. The leaders identified influential factors behind their involvement and produced recommendations for rural development interventions. Further, a generalized concept map typifying ideal characteristics for farmer promoters was constructed. Recommendations for development agencies centered on project design and implementation, demanding a methodology for strengthening local innovative capacities, participation, and control over resources. Ultimately, the leaders downplayed the role of technologies in rural development and called for special attention to enabling communities to confront external pressures, in particular recent government ``modernization'' policies, that they felt threatened community livelihood. (shrink)

Cet article est une étude sur l’apparition et la fortune critique du terme installation dans le vocabulaire de l’art contemporain. À travers la brève histoire de la diffusion de ce mot en art seront analysés les circonstances contextuelles, les modalités de fonctionnement et l’imaginaire de la forme « installation ». Devenue populaire grâce à trois artistes commissaires d’un lieu d’exposition à Londres, le « Museum of Installation » dans les années 1990, la forme « installation » renvoie à des dispositifs (...) antérieurs, amorcés dès les avant-gardes. L’analyse historique permet d’en appréhender les différents paliers : les prémisses, puis les « environnements » issus de l’assemblage et popularisés par Allan Kaprow, et l’« in situ », ces deux dernières formes et leur terminologie dominant jusqu’à la fin des années 1970. Après la transition constituée par les années 1980, le texte se conclut par l’analyse d’un moment inaugural ouvrant l’histoire des installations en France, les « Ateliers du Paradise » de 1991. À travers cette œuvre sont questionnées les différentes valeurs critiques comme les ambiguïtés de ce mode aujourd’hui si répandu internationalement qu’il semble à beaucoup synonyme d’art contemporain. This article studies the emergence and critical reception of the term installation in today’s artistic vocabulary. Through the brief history of the diffusion of the word will be analyzed its contextual circumstances, the functioning procedures and the imaginary conveyed through the different forms of installation. Mediated by three artists who, in the 1990s, curated a place in London they called the “Museum of Installation”, installation as an art form much predates the 1990, and can be found in avant-garde art. The historical analysis allows one to discern different stages: the premises of installation, “environments” issued from assemblage and popularized by Allan Kaprow, “site-specific” installations,—these last two forms and words being prevalent up to the end of the 1970s. After presenting the transitional period of the 1980s, the text concludes with the analysis of an inaugural event opening the history of installations in France, the “Paradise’s Studios”, in 1991. Through this analysis are questioned the critical values as well as the ambiguities of installation, as this very form is so internationally spread today that it seems to mean contemporary art itself. (shrink)

First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of (...) a "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides. (shrink)

This discussion seeks to highlight the ability of poetry to combat loneliness, a growing public health problem with significant negative health outcomes that potentially impact millions of Americans. We argue that poetry can play a very relevant role and have an impact in medicine. Through a brief literature review of previous studies on poetry in medicine, we demonstrate that poetry can not only combat loneliness but can also play important roles in helping patients, physicians, and other healthcare professionals/providers. Because of (...) the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe now is the perfect opportunity to utilize poetry because the benefits can be experienced even in solitude, which is why this is such a timely and pertinent issue today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Looking Back and Moving ForwardDebbie PittsI started my Nursing Assistant career forty-three years ago and have worked in the same long-term care facility for the past forty years now. Over the years, I have seen many cultural changes being made in the field. Back then everyone was referred to as patients, then residents and more recently elders. As these changes took place, it was difficult for us (...) to change in the sense of calling them patients to residents and now elders but we all manage to accomplish it. Our elders have so many more choices nowadays, which has been a wonderful additive for those who live in a facility.As I look back, I can remember when restraints were used routinely. The good old locked Posey belts, pelvic restraints, vest restraints and how many other types that we used to use. Already many years have passed since we have used these things and that is a blessing as they were nothing more than a pain to use for us and our elders. Sometimes they would be so knotted it was difficult to get them untied. I can remember that many who needed to have these were people that had symptoms of now what we call Alzheimer's or people with some sort of dementia. Back then they were unsure of this disease. These were definitely some challenging times to work in. Taking care of the combative person can be very difficult. At least now, we have much more knowledge through education as to how to handle and deal with these issues. I have been fortunate in my facility that we thrive on education, which helps me learn all the modern techniques and ways of dealing with the many issues we have today with dementias.When I go to work daily, I not only have to take care of my elders, but then I also have to deal with their families as well. This too, can be somewhat difficult at times. Some of them can become quite demanding with the cares needed for their loved one. After dealing with them I often find that they have a guilty feeling for having to place them in a nursing home, but it can still create a problem for you and make it hard to get your cares done for other elders on your daily schedule. As much as I try to reassure them that their family member is getting the best care and attention they need, sometimes it isn't enough to satisfy them. There are times if I feel pressured or frustrated I will talk with my supervisor, or a social worker, and ask them if they could have a talk with the family for me. I find that having [End Page 143] good communication with every department and all supervisors is vitally important in my job. Unlike years ago, today we are all a team and are there for our elders and their every need.On a more personal level, with my daily routine in care, I love when I can take my elder for a walk. Sometimes they may be fearful of falling or something else. Using reassurance and encouragement and getting them going can be a very rewarding situation. It's when they don't believe they are capable of doing this, and then they do, when you realize just how much you have done for them. The smiles, thank yous and hugs I get back can just warm your heart and even put tears in your eyes. The sense of accomplishment provided for them is very rewarding. This is just so true whether it be walking, eating, bathing or dressing. Taking the time to work individually with each elder on whatever levels needed is so important. When they tell their family member about their accomplishment that they achieved today, they are so proud. The smiles, twinkle in their eyes and the excitement shown is just amazing. Sometimes at this point I can develop a relationship with the difficult family member. Normally they will be happy for their loved one's accomplishment and grateful to you for helping them. My personal accomplishment is becoming a... (shrink)

In her new article in the American Journal of Bioethics, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby (2024) provides at least three reasons that support her argument that the concept of personhood must be abandoned...

ABSTRACT This article employs Richard Rorty's 1996 text “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096” as a model for examining the state of America, education, and philosophy from the year 2117. The imaginative engagement explores how past and present structures might yield to future forms with a focus on early childhood education, guns, literacy, higher education and the state of the university, and the relationships between professional philosophy and social activism in America. Arguing for a shift in the paradigms of thinking (...) and writing to include more revolutionary and artistic practice, this essay envisions a future in which philosophy takes increasingly pluralistic, creative, and political forms. Rorty's prophetic writings serve as one example of the value of imagination in the production of social change, hope, and the destabilization of entrenched patterns of thought. (shrink)

The seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in 1945 invites us to look back at the achievement of creating this new organization even before the guns had fallen silent in World War II. It also prompts us to ask: Where is the organization today? How well has it fulfilled and is it still fulfilling the high ideals of its Charter? Even more importantly, how confident can we be that what has grown into the complex UN (...) system will not just survive but also provide its member states and the peoples of the world with the organizational structures, resources, and tools needed to address twenty-first century challenges? (shrink)

The aim of the article is to review Japanese Political Studies in Japan (JPSJ) circa 2000 for the purpose of identifying the trends of JPSJ and gauging its scope, subject areas, and methods. I then identify the key questions asked in JPSJ, i.e. for the third quarter of the last century: (1) What went wrong for Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, which had been seemingly making progress in the scheme of and was with a ? (2) What is the (...) secret of Western democracy in excelling itself in terms of keeping freedom and accumulating wealth? For the last quarter of the last century: (1) Why is Japanese politics shaped so heavily by bureaucracy? (2) Why are its citizens so weakly partisan in their voting choice? (3) How are politics and economics intertwined in policy making and electoral behavior? Following these trends in JPSJ in the latter half of the last century, I identify the three trends that have emerged in the first quarter of this century: (1) historicizing the normative and institutional origins of Japanese politics, (2) putting Japanese politics in comparative perspective, (3) the new self-conscious impetus for data collection and theory construction. Despite the steady tide of globalization and the strong influence of American political science, market size, long tradition, and language facility, lead political scientists in Japan to think and write more autonomously. (shrink)

In this interview with Jean Grondin, Gadamer discusses the meaning ‘linguisticality’ and acknowledges his intellectual debt to Heidegger, Augustine, Vico and classical Greek philosophy. Heidegger’s influence on Gadamer can be seen in Gadamer’s awareness of pernicious ontological effects of the Latinization of European language, his awareness of the centrality of technology to the understanding of contemporary philosophical problems and the idea that ‘language speaks’. From Augustine, Gadamer derived his theory of the word as that which cannot be known and brought (...) under control; from Vico the idea that language is rhetorical; and from classical philosophy the Aristotelian idea of phronesis and the Platonic idea that the idea of beauty is inseparable from the idea of the good. Gadamer concludes the interview with a discussion of the need for humanity to overcome its present fascination with technology. (shrink)

An examination of the use of the idiom “to return” to express the forgiveness and compassion of a deity in ancient Semitic languages and quranic Arabic.

The place is San Francisco, the year 1981. The newly minted young doctor, all shiny confidence, sits at his desk. Suddenly, he stares down at a lab result, startled. This opening scene can mean only one thing in a medical memoir: the mysterious disease not yet known as AIDS has come to town. As the generation who first encountered AIDS ages into its memoir-writing years, we will be seeing more of these first chapters, and despite their inevitable redundancies, each may (...) well bring something unique to the table. Every illness subsumes many worlds, but the AIDS epidemic in particular has contained multitudes, each smaller epidemic whirling at a different speed and spinning out a different set of urgencies. In Lethal Decisions: The Unnecessary Deaths of Women and Children from HIV/AIDS, Arthur Ammann offers a comprehensive if problematic account from the world of pediatric AIDS. (shrink)

Debate about the epistemic prowess of historical science has focused on local underdetermination problems generated by a lack of historical data; the prevalence of information loss over geological time, and the capacities of scientists to mitigate it. Drawing on Leonelli’s recent distinction between ‘phenomena-time’ and ‘data-time’ I argue that factors like data generation, curation and management significantly complexifies and undermines this: underdetermination is a bad way of framing the challenges historical scientists face. In doing so, I identify circumstances of epistemic (...) scarcity where underdetermination problems are particularly salient, and discuss cases where legacy data—data generated using differing technologies and systems of practice—are drawn upon to overcome underdetermination. This suggests that one source of overcoming underdetermination is our knowledge of science’s past. Further, data-time makes agnostic positions about the epistemic fortunes of scientists working under epistemic scarcity more plausible. But agnosticism seems to leave philosophers without much normative grip. So, I sketch an alternative approach: focusing on the strategies scientists adopt to maximize their epistemic power in light of the resources available to them. (shrink)