"The maestry of nature was viewed by eighteenth-century historians as an important measure of the progress of civilization. Modern scholarship has hitherto taken insufficient notice of this important idea. This book discusses the topic in connection with the mainstream religious, political, and philosophical elements of the Enlightenment culture. It considers workd by Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Herder, Vico, Raynal, Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and a wide range of lesse- and better-know figures. It also discusses many classical, medieval, and early (...) modern sources which influenced Enlightenment historiography, as well as eighteen-century attitudes toward nature in general". (shrink)

Working within a framework of environmental philosophy and environmental ethics, this book describes and postulates alternative understandings of nature in Indian traditions of thought, particularly philosophy. The interest in alternative conceptualizations of nature has gained significance after many thinkers pointed out that attitudes to the environment are determined to a large extent by our presuppositions of nature. This book is particularly timely from that perspective. It begins with a brief description of the concept of nature and (...) a history of the idea of nature in Western thought. This provides readers with a context to the issues around the concept of nature in environmental philosophy, setting a foundation for further discussion about alternate conceptualizations of nature and their significance. In particular, the work covers a wide array of textual and non-textual sources to link and understand nature from classical Indian philosophical perspectives as well as popular understandings in Indian literary texts and cultural practices. Popular issues in environmental philosophy are discussed in detail, such as: What is ‘nature’ in Indian philosophy? How do people perceive nature through landscape and mythological and cultural narratives? In what ways is nature sacred in India? To make the discussion relevant to contemporary readers, the book includes a section on the ecological and ethical implications of some philosophical concepts and critical perspectives on alternate conceptualizations of nature. (shrink)

: The doctrines on human nature and moral development maintained in ancient China by Gaozi, Mencius, and Xunzi, respectively, have been interpreted mostly as a contradiction within the Confucian school. It is argued here that they represent distinct, yet possible and congruous, modes of interpreting and re-elaborating Confucius' teachings, two opposing yet largely complementary currents that have developed within the Confucian school.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels:Doing the MathJoseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel J. KrugerIThree broad ambitions animate this study. Building on research in evolutionary social science, we aimed (1) to construct a model of human nature—of motives, emotions, features of personality, and preferences in marital partners; (2) use that model to analyze some specific body of literary texts and the responses of readers (...) to those texts, and (3) produce data—information that could be quantified and could serve to test specific hypotheses about those texts.Evolutionary social science is still in the process of constructing a full and adequate model of human nature. Evolutionary social scientists know much already about how human reproductive behavior and human sociality fit into the larger pattern of human evolution. They still have much to learn, though, about the ways literature and the other arts enter into human nature. Our model of human nature draws on our knowledge of imaginative culture, integrates that knowledge with evolutionary theories of culture, and produces data that enable us to draw conclusions on an issue of broad significance for both literary study and evolutionary social science: the adaptive function of literature and the other arts.1In order to make advances in knowledge, it is necessary to choose some particular subject. Genetics is a basic science that applies to all organisms, but geneticists first got an empirical fix on their subject by focusing minutely, with Mendel, on peas, and, with Morgan, on fruit flies. In place of peas and flies, we have taken as our subject British novels of [End Page 50] the longer nineteenth century (Austen to Forster). As a literary topic, the subject is fairly broad, but our theoretical and methodological aims ultimately extend well beyond the specialist fields of British novels, the nineteenth century, British literature, narrative fiction, or even literary scholarship generally. This study is designed to engage the attention of literary scholars in all fields and also to engage the attention of social scientists. If it achieves its aims, this study would help persuade literary scholars that empirical methods offer rich opportunities for the advancement of knowledge about literature, and it would help persuade social scientists that the quantitative study of literature can shed important light on fundamental questions of human psychology and human social interaction. Our own research team combines these two prospective audiences. Two of us (Carroll and Gottschall) have been trained primarily as literary scholars, and two of us (Johnson and Kruger) primarily as social scientists.The focal point for this study is "agonistic" structure: the organization of characters into protagonists, antagonists, and minor characters. The central question in the study is this: does agonistic structure reflect evolved dispositions for forming cooperative social groups? Suppressing or muting competition within a social group enhances group solidarity and organizes the group psychologically for cooperative endeavor. Our chief hypothesis was that protagonists and good minor characters would form communities of cooperative endeavor and that antagonists would exemplify dominance behavior. If this hypothesis proved correct, the ethos reflected in the agonistic structure of the novels would replicate the egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherers, who stigmatize and suppress status-seeking in potentially dominant individuals. If suppressing dominance in hunter-gatherers fulfills an adaptive social function, and if agonistic structure in the novels engages the same social dispositions that animate hunter-gatherers, our study would lend support to the hypothesis that literature fulfills an adaptive social function.2One of our chief working hypotheses is that when readers respond to characters in novels, they respond in much the same way, emotionally, as they respond to people in everyday life. They like or dislike them, admire them or despise them, fear them, feel sorry for them, or are amused by them. In writing fabricated accounts of human behavior, novelists select and organize their material for the purpose of generating such responses, and readers willingly cooperate with this purpose. They participate vicariously in the experiences depicted and form personal opinions about the qualities of the characters. Authors and readers [End Page 51] thus collaborate in producing a simulated experience of emotionally responsive evaluative judgment. If agonistic structure is a... (shrink)

Numinous spaces in British literature from William Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett -- Jesus figures in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edward Albee -- Using Bakhtin's definitions to discover ethical voices in Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy -- René Girard's categories of scapegoats in literature of the American South -- Hopkins's metaphysics of nature as sacred disclosure -- The book of job as mirrored in Hopkins's metaphysics -- Beckett's mythos of the absence of God.

The latter half of the eighteenth century saw radical changes in the way nature - both external and human nature - was perceived. It is these new perceptions, these new images of the 'the natural' that this book examines: new appreciations of the 'sublime' wildness of landscape; new revelations by the life sciences of natural creative fecundity; new assertions of the innocence of 'natural man', as illustrated by the noble savage, the contented peasant, the happy family; a new (...) sense of harmony between man and nature, reflected in changing moral, psychological, economic, and religious attitudes. Professor Charlton concentrates on French examples, for in France the contrast between old and new views was particularly vivid; but there are also numerous comparisons with England and other European countries, making this a major study in the cultural history of Europe at an especially crucial time for the formation of many of our modem assumptions about man and nature. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo sostiene que algunas Meta-Picto-Poesías del Paisaje compuestas por el poeta estadounidense Gary Snyder toman como tema la pintura china del paisaje con las características de la antigua poesía china, resplandeciente de incomparable encanto artístico y sustancia cultural. La poesía de este tipo es una combinación perfecta de elementos orientales y occidentales, que integra las culturas, los pensamientos y las artes de ambas partes, cuya apreciación crea una experiencia compleja con un híbrido de formas artísticas y espacios estéticos. (...) Gary Snyder no es sólo un eco-poeta, sino también un estilista y un hombre de práctica. Sus obras poéticas revelan la relación de fomento entre literatura, cultura y naturaleza. El artículo pretende hacer un intento transcultural, interdisciplinar y multidisciplinar en la crítica de Snyder, con métodos analíticos que incluyen culturas orientales y occidentales, visiones antiguas y actuales, así como experiencias dinámicas y estáticas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 585-587 [Access article in PDF] Chumaru Koyama, editor. Nature in Medieval Thought: Some Approaches East & West. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. xiv + 183. Cloth, $65.00. The subtitle of this volume is misleading. The Japanese scholars represented (Koyama, Y. Iwata, and B. R. Inagaki) were all trained in Western medieval philosophy and are (...) highly respected medievalists. None of the Western contributors is an expert on Eastern philosophy. Even readers familiar with Japan will be hard pressed to find anything characteristically Eastern in any of the contributions.In the forward provided by the editor and in a preface written by W. Kluxen, we are informed that the volume was the product of two international conferences. Western [End Page 585] and Eastern experts on medieval philosophy were assembled to discuss the problem of "how each human being and humanity as a whole will handle nature in the future" (viii). Both Koyama and Kluxen assume that medieval Europeans conceived essential features of the understanding of "nature" now common to the whole world.Judging from the essays in the book, we conclude that the volume represents a beginning. There are connections between some of the essays, but the question remains: can the medieval view of nature offer us guidance on how to deal with our environmental crises? In general, one might expect a congenial relationship between ancient Western organic views and Japanese intuitions about nature. Nevertheless, compromise characterizes technological decision-making in both cultures. The challenge posed by radical environmentalists is the adequacy altogether of anthropocentric environmental ethics to save the planet.The essay by Iwata offers an interpretation of natural teleology that is compatible with mechanism and hypothetical necessity. Iwata suggests that art that pursues its own ends and not as an imitation of nature can be the source of environmental crises. Two papers by Kluxen on ethics, nature, and natural law acknowledge major transformations in the Middle Ages, and the challenge he poses is how to reintegrate reason and nature. K. Riesenhuber challenges recent accounts that claim to find in some twelfth-century authors an autonomous interest in nature. While nature as a discipline did not achieve autonomy in the twelfth century, Riesenhuber detects the stirrings of independence, but knowledge of nature remained subordinate to knowledge of God. L. Honnefelder suggests that guidance for our treatment of nature may lie in developing new models for the combination of the Platonic technomorphic with the Aristotelian biomorphic paradigm. Inagaki's paper on original sin and human nature adopts a stance that conforms to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the human break with nature. Whatever the source of that disintegration, the problem described in this way requires first a healing of human nature. The paper by M. M. Adams considers John Duns Scotus's revision of final causality. Scotus distinguished between the perfection of the being that a thing constitutes and the explanatory function of that achievement. On this account, Scotus revised the analysis to secure one sense in which Goodness explains being. The paper provides an example of the sorts of transformations in the medieval view suggested by several of the other contributors.C. Steel's paper questions the assumptions about the connection between medieval and modern conceptions of nature. Steel adopts a more comprehensive historical perspective. Flawed by its selective reliance on secondary literature, the paper nonetheless represents an important effort to understand our current dilemma from a historical perspective. Steel challenges L. White, Jr.'s now famous claim about the Christian roots of our ecological crisis. Steel overlooks White's appeals to Christian traditions at variance with Christian dualism and to the use of the Bible in the seventeenth century to sanction the study of science as a means to master nature. Steel takes up the vexed question of continuity or discontinuity between medieval philosophy of nature and seventeenth-century science. In the end Steel falls on the side of continuity, yet in a way that can be expressed only dialectically! That is to say, medieval commentaries on... (shrink)

The Truth of Ecology is a wide-ranging appraisal of contemporary environmental thought. It explores such topics as the history of ecology, radical science studies and radical ecology, the need for greater theoretical sophistication in ecocriticism, the dubious legacy of Thoreau, and the contradictions of current nature writing.

In the article the mutual influence of folk theatre, Austrian Singspiel and Viennese opera in the genres of comic opera, operetta and drama performances involving music, singing and dancing is studied. The powerful influence of Italian and French opera schools, as well as the Italian Commedia Dell'arte led to the flourishing of music and theatre art in Austria: opera buffa (A. Salieri, Ch. W. Glück, J. Haydn, W. A. Mozart), fairy-tale comedies of F. Raimund and satirical dramas of Nestroy. Their (...) game-like nature finds its expression in musical turns, satirical songs and duets. Viennese dance operetta has absorbed the traditions of Viennese popular comedy and comic opera. Recitative, vocal music and folk dances were the key elements of operettas (J. Strauss junior, F. von Suppe, K. Millöcker, K. Zeller, F. Lehar). The music and the game in Austria are the results of theatralization of life: the life turns into something like art. Austrian culture, which is addressed directly to the human being and short of complex philosophical musings and speculative schemes, has genetically built-in playful, musical and theatrical basis, as well as German. Strongly-pronounced playful and musical source as an important national component of the culture, its code, determine its highly fictitious character (staginess) and integrity (both genre and intermediately), thereby maintain its special status in the European culture. (shrink)

The question of naturalness in logic is widely discussed in today’s research literature. On the one hand, naturalness in the systems of natural deduction is intensively discussed on the basis of Aristotelian syllogistics. On the other hand, research on “natural logic” is concerned with the implicitly existing logical laws of natural language, and is therefore also interested in the naturalness of syllogistics. In both research areas, the question arises what naturalness exactly means, in logic as well as in language. (...) We show, however, that this question is not entirely new: In his Berlin Lectures of the 1820s, Arthur Schopenhauer already discussed in depths what is natural and unnatural in logic. In particular, he anticipates two criteria for the naturalness of deduction that meet current trends in research: (1) Naturalness is what corresponds to the actual practice of argumentation in everyday language or scientific proof; (2) Naturalness of deduction is particularly evident in the form of Euler-type diagrams. (shrink)

The question of human nature has not been effectively addressed in our time because of great skepticism in the academic and philosophical discourses about the idea of social progress and the validity of a common humanity. As a result the question has been reduced by neoliberalism, biopsychology, and social psychology to demonstrating the malleability of humans in response to hierarchical, biological, or social-conformist pressures. To recover the concept of human nature it will be necessary to reconceptualize the dynamic (...) of human development as a feature of the modern and late modern achievements of a more evolved vision of individuality and community. (shrink)

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale (...) in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales. (shrink)

The essays chosen for this anthology were taken from a conference held April 20–21, 2018, in Florence, Italy, at the Dutch University Institute of Art. All concern themselves with what editor Guy H...

The central importance of Marx's concept of nature in the formulation of historical materialism has been largely neglected in the extensive literature on Marx. Alfred Schmidt, philosophical successor to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt, seeks to elucidate it in this original study.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British Novels:Doing the MathJoseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel J. KrugerIThree broad ambitions animate this study. Building on research in evolutionary social science, we aimed (1) to construct a model of human nature—of motives, emotions, features of personality, and preferences in marital partners; (2) use that model to analyze some specific body of literary texts and the responses of readers (...) to those texts, and (3) produce data—information that could be quantified and could serve to test specific hypotheses about those texts.Evolutionary social science is still in the process of constructing a full and adequate model of human nature. Evolutionary social scientists know much already about how human reproductive behavior and human sociality fit into the larger pattern of human evolution. They still have much to learn, though, about the ways literature and the other arts enter into human nature. Our model of human nature draws on our knowledge of imaginative culture, integrates that knowledge with evolutionary theories of culture, and produces data that enable us to draw conclusions on an issue of broad significance for both literary study and evolutionary social science: the adaptive function of literature and the other arts.1In order to make advances in knowledge, it is necessary to choose some particular subject. Genetics is a basic science that applies to all organisms, but geneticists first got an empirical fix on their subject by focusing minutely, with Mendel, on peas, and, with Morgan, on fruit flies. In place of peas and flies, we have taken as our subject British novels of [End Page 50] the longer nineteenth century (Austen to Forster). As a literary topic, the subject is fairly broad, but our theoretical and methodological aims ultimately extend well beyond the specialist fields of British novels, the nineteenth century, British literature, narrative fiction, or even literary scholarship generally. This study is designed to engage the attention of literary scholars in all fields and also to engage the attention of social scientists. If it achieves its aims, this study would help persuade literary scholars that empirical methods offer rich opportunities for the advancement of knowledge about literature, and it would help persuade social scientists that the quantitative study of literature can shed important light on fundamental questions of human psychology and human social interaction. Our own research team combines these two prospective audiences. Two of us (Carroll and Gottschall) have been trained primarily as literary scholars, and two of us (Johnson and Kruger) primarily as social scientists.The focal point for this study is "agonistic" structure: the organization of characters into protagonists, antagonists, and minor characters. The central question in the study is this: does agonistic structure reflect evolved dispositions for forming cooperative social groups? Suppressing or muting competition within a social group enhances group solidarity and organizes the group psychologically for cooperative endeavor. Our chief hypothesis was that protagonists and good minor characters would form communities of cooperative endeavor and that antagonists would exemplify dominance behavior. If this hypothesis proved correct, the ethos reflected in the agonistic structure of the novels would replicate the egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherers, who stigmatize and suppress status-seeking in potentially dominant individuals. If suppressing dominance in hunter-gatherers fulfills an adaptive social function, and if agonistic structure in the novels engages the same social dispositions that animate hunter-gatherers, our study would lend support to the hypothesis that literature fulfills an adaptive social function.2One of our chief working hypotheses is that when readers respond to characters in novels, they respond in much the same way, emotionally, as they respond to people in everyday life. They like or dislike them, admire them or despise them, fear them, feel sorry for them, or are amused by them. In writing fabricated accounts of human behavior, novelists select and organize their material for the purpose of generating such responses, and readers willingly cooperate with this purpose. They participate vicariously in the experiences depicted and form personal opinions about the qualities of the characters. Authors and readers [End Page 51] thus collaborate in producing a simulated experience of emotionally responsive evaluative judgment. If agonistic structure is a... (shrink)

Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary works are "spatial" insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This argument has (...) been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract attention from more important features of the reading experience. The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view, not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works , spatial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any work that does not. · 1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 and was revised in his The Widening Gyre . Frank's basic argument has not changed essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 : 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten .· 2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is the author of Blake's Composite Art, and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology: The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Leon Surette responds to the current essay in "‘Rational Form in Literature’". (shrink)

While there are interesting connections between literature and evil, there is as of yet no systematic collection of models of evil to study literature. This is problematic, since literature is among other things an evaluative discourse and the most basic evaluative category is the polarity of good versus evil. In addition, evil shows important affinities with basic narratological principles. To initiate a discussion of models of evil for the analysis of literature, this article organizes a dozen (...) models of evil into four groups. The first consists of a core model which coincides with basic narratological elements in character analysis and narrative tension. The second group contains two pre-modern models of evil, defilement and moral-natural evil. The third group takes its cue from personality theory and proposes the five-factor model of personality and an enriched “dark triad,” and, to balance description against narration, a model which categorizes kinds of murder. The last group organizes six models around the thematic opposition between nature and society, an opposition which forms the backbone of Western philosophy and narrative. To test their validity, the models are applied to a series of literary examples/characters, above all Grendel, Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” and Carol Oates’ short story “Heat.”. (shrink)

The question of what is philosophy, leads, it would seem, inevitably to diverse and conflicting, if not at times contradictory, answers. It is not only a matter of different philosophic perspectives, but also of fundamentally opposed conceptions of philosophy. Varying philosophic intentions and aims underlie what is taken to be the nature of philosophy and disagreement abounds. Philosophies then tend to differ not so much in terms of what they disagree about but what they consider philosophically sound and important. (...) Phenomenology may share some concerns about basic philosophic problems, like intentionality, with ordinary language philosophy. But they diverge again sharply about the question of what philosophy should accomplish for, and what difference it makes to, human knowledge and understanding. The one sees intentionality as the pervasive structure of human consciousness and reality, and the other sees it as simply part of the various ways in which the uses of language can explain, and thus do away with, philosophical questions on perplexity. This difference about what philosophy should accomplish, its purpose, is not resolvable. It is what on each approach must be considered the very nature of philosophy and its primary task. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

The paper analyzes philosophy of nature viewing it as this part of philosophy which investigates the foundations of nature and the limits of its existence. The paper concerns the following issues: the historical forms of the philosophy of nature, its modern context and the embracing philosophy of nature in the frame of co-evolution strategy determining that nature is only a moment of interaction between mankind and the world outward. It is shown that “philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>nature” is an extremely general notion being filled with various historical, social and cultural senses. Nature is involved into the smithery of human activity and human relations. In cannot be understood beyond these relations, as well as beyond the historical and cultural spheres. Nature becomes the participant of human questioning which grows in certain social and cultural context and carries on itself its signs. Philosophy of nature begins to be built up on the basis of ontology of history, or, in other words, on the basis of the comprehension of ultimate characteristics of historic processes. (shrink)

The notion of aesthetic illusion relates to a number of art forms and media. Defined as a pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of texts and artefacts, it amounts to the reader's or viewer's sense of having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping a distance from it. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts is an in-depth study of the main questions surrounding this experience of art as reality. Beginning with an introduction providing (...) historical background to modern discussions of illusion, it deals with a wide range of theoretical issues. The collection explores the nature and function of the aesthetic illusion as well as the role of affect and emotion, the implications of aesthetic illusion for the theory of fiction, the variable forms of aesthetic illusion and its relationship to other components of aesthetic response. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts brings together a team of scholars from philosophy, literature and art and presents an interdisciplinary examination of a concept lying at the heart of contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

Das Nachdenken von Wissenschaftlern und Kunstlern uber das Verhaltnis von Natur und Kunsten, uber die begrundende, orientierende Qualitat der Kunst, ihr Bearbeitungs-, Veranderungs-, Deutungsrecht an der Natur oder ihre Abhangigkeit von der Natur ist alt. Das in den sechziger Jahren erwachte Interesse an der Barockliteratur hat der Literatur der fruhen Neuzeit in vielen Bereichen ganz neue und andere, vor allem in einzelne Kunste und Nationalkulturen ubergreifende Zusammenhange gelehrt, mit bis heute unabsehbaren und weiterwirkenden Folgen fur die Kulturgeschichte der Epoche.Die 65 (...) Vortrage des Kongresses gehen der Programmatik und den Perspektiven des Verhaltnisses von Natur und Kunsten nach, untersuchen die Konstanz und den Wandel im kunsttheoretischen Diskurs, betrachten Fragen der Kunstnormierung und der Entwicklung neuer Gattungen, beschreiben Institution und Medien der Diskussion und der Entwicklung von Kunstlehren. (shrink)

This is a philosophical review of the exhibition dedicated to Literature – Art titled Mukhaputa (Cover page) held on occasion of the Manipal International Literature and Arts Platform 2017 in Manipal, India. The curatorial strategy of the exhibition explores the intersectional relationships between literature and visual arts at large. The context of this critical review is the recent past of modern literature journals in print that encouraged artists and illustrators to converse with literature and in (...) turn poets and authors to be artists in their own right. Through a reflection on the nature of new forms of art works submitted by various artists to the exhibition, the review situates new methods of interdisciplinary curating which is highly contingent and speculative. Curation, thus, demands a new reading in terms of its role in interdisciplinary creative practice. (shrink)

In literary aesthetics, the debate on whether literary fictions provide propositional knowledge generally centres around the question whether there are authors’ explicit or implicit truth-claims in literary works and whether the reader’s act of looking for and assessing such claims as true or false is an appropriate stance toward the works as literary works. Nevertheless, in reading literary fiction, readers cannot always be sure whether the author is actually asserting or suggesting a view she expresses or presents because of the (...) artistic and imaginative nature of the work. In this essay, I shall argue that in addition to asserting and suggesting, authors make use of a third way of conveying knowledge by their works: they invite the reader to genuinely or extra-fictionally contemplate unasserted thoughts or viewpoints to a given issue, or they offer hypotheses or provide the reader fictional material for constructing a hypothesis. The aim of this essay is to examine this rather unanalyzed but extremely wide grey zone: the author’s act of ‘contemplating’ and the cognitive value of its products which I shall call ‘literary hypotheses.’. (shrink)

Applying an ecocritical lens to Holocaust literature, this paper explores the connection between the natural world and the seemingly unnatural machinations of the Holocaust by placing two writers in conversation: Abraham Sutzkever and Vasily Grossman. For Sutzkever, the famed Yiddish poet of Vilna, poetry was linked to survival and to the environment, sometimes emerging from a bog, wilderness, or mutilated landscape but shining all the more brightly for its mired origins. Grossman, another important documenter of the Holocaust, was a (...) Soviet-Jewish writer known for his reportage, fiction, and compilations of Jewish documents from the Second World War. Like Sutzkever, Grossman was occupied in his work with the earth and its animate and inanimate inhabitants, from the crying stones and soil of Treblinka to the red sunset of a humanity ravaged by genocide. When faced with the almost unnarratable desolation and loss encountered during the Holocaust, both authors turned to their environment as a literary tool, a means of conveying that which could not be conveyed through traditional or accepted language. Nature and the nonhuman world became vehicles for an exploration of trauma and violence that in many ways extended beyond human comprehension, and therefore required a mode of imagining that similarly extended beyond human experience alone. At the same time, both Sutzkever and Grossman can be seen attempting to allow nonhuman nature to speak in its own voice, however inflected by human perspectives the hearing and translation of that voice may be. This paper therefore reveals and highlights the importance of addressing the interactions between human and nonhuman nature in Holocaust literature. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] essays collected in Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature present unique perspectives on the representation of ethical concerns in literature. Edited by Garry L. Hagberg, these essays address different ways that ethical and aesthetic concerns are interwoven in works of long-form literature such as novels and (...) theatrical works. The majority of these essays also support a related claim: due to their long-form nature, these types of literary works provide a reader with ethical perspectives that are both more holistic and nuanced than is possible in typical philosophical thought experiments. Long-form literature affords the time and space to show us the breadth and depth of both our ethical motivations and their consequences.Hagberg has divided this work into... (shrink)

When reading literature, we might have an emotional connection with the author, or at least what appears to be such, even when that literature is a work of fiction. But it is unclear how a work of fictional literature could supply the resources for such an experience. It is, after all, a work of fiction, not a report of the author’s experience, as with memoir or autobiography. The task of this paper is twofold: first, to explain the (...) nature and value of this emotional experience; second, to argue that a fictional literary work can supply the resources for such an experience. (shrink)

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of (...) influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)

In "Nostromo," Conrad is proffering an ontological comment on the universe's structural economy involving the motions and counter-motions of the human and natural orders of creation.

In "Nostromo," Conrad is proffering an ontological comment on the universe's structural economy involving the motions and counter-motions of the human and natural orders of creation.

Producers, traders, and consumers oforganic food regularly use the concept of thenatural (naturalness) to characterize organicagriculture and or organic food, in contrast tothe unnaturalness of conventional agriculture.Critics sometimes argue that such use lacks anyrational (scientific) basis and only refers tosentiment. In our project, we made an attemptto clarify the content and the use of theconcepts of nature and naturalness in organicagriculture, to relate this conception todiscussions within bioethical literature, andto draw the implications for agriculturalpractice and policy.Qualitative interviews were (...) executed with arange of people in the field of organicagriculture and with consumers of organicproducts, on the basis of a list of statementsabout the meaning of the concept of naturalnessformulated by the authors. Based on the resultsof the interviews, we distinguished 3 aspectsof the concept of naturalness: natural as theorganic (life processes), natural as theecological, and natural as referring to thecharacteristic nature of an entity. We relatedthese conceptual aspects to three mainapproaches within the field of organicagriculture: the no chemicals approach, theagro-ecological approach, and the integrityapproach. It became clear that these approachescan also be recognized in the change ofattitude of farmers as they convert fromconventional to organic agriculture, and in theattitudes of consumers of organic foodproducts. (shrink)

Art versus nature, the literary work and the author, the literary work and the reader, structure and style, and the purpose of literature are the main subjects treated in a study of eight leading writers of modern Japan.

Acoustic experiences of nature represent a growing area in restorative environments research and are explored in this narrative literature review. First, the work surveyed indicates that nature is broadly characterized by the sounds of birdsong, wind, and water, and these sounds can enhance positive perceptions of natural environments presented through visual means. Second, isolated from other sensory modalities these sounds are often, although not always, positively affectively appraised and perceived as restorative. Third, after stress and/or fatigue (...) class='Hi'>nature sounds and soundscapes can lead to subjectively and objectively improved mood and cognitive performance, as well as reductions in arousal, although some inconsistencies in findings are observed. Fourth, theoretical frameworks of restorative environments would benefit from inclusion of acoustic environmental properties such as sound intensity or frequency. Fifth, findings regarding positive, learned semantic associations with nature have arisen as a result of recent work on sounds and restoration. This represents another important area of potential theoretical development for broader restorative environments research. (shrink)

Views of what role convention plays in the creation and appreciation of art works gravitate towards two extremes. One view holds that works of art can be apprehended and appreciated as well as created with no reference to convention. The other claims that conventions fully determine how works of art are apprehended and are therefore necessary conditions for the creation of works of art as well as constitutive of appreciation. The former is a version of the Romantic view of art (...) as something that appeals spontaneously to man's most profound emotions, to man's sentient nature, without making use of or needing mediating conventions. The conventionalist view denies that it is possible to respond spontaneously to art. All apprehension and appreciation of art are structured by conventions, and the reader/audience cannot go beyond these conventions because they constitute the experience of the work of art. This paper explains the sense in which the constitutive view may be best understood. (shrink)

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of (...) influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell. In The Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance. (shrink)