Hrotsvit wrote stories, plays, and histories during the reign of Emperor Otto the Great. Twelve original essays survey her work, showing historical roots and contexts, Christian values, and a surprisingly modern grappling with questions of identity and female self-realization.

This new book proposes a way out of the crisis by letting go of the idea that psychology needs ‘new’ foundations or a new identity, whether biological, discursive, or cognitive. The psychological is not narrowly confined to any one aspect of human experience; it is quite literally ‘everywhere’. Drawing on a range of influential thinkers including Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, AN Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, the book proposes a strong process-oriented approach to the psychological, which studies ‘events’ or ‘occasions.’.

This essay analyses the role played by okra in The Underground Railroad, together with how it functions in relation to the soil that sustains it and which allows it to grow. I argue that okra represents an otherwise lost African past for both protagonist Cora and for the show in general and that this transplanted plant, similar to the transplanted Africans who endured the Middle Passage on the way to ‘New World’ slave plantations, survives by going through ‘black holes’, something (...) that is not only linked poetically to the established trope of the otherwise absent Black mother but which also finds support from physics, where wormholes (similar to the holes created by worms in the soil) take us through black holes and into new worlds, realities or dimensions. This is reflected in Jenkins’s series (as well as Whitehead’s novel) by the titular Underground Railroad itself, which sees Cora and others disappear underground only to reappear in new states (the show travels from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana and so on), as well as specifically in the show through the formal properties of the audio-visual (cinematic/televisual) medium, which, with its cuts and movements, similarly keeps shifting through space and time in a nonlinear but generative fashion. Finally, I suggest that we cannot philosophise the plant or the medium of film (or television or streaming media) without philosophising race, with The Underground Railroad serving as a means for bringing together plants and plantations, soil and wormholes and Blackness and black holes, which, collectively and playfully, I group under the umbrella term ‘black (w)hole foods’. (shrink)

Genomic conflicts are potentially involved in the evolution and maintenance of culture. Maternal genes contributing to neocortical development could influence biases in the acquisition of information. Specifically, relatedness asymmetries due to multiple paternity are expected to lead to an increased reliability and receptivity of matrilineally-transmitted information. This view complements the gene-culture coevolutionary model adopted by Rendell and Whitehead.

Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have all embraced Whitehead’s thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media. _The Lure of Whitehead_ offers readers not only a comprehensive (...) introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch. Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana U; Nathan Brown, U of California, Davis; Peter Canning; Didier Debaise, Free U of Brussels; Roland Faber, Claremont Lincoln U; Michael Halewood, U of Essex; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Steven Meyer, Washington U; Luciana Parisi, U of London; Keith Robinson, U of Arkansas at Little Rock; Isabelle Stengers, Free U of Brussels; James Williams, U of Dundee. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the life achievements of Jason W. Brown, who, along with Jean Piaget, Heinz Werner, Alexander Luria and the Wurzburg school, has significantly contributed to the development of a process-based theory of brain/mind capable of challenging the currently fashionable modularist or cybernetic approaches to understanding human thought and feeling. As a paradigm, Brown's microgenetic theory is thus applicable in both brain science (where Brown was inspired by the pioneering work of Schilder and Pick) and the (...) philosophy of mind (where the influence of Bergson, Whitehead, Cassirer, and Merleau-Ponty can be seen). Essays with a range of focus as wide as Brown's expertise have been collected in such diverse areas as neuropsychology (microstructure of action, symptomatology, neuro-rehabilitation, neurolinguistics, locationism), theoretical psychology (consciousness, hypnosis, morphogenesis, personality development, psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, mysticism), and philosophy of mind (evolutionary epistemology, emergence/novelty/creativity, subjectivity, will and action, Whiteheadian process philosophy).". (shrink)

Jason Brown started his career as a neurologist specializing in language disorders, perceptive illusions, and impaired action. But beyond his activity as a physician he is a man of genuinely theoretical appetite. As satisfying as it is to help improve the situation of sick fellow humans, this alone does not characterize him well. Those who know him closer know his insistent urge to find a philosophical framework for his clinical practice and research, together with his desire for a more (...) humane society. Those who do not know him will see this immediately when they read his most recent book Process and the authentic life (Brown 2006). This is, in a nutshell, how and why Brown came to look into process philosophy, as an alternative to philosophical systems focusing on substances such as the Cartesian res cogitans and res extensa, on which science and technology are essentially based. Process philosophy holds some radical deviations from these systems, and may be regarded as complementary to them (Roemer 2006), although any such convergence is hotly contested (e.g., Bickhard 2004). Best known among adherents of a process worldview is Whitehead with his opus magnum Process and Reality. Brown’s approach is clearly in the spirit of Whitehead’s. However, due to his medical and psychological background it differs in motivation, and consequently it differs in the way it is carried out. While Whitehead, originally a mathematician, tried to be as precise and detailed as possible in his definitions, arguments and conclusions, Brown strives for his humanistic goal more directly. His accounts are based on examples rather than formal inferences, everyday experiences rather than abstract constructions. (shrink)

Browning has put together a useful anthology of texts taken from Bergson, Peirce, James, Alexander, Morgan, Dewey, Mead, and Whitehead, and arranged around the common allegiance of these philosophers to a "metaphysics of motion" as opposed to a classical "metaphysics of rest." The metaphysical presuppositions of at least one form of process philosophy are delineated in a remarkably concise and coherent introduction by Charles Hartshorne: one is tempted to call this introduction Hartshorne's Monadology. The editor provides an illuminating historical (...) account of the genesis of process philosophy in his preface, and has included a brief biographical introduction and a well-selected and current bibliography for each philosopher.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This collection of essays analyzes relations of social inequality that appear to be logical extensions of a "natural order," and in the process demonstrates that a revitalized feminist anthropology of the 1990s has much to offer the field of feminist theory. Fashioned as a response to the lack of cultural analysis in feminist scholarship, the contributors question the category of gender within the inclusive context of the structural dynamics of inequality. They also examine how cultural identities, domains and institutions affect (...) our perception of gender in society. The first selection of essays addresses how ideas of family and kinship have fostered society's hierarchies and legitimized the status quo. In part two, the essays show how several dimensions of inequality are implicit in the construction of identities that are based upon ideas of social solidarity. Contributors: Susan McKinnon, University of Virginia; Kath Weston, Arizona State West; Rayna Rapp, New School for Social Research; Janet Dolgin, Hofstra University; Harriet Whitehead, Duke University; Carol Delaney, Stanford University; Brackette Williams, University of Arizona; Sylvia Yanagisako, Stanford University; Phyllis Chock, Catholic University; Sherry Ortner, University of Michigan; Anna Tsing, University of California, Santa Cruz. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Kathryn Kein 671 Kathryn Kein Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies At the 2014 annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), the Humor Studies Caucus held a panel titled “Female Comedians and the Critical Power of Laughter.” After listening to presentations on Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, and Black women comedians’ 1960s comedy albums, one audience (...) member asked the panel if the classic theories of humor—Freud’s theory of the joke, Bergson’s thoughts on laughter (all conceived of in relation to the work of men)—applied when analyzing female comedic performers. One panelist immediately responded that she found none of those theories useful to her work on female comedians, and that instead she used queer theory to aid her analysis. This exchange at ASA points to many of the questions that scholars of humor and feminism are currently facing as they work to address a dearth of scholarship dealing with women, feminism, and comedy. The nods in agreement around the room spoke to the notion that scholarship on the topic of women in comedy is not merely filling in gaps, but breaking new ground. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have been relatively silent on topics involving women and/in comedy.1 The meager 1. See Susanne Lavin, Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2004); June Sochen, ed., Women’s Comic Visions (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991); John Limon, “Skirting, Kidding: Ellen Degeneres and Paula Poundstone,” in 672 Kathryn Kein scholarly space devoted to feminism and humor is likely shaped by the fraught relationship women and feminism have had with humor in our cultural imagination. Women have long battled a perception that they, as a sex, are biologically not funny. Men have always vastly outnumbered women on stand-up stages and in comedy writers’ rooms. Former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts recalled that star John Belushi, being of the “chicks-aren’t-funny” school, often requested that the women writers be fired.2 In her bestselling Bossypants, Tina Fey recalls that the gender imbalance of the sketch comedy teams at Chicago’s Second City were due to the fact that directors believed “the audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.”3 In his 2007 piece in Vanity Fair brashly titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens went so far as to call women and humor “antithetical.”4 In particular, feminist women have been painted as humorless and unable to take a joke. In The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed, defining her figure of the feminist killjoy, observes that “feminists are typically represented as grumpy his Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 2. For further accounts of women comedy writers’ and performers’ experiences, see Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy: A Very Oral History (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2012). 3. Tina Fey, Bossypants (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011), 87. 4. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair 557 (2007): 54 Books Discussed in This Essay All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. By Rebecca Krefting. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. By Linda Mizejewski. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. By Jennifer Reed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kathryn Kein 673 and humorless.”5 In a variation of the age-old joke, when a jokester asks, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” the respondent doesn’t say “How many?” but instead deadpans, “That’s not funny.” In different ways, the three books reviewed in this essay take up the conversation at ASA and tackle these same questions: How do we analyze humor produced by (and for?) women when our understanding of humor is decidedly male? What omissions have the gendered assumptions about humor caused in scholarship on feminism? How does humor work to address these assumptions? And how does the backdrop of these assumptions influence the comedy... (shrink)

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue Spreads a "Welcome Table" at the 2009 Annual MeetingFrancis V. TisoA retreat program designed by the participants in the ongoing Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue explored the dialogue of religious experience and the dialogue of life, set amid the redwoods of Guerneville, California. The 28–31 January 2009 meeting was cochaired by the Rev. Heng Sure of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery and the Institute for World Religions, Berkeley, California, and by (...) Most Rev. John C. Wester, Bishop of Salt Lake City, Utah.Sr. Mary Ann Donovan of the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, led an experience of lectio divina based on John 15:1–17, Jesus's simile of the vine and the branches. Rev. Victoria Austin of the San Francisco Zen Center gave an "encouragement talk," which would typically be delivered to Zen retreatants. She referred to the Gospel passage, noting: "We don't prune the vine because it is dead, but because it has the capacity to be fruitful. We don't purify the mind to get rid of dirt, but to return to the mind's original purity, which is the source of our conscience and is the true life within us." Rev. Jan Chosen Bays of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon observed that "Vows make our life energy more focused, keeping us from losing purpose and meaning. Vows prune away unnecessary things. When we ask for help with the challenge of being faithful to our vows, we call up and encounter unexpected sources of support and 'grace.' "The Ch'an Buddhist presentation focused on meditation experience, which was described as "recovering the natural state of the mind." Prof. Martin Verhoeven of the Pacific School of Religion pointed out that in meditation "we are returning to the origin, not moving forward to 'gain something.'" Linking ethical engagement with contemplation, he said, "When the mind of a meditator is motivated to act out of genuine compassion, its action is accurate and correct. Action is neither driven nor obstructed by ego or sentiment." These comments resonated with Rev. Heng Sure's presentation on the statement on the environment from the recent Gethsemane III conference "Simple and Sufficient," in which Buddhist and Christian monastics embraced an ecologically valid way of life. Urging the group to notice the connections between contemplation and ethical action, Bishop John C. Wester commented: "This [End Page 145] work embodies mercy by lifting people up; it embodies justice as it arises out of our common humanity."Because of the financial challenges that all three sponsoring institutions are facing, it was decided to conclude formal sponsorship of the Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue with this meeting. However, participants agreed to work together to reconstitute the dialogue regionally. A steering committee was designated to undertake new logistical arrangements and to draft a narrative of the previous seven years of dialogue for posting on our respective websites. Bishop Wester summarized the convictions of participants, both Buddhist and Catholic, by observing: "It is impossible not to be affected by this experience. Dialogue in this atmosphere has had an impact on my own way of ministering to others. I feel that my faith, sensitivity, compassion, and reverence have been enhanced by participating in these meetings."Participants in the 2009 dialogue meeting included Rev. Heng Sure, Berkeley Buddhist Monastery; Bishop John C. Wester, Salt Lake City; Dr. Snjezana Akpinar, Dharma Realm Buddhist University; Rev. Gigen Victoria Austin, San Francisco Zen Center; Rev. Jan Chozen Bays, Great Vow Zen Monastery; Sr. Phyllis D'Anna, SND, Zen Center, Palo Alto; Sr. Mary Ann Donovan, SC, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; Dr. Ron Epstein, Dharma Realm Buddhist Association; Mrs. Lorraine Moriarty, Society of St. Vincent De Paul; Bhikshuni Heng Jiao, City of 10,000 Buddhas; Bhikshuni Heng Liang, City of 10,000 Buddhas; Rev. Canon Francis Tiso, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. James Massa, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. Thomas W. Devereaux, Diocese of Santa Rosa ecumenical and interreligious officer; Dr. Martin Verhoeven, Pacific School of Religion; and Ron Brown, observer (Cloverdale, California). [End Page 146]Francis V. TisoUnited States Conference of Catholic BishopsCopyright © 2009 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter.

A long essay, in a collection of essays, about the relationship between rock music and philosophy. Philosophers include Plato, Kant, Vico, Whitehead, Sartre, Cassirer, Langer, Machiavelli, and so forth. Musicians include the Rollings Stones, David Bowie, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, The Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, Led Zeppelin and Rush.

History of the human race from the point of view of mankind's changing ideas--sociological, cosmological, philosophica.

This paper investigates the semantic treatment of conditional obligation, explicit permission (often called positive permission), and prohibition based on models with agents and branched time. In such models branches (rather than moments) are taken as basic, and the branching provides a way to represent the indeterminism which is normally presupposed by talk of free will, responsibility, action and ability. Careful treatment of the relation between ability and responsibility avoids many common problems with accounts of conditional obligation. Recognition of the generality (...) often involved in conditional obligations makes possible a sensitive way of expressing some kinds of general prohibitions, which in turn makes it possible to account for the special role of explicit permission. (shrink)

McRae, Brown and Elman argue against the view that events are structured as frequently‐occurring sequences of world stimuli. They underline the importance of temporal structure defining event types and advance a more complex temporal structure, which allows for some variance in the component elements.

First published as part of the Cambridge Miscellany series in 1934, this book presents the content of two lectures delivered by Alfred North Whitehead at the University of Chicago in October 1933. The volume concerns itself chiefly with the complex relationship between nature, philosophy and science.

In addition to his brilliant achievements in theoretical mathematics, Alfred North Whitehead exercised an extensive knowledge of philosophy and literature that informs and elevates all of his works. In this book, he offers undergraduate students and other readers an absorbing exploration of the fundamental problems of substance, space, and time. The Concept of Nature originated with Whitehead's Tarner Lectures of 1919, and its discussions are highlighted by a criticism of Einstein's method of interpreting results, and by the author's (...) alternative development of the celebrated theory of the four-dimensional space-time manifold. 1920 ed. (shrink)

Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of (...) care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. (shrink)

From a discussion of Einstein’s theories to an analysis of meaning, the philosopher offers a fascinating collection of essays on a wide range of topics. This is a collection of many of Whitehead’s papers that are scattered elsewhere. It was the penultimate book he published, and represents his mature thoughts on many topics. Philosophical Library has done a great service by publishing a representative collection of his writings on the subjects of Philosophy, Education and Science. The portion on Philosophy (...) includes five papers: “Immortality”, “Mathematics and the Good”, “Process and Reality”, “John Dewey and His Influence” and the “Analysis of Meaning.” The first three chapters consist of Whitehead’s personal reflections illumined by flashes of his lively humor. They are picturesque and amusing. The remainder of the book consists of chapters on Philosophy, Education, and Science. They cover in depth his positions on many scientific and philosophical matters in an extraordinarily unified way. The final section of the book is devoted to excellent surveys of Geometry and Mathematics as well as a paper on Einstein’s theories. (shrink)

The first three chapters are personal history, highly picturesque and amusing, illumined by flashes of his lively humor....From here the chapters go on into Philosophy, Education, and Science. covering a span of thrity years though these writings do, they are surprizingly unified. Atlantic.

'...In these pages I consider Reason in its relation to these contrasted aspects of history. Reason is the self-discipline of the originative element in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this element is anarchic.' -From the Summary.

This volume contains the proceedings of the six symposia of the 'Philosophers into Europe' conference held under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the British Society for Phenomenology at the University of Southampton in September 1969.