In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 123-126 [Access article in PDF] Beyond the Usual Alternatives? Buddhist and Christian Approaches to Other Religions Virginia Straus Boston Research Center for the 21st Century In regard to the three commonly accepted attitudes toward other religions—exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist—Terry C. Muck presents an extremely persuasive critique of the existing paradigm. He objects to the ideological stereotyping "The Paradigm" promotes. He proposes that we make (...) a shift in the use of The Paradigm: Instead of labeling people and their points of view, it would identify modes of thinking about certain beliefs and practices, without negative connotations. He calls this a shift to an instrumental or functional use of The Paradigm. His cost/benefit analysis of this shift attributes to the benefit side of the ledger the following advantages: less name-calling, more engagement with the substantive ideas being presented, new openings for dialogue among Christians formerly separated from each other by negative use of The Paradigm, and possible resonance with the logic of non-Western traditions.As I read these ideas I recalled a recent paper written by Miriam Levering, who, with no knowledge of Muck's novel and irreverent approach to The Paradigm, wrote about Buddhist thinking, answering Muck's question about whether his idea resonates with non-Western traditions. Levering presents a fascinating description and analysis of the position taken by certain Chinese Buddhist teachers and two contemporary Buddhist leaders, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. She says Buddhists, when making judgments about religions, tend to divide them into three parts: teachings, practices, and realization. In regard to teachings, she says Buddhists use discernment to evaluate other teachings. As Levering describes the use of discernment, she cites three modes of thinking that resonate rather well with Muck's instrumental approach. She says Buddhists distinguish among three kinds of teachings:Teachings that are wrong, unskillful, and do not lead to liberation (that is, they take an exclusivist position on a particular doctrine);Teachings that, while partial or shallow, can lead people to make progress on the path to liberation (an inclusivist position); andFully liberative teachings (a pluralist position). [End Page 123]In regard to practices, Levering indicates that the Buddhists she has studied do not apply discernment to practices. They all appear to take a pluralist position at all times on all practices, whether old, new, or yet to be invented. Although she does not say so, I am sure she would agree that this is not true of all Buddhist traditions. Pure Land, Nichiren Buddhists, and others have specific practices to which they are exclusively committed. In Levering's discussion of the third dimension of religions—the one she terms "realization"—she finds the Buddhist view to be primarily inclusivist rather than pluralist.With this in mind, I would like to raise two questions that may provide a helpful starting point for discussion. First, how does the recent scholarship aimed at developing a fourth alternative relate to this paper?Muck, with his justifiably jaundiced view of the use to which The Paradigm has been put, shares the dissatisfaction with the existing paradigm that has motivated this recent scholarly work. Yet he claims to be "skeptical that simply expanding The Paradigm by adding new forms would really get us anywhere." I wonder if he is not too quick to write off this promising work. In fact, I think this scholarship would help those searching for a fourth way (Levering included) and further refine the reflections they make on the pluralist position and also would suggest a fourth alternative mode of thinking to be used in the instrumental way Muck suggests.Specifically, I am thinking of James Fredericks's work on what he calls comparative theology, which he considers a process or practice rather than a theory. In essence, he, like Muck, is shifting to an instrumental use. By emphasizing the comparative approach, Fredericks hopes to understand a religion 1 on its own terms without glossing over differences as in the pluralist approach. Another thinker on this subject, James Wiggins, would substitute the term... (shrink)

This comprehensive introduction presents the fundamentals of symbolic logic clearly, systematically, and in a straightforward style accessible to readers. Each chapter, or unit, is divided into easily comprehended small bites that enable learners to master the material step-by-step, rather than being overwhelmed by masses of information covered too quickly. The book provides extremely detailed explanations of procedures and techniques, and was written in the conviction that anyone can thoroughly master its content. A four-part organization covers sentential logic, monadic predicate logic, (...) relational predicate logic, and extra credit units that glimpse into alternative methods of logic and more advanced topics. (shrink)

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ (...) privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society. (shrink)

After recent tragedies involving mass murders on a college campus in Virginia, an Army base in Texas, a congressional constituent event at a shopping center in Arizona, and a movie theater in Colorado, one might have assumed the public had become numb to horrendous and senseless acts of killing. If so, one would have been wrong. The public was not prepared for the brutal and cold-blooded murder of 20 first-grade school children and six teachers and staff at Sandy Hook (...) Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.Following the all-too-familiar emotional stages of shock, grief, and anger, many members of the public and elected officials turned to the issue of how to prevent such tragedies in the future. Two main questions quickly became the focus of policy makers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Noël Carroll THE PARADOX OFJUNK FICTION Perhaps on your way to some academic conference, if you had no papers to grade, you stopped in die airport gift shop for something to read on the plane. You saw racks of novels authored by die likes of Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Tom Clancy, and so on. (...) These are the kinds of novels that, when you lend them to friends, you don't care, unless you live in Bowling Green, Ohio, whether you ever get them back. They are mass, popular fictions. In another era, they would have been called pulp fictions. Following Thomas Roberts,1 I will call diem junk fictions, under which rubric I will also include things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies. There are a number of interesting philosophical questions diat we may ask aboutjunk fiction. We could, for example, attempt to characterize its essential features. However, for the present, I will assume that the preceding examples are enough to provide you with a rough-andready notion of what I am calling junk fiction, and I will attempt to explore anotiier feature of the phenomenon, viz., what I call the paradox ofjunk fiction. Thejunk fictions that I have in mind are all narratives. Indeed, dieir story dimension is die most important thing about diem. Stephen King, for instance, makes diis point by saying that he is primarily a story teller rather than a writer. Junk fictions aspire to be page-turners—the blurb on the cover of Stillwatch by Mary Higgins Clark says that it is "designed to be read at breatiitaking speed"—and what motivates turning die page so quickly is our interest in what happens next. We do not dawdle Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 225-241 226Philosophy and Literature over Clark's diction as we might over Updike's nor do we savor die complexity of her sentence structure, as we do widi Virginia Woolfs. Radier, we read for story. Moreover, junk fictions are die sort of narratives that commentators are wont to call formulaic. That is, junk fictions generally belong to well-entrenched genres, which diemselves are typified by tiieir possession of an extremely limited repertoire of story-types. For example, as John Cawelti has pointed out, one such recurring Western narrative is diat of the recendy pacifist gunfighter, like Shane, who is forced by circumstances to take up his pistols again, widi altogedier devastating effect.2 Junk fictions tell diese generic stories again and again with minor variations. Sometimes diese variations may be quite clever and unexpected. Agatiia Christie was the master of this; she was able to use the conventions of the mystery genre in order to "hide" her murderers. In TheMurderofRogerAckroyd, she "secrets" the murderer in the personage of the narrator; in Ten Little Indians, die murderer is a "dead man"; while in Murder on the Orient Express, all the suspects did it. In each of these cases, Christie's brilliance hinges upon her playing (and preying) upon conventional expectations. Neverdieless, even diese surprising variations require a well-established background of narrative forms. That is, in order to appreciate diese variations, die reader must in some sense know die standard story already. And with junk fiction, it is generally fair to say that in some sense, the reader—or, at least, the reader who has read around in die genre before—knows in rough oudine how die story is likely to go. Readers and/or viewers of Jurassic Park surmised, once die dinosaur enclosures were described, diat in fairly short order die dinosaurs would trample them down and go on the rampage—after all we had already seen or read The Lost World, King Kong, and their progeny. So, junk fictions are formulaic. They rehearse certain narrative formats again and again. And, furthermore, in some very general sense, the audience already knows die story in question. But this knowledge on die part of die audience provokes a question, specifically, why if the reader, viewer or listener already... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.1 (2000) 75-80 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway: A New Basis for Allocating Livers for Transplant Robert M. Veatch The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the private organization with the government contract to manage the national organ transplant program, are in the midst of a protracted dispute over how livers for (...) transplant should be allocated. UNOS, which is based in Richmond, Virginia, has for many years set the national policy for allocating cadaver organs. UNOS had a policy that, in effect, gave healthy local recipients priority over much sicker, more urgent cases beyond the local level. In April of 1998, Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, issued a regulation requiring that organs must be allocated according to uniform medical criteria and that organ sharing must take place over broad enough areas to ensure that organs can reach the patients who need them most. In effect, she sought to overturn the strict local priority in favor of a more uniform national list based on medical need or at least an approach that extended allocation beyond the strict locals-first approach.UNOS has put up great resistance, expressing a strong preference for retaining local priority even though doing so means some desperately sick people at more distant centers almost certainly will die for lack of organs. What sounds at first like a rather esoteric dispute over government regulation turns out to raise some fascinating issues involving questions of ethics and moral epistemology. The Background For several years, UNOS followed a policy of dividing all potential liver transplant recipients into four categories based on how urgently the person needed a transplant. Status 1 patients were the sickest, essentially those in intensive care. Status 2 patients were the next most ill-in the hospital, but not the ICU. Status 3 patients were ill enough to be at home, while Status 4 patients were still up and about. UNOS coordinates 62 local organ procurement organizations (OPOs), each serving a metropolitan area. These are grouped into 11 regions.The long-term allocation rule gave first priority to local Status 1 patients. If no Status 1 patient was available locally, rather than sending the organ to another OPO, it would be assigned to a Status 2 patient in the same OPO where the [End Page 75] organ was procured, then to a local Status 3 patient, and then to one at Status 4. Only if no patients could use the organ locally would it be "exported" to another OPO. It would then be offered to another OPO in the same region, starting once again with patients at the most urgent status. Only if no patients in the region could use the organ would it be offered outside the region. The effect of this policy was that in some cases quite well-off local patients could get priority over more distant patients who only had hours or days to live if they did not get transplanted. (It was because of this policy that Mickey Mantle-who was Status 2-got an organ so quickly. There were no other suitable Status 1 or 2 patients in the Dallas area. He did not have to compete with any of the thousands of liver transplant patients on the waiting lists beyond his local area.)The realization that critically ill patients beyond the local area were dying while healthy local patients got organs even though they still could wait for perhaps months or years led DHHS to issue its mandate. The goal was to get more organs to people who were in desperate need.The response at UNOS has been hostile. UNOS is made up primarily of representatives from the OPOs, which, in turn are often dominated by transplant surgeons. They did not like the idea that locally-procured organs were being shipped to other communities when they had their own patients who needed them.Spokespersons for this position offered two primary arguments. First, they believed that people would be more... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 103-106 [Access article in PDF] The 2000 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies Edward L. Shirley St. Edward's University The annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies met in Nashville on Friday and Saturday, November 17 and 18, 2000. This year's papers addressed the theme "Beyond the Usual Alternatives in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue," with usual alternatives being the categories of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.The (...) first session was held Friday afternoon. The first presenter, Terry Muck, spoke from a Christian perspective. He first addressed the adequacies of these three categories.Were these legitimate categories?Were they the only categories? Were there better ways to categorize theoretical positions involving the truth claims of the other? Terry suggested first that it seemed unnecessary to expand these three categories to include a fourth or fifth. Nor did he feel that it was necessary to do away with said categories altogether. He proposed, rather, that we make use of these three categories as helpful but that we be careful not to use them to label people. Indeed, he suggested, the same person might be inclusivist at one point in the dialogue but pluralist at another. It was especially important not to use these categories to dismiss another's position: "Oh, she's just an inclusivist." Terry pointed out that much of the discussion concerning the truth claims of the other were ultimately grounded in questions of soteriology: who will be saved (from a Christian perspective), or who can be liberated (from a Buddhist perspective)?The second presenter was Miriam Levering, speaking from a Buddhist perspective. In her paper, she used three medieval Chinese Buddhist teachers who seemed to represent these three categories: Kuei-feng Tsung-mi, Ch'eng-kuan, and Ta-hui Tsung-kao (with whom she also associated contemporary Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh). The three teachers were facing questions about the relationship of Buddhism to Confucianism and Taoism. Kuei-feng Tsung-mi taught that there were three types of teachings: those that were nonliberative, those that were partially liberative, and those that were fully liberative. Lao-Tzu and Confucius, he maintained, were liberated beings, but were not fully liberated. Their liberation was partial or shallow. Ta-hui Tsung-kao, on the other hand, taught that words and concepts were not as important as the experience of emptiness and non-self, which could take place outside a Buddhist context. This seems to be the position, Miriam suggested, ofThich [End Page 103] Nhat Hanh. Finally, Ch'eng-kuan taught that only Buddhism contained the truth and that the teachings of Taoism and Confucianism were poison and led one to hell.Virginia Straus responded from a Buddhist perspective. She appreciated Terry's suggestion that we shift from seeing the three categories as labeling and use them as instrumental categories: people tend to function in this way. She felt that Miriam's paper resonated with Terry's as she presented three types of teaching from within the Buddhist tradition.Virginia felt, however, that perhaps Terry had too quickly written off attempts to expand the number of categories to a set of four or five. Indeed, she pointed out, both presenters either ignored or dismissed this important work. Virginia also questioned why Terry seemed to let the positive and negative aspects of dialogue rise and fall on the question of salvation. What of David Chappell's suggestion that dialogue be based on responses to cultural and economic oppression rather than the search for truth? Global ethics, she suggested, would give a larger framework within which to dialogue.Afterwards, there was general group discussion. A question was raised as to whether there was a parallel between this discussion of dialogical positions and the debate in studies of mysticism between the perennialists and pluralists. Others questioned Thich Nhat Hanh's position that dialogue could only take place from the position of nonduality. Were these categories merely ways religious liberals had to label others? Can there be a Christian or Buddhist ethics without the experience of grace or non... (shrink)

The front page of the [New York] Times on July 16, 1951, serves to outline, quickly enough, the situation of the world into which The Catcher in the Rye made such a successful and relatively well-publicized entrance. The main action of the world, the chief events of its days were occurring within a framework of struggle between two systems of life, two different ways of organizing human being socially, politically, economically. The opposition between East and West, between socialist and capitalist, (...) was determining what happened in Kaesong, Budapest, Madrid, Teheran, Washington, New York. Name-calling the Administration, Republicans threw out the term "socialist," and the bid for millions to build schools in the five boroughs of New York would finally have to dovetail with allocations of taxes for defense. The review of The Catcher in the Rye in the back pages of the Times made no mention of any of this. The kind of reality reported on the front page belonged to one world; the new novel was about to be assimilated into another, into the world of culture, which was split from politics and society. And this separation repeated itself in other reviews: typically, they did not mention the framework of world history contemporary with the novel; they did not try to relate Catcher to that framework even to the extent of claiming that there was only a partial relationship or complaining, however simplistically, that there was none. Our concern from here on will be to try to sketch what reviewers and what academic critics after them did see in the novel and what they might have seen in it. We are interested in the conceptual frameworks, the alternatives to history, they used to respond to and interpret Catcher as they passed it on to its millions of lay readers. Carol Ohmann is currently working on a book about Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemic Preface" , appeared in the December 1974 issue. Richard Ohmann's most recent book is English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Both are professors in the department of English at Wesleyan University, and contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" to Critical Inquiry in the Summer 1977 issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism (...) and philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

After recent tragedies involving mass murders on a college campus in Virginia, an Army base in Texas, a congressional constituent event at a shopping center in Arizona, and a movie theater in Colorado, one might have assumed the public had become numb to horrendous and senseless acts of killing. If so, one would have been wrong. The public was not prepared for the brutal and cold-blooded murder of 20 first-grade school children and six teachers and staff at Sandy Hook (...) Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.Following the all-too-familiar emotional stages of shock, grief, and anger, many members of the public and elected officials turned to the issue of how to prevent such tragedies in the future. Two main questions quickly became the focus of policy makers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism (...) and philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I removed the wrapper from the “Race,” Writing, and Difference issue of Critical Inquiry and observed the word “race” in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Who,” he asked me, “has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow, or brown?” . There was a question (...) that spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was, crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy. Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence—of denying the individuality of all of God’s creation—not only by referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word “race” in quotation marks? Why not every single word in the entire issue of Critical Inquiry? For to refer, it seems, is to colonize, to take things over for one’s own brutal use, to turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in the academic’s favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down. Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many years in university English departments. He has published articles on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory, politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the Brontës. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS people will in fact he causally influenced to do B as well. The former is a philosophical issue and the latter is an empirical one. There are many interesting issues in these last three chapters. But the most important planks in Rachels's radical view are his distinction between biological and biographical life and his Bare Difference argument against the active killing/passive letting die distinotion. This hook contains (...) a number of very important moral issues which are rich· ly discussed. But his case against the rtraditional view must ultimately he judged inadequarte. Rachels himself admits that until now the traditional view has been the only one that is sufficiently worked out in a sophisticated and satisfactory way. In my opinion, Rachels's contribution to the discussion has not changed that situartion. J.P. MORELAND Lynchburg, Virginia Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project. By JoHN D. CAPUTO. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Pp. 319. Professor Caputo's impressive book, which is composed of an introduction and three parts, is a closely reasoned, scholarly explanation and defense of what its author calls radical hermeneutics. In his Jn. troduction, which he entitles "Restoring Life rto Its Original Difficulty," Caputo presents what he takes to be the problem of trying l:o make sense of contemporary experience, given the thought developments of the last two centuries. Central to Caputo's project is his reading of traditional metaphysics as a betrayal of the human experi· ence of the flux. He claims that, though metaphysics makes a show of beginning with questions, it quickly forecloses those questions as soon as things begin to look uncertain. In Being and Time Heidegger tried to restore the original difficulty of Being that metaphysics had swept under the rug. Viewing Kierkegaard in his pseudonymous masks, such as the disguise of Contantin Constantius, as involved in making life difficult rather than easy, Capuito links the Danish existentialist's con· cerns to Heidegger's. Caputo argues that radical hermeneutics is for the hardy and not for those who seek some way out of the flux. Meta· physics has illegiitimartely claimed some transcendental high ground ac· cording to Caputo, hut radical hermeneutics will have none of that ap· parently consoling hut ultimately unjustifiable comfort. Rather, her· BOOK REVIEWS meneutics wants to describe the difficulrty we are in and rather than rise above the flux " gets up the nerve to stay with it " (p. 3). Caputo's book is evidence of the author's attempt to "get up the nerve to stay with it " and though difficult reading the hook is nonetheless exciting. Caputo argues Philosophy is scandalized by motion and thus tries either to exclude movement outright from real being (Platonism) or more subversively, to portray itself as a friend of movement and thus to lure it into the philosophical house of logical categories (Hegelianism). Kierkegaard objects to the mummifying work of philosophy, not because he thinks that eternity-the sphere of that which lies outside of time and movement -is an illusion, that the real world is a myth (Fabel), as does Nietzsche, but because he thinks that philosophy makes things too easy for itself. It is ready to sneak out the back door of existence as soon as life begins. It does not have the courage for the flux, for the hard work of winning eternity in time, of pushing forward existentially for the prize which lies ahead. It is not eternity as such (Nietzsche's 'real world') to which he objects but philosophy's effete manner of seeking it. He takes the side of becoming against Being, of existence against thought, of existential 'interest' against metaphysics. For it is on the basis of interest that philosophy founders, that metaphysics comes to grief (pp. 11-12). Impressed with :the radicalization which hermeneutics provides, Caputo sees the protohistory of hermeneutics in thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Husserl, Nietzsche, Meister Eckhart, the late Heidegger and even Derrida, who is a critic of hermeneutics. In Part One Caputo discusses Kierkegaardian repetition and Husserlian conS. (shrink)

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the ethics of (...) care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

Virginia Held's Feminist Morality defends the idea that it is possible to transform the "public" sphere by remaking it on the model of existing "private" relationships such as families. This paper challenges Held's optimism. It is argued that feminist moral inquiry can aid in transforming the public sphere only by showing just how much the allegedly "private" realms of families and personal relationships are shaped-and often misshapen-by public demands and concerns.

Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote what is considered to be the first major work of feminist political theory: A Vindication of the Rights of Women . Much has been written about this work, and about Wollstonecraft as the intellectual pioneer of feminism, but the actual substance and coherence of her political thought have been virtually ignored. Virginia Sapiro here provides the first full-length treatment of Wollstonecraft's political theory. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works and treating them (...) thematically rather than sequentially, Sapiro shows that Wollstonecraft's ideas about women's rights, feminism, and gender are elements of a broad and fully developed philosophy, one with significant implications for contemporary democratic and liberal theory. The issues raised speak to many current debates in theory, including those surrounding interpretation of the history of feminism, the relationship between liberalism and republicanism in the development of political philosophy, and the debate over the canon. For political scientists, most of whom know little about Wollstonecraft's thought, Sapiro's book is an excellent, nuanced introduction which will cause a reconsideration of her work and her significance both for her time and for today's concerns. For feminist scholars, Sapiro's book offers a rounded and unconventional analysis of Wollstonecraft's thought. Written with considerable charm and verve, this book will be the starting point for understanding this important writer for years to come. (shrink)

In this book, the author examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values. Throughout (...) the book the author discusses related work, conscious of both classical, philosophical treatments of ethical issues and the implications in modern, algorithmic systems, and she combines regular references and footnotes with suggestions for further reading. This short overview is suitable for undergraduate students, in both technical and non-technical courses, and for interested and concerned researchers, practitioners, and citizens. (shrink)

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the ethics of (...) care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

This volume is fourth in the series of annuals created under the auspices of The Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST). The topics covered herein-from peacekeeping and terrorism, to sex trafficking and women's paid labor, to poverty and religious fundamentalism-are vital to women and to feminist movements throughout the world.

How is feminism changing the way women and men think, feel, and act? Virginia Held explores how feminist theory is changing contemporary views of moral choice. She proposes a comprehensive philosophy of feminist ethics, arguing persuasively for reconceptualizations of the self of relations between the self and others and of images of birth and death, nurturing and violence. Held shows how social, political, and cultural institutions have traditionally been founded upon masculine ideals of morality. She then identifies a distinct (...) feminist morality that moves beyond culturally embedded notions about motherhood and female emotionality. Examining the effects of this alternative moral and ethical system on changing social values, Held discusses its far-reaching implications for altering standards of freedom, democracy, equality, and personal development. Ultimately, she concludes, the culture of feminism could provide a fresh perspective on--even solutions to--contemporary social problems. Feminist Morality makes a vital contribution to the ongoing debate in feminist theory on the importance of motherhood. For philosophers and other readers outside feminist theory, it offers a feminist moral and social critique in clear and accessible terms. (shrink)

There are many different forms and interpretations of rewilding: the concept and its practice vary from country to country, with distinct interpretations according to its geographical location. Despite the term rewilding having been present in the lexicon for three decades, the concept of rewilding in England has experienced a prolonged developmental stage. This paper argues that a unique form of English rewilding is now emerging, which is distinct from rewilding in other parts of the world. Compared to other locations rewilding (...) in England operates at smaller spatial scales; its ambitions to increase biodiversity, restore ecosystem functioning and increase natural autonomy are somewhat curtailed; it involves higher levels of human intervention; and, perhaps most tellingly of all, it goes by another name - 'wilding', 'wild' or 'wilder' with little mention of the much-maligned prefix 're'. This conclusion has been developed following a comparative case study of two English 'rewilding' sites (the Avalon Marshes and Wild Ennerdale) involving 49 semi-structured interviews: twelve expert interviews and nineteen and eighteen stakeholder/practitioner interviews at the Avalon Mashes and Wild Ennerdale respectively. (shrink)

Two studies investigated the development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. In Study 1, infants of 12,15 and 18 months were tested in a standard preferential looking experiment, in which they were shown paired line drawings of typical and scrambled bodies. Results indicated that the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes, while the younger infants did not show differential responding. In Study 2, 12- and 18-month-olds were tested with the (...) same procedure, except that the typical and scrambled body stimuli were photographic images. The results of Study 2 again indicated that only the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes. This finding contrasts sharply with infants' precocious preferences for human faces, suggesting that infants' learning about human faces and human bodies follow different developmental trajectories. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. In A Room of One's Own, she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women's creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas, however, Woolf argues that women's historical exclusion offers them the chance to form a political (...) and cultural identity which could challenge the drive towards fascism and war. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Contemporary society is in the grip of contractual thinking. Realities are interpreted in contractual terms, and goals are formulated in terms of rational contracts. The leading current conceptions of rationality begin with assumptions that human beings are independent, self-interested or mutually disinterested, individuals; they then typically argue that it is often rational for human beings to enter into contractual relationships with each other.

I explore some new directions—suggested by feminism—for medical ethics and for philosophical ethics generally. Moral philosophers need to confront two issues. The first is deciding which moral issues merit attention. Questions which incorporate the perspectives of women need to be posed—e. g., about the unequal treatment of women in health care, about the roles of physician and nurse, and about relationship issues other than power struggles. “Crisis issues” currently dominate medical ethics, to the neglect of what I call “housekeeping issues.” (...) The second issue is how philosophical moral debates are conducted, especially how ulterior motives influence our beliefs and arguments. Both what we select—and neglect—to study as well as the “games” we play may be sending a message as loud as the words we do speak on ethics. (shrink)

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.

In Three Guineas, first published in June, 1938 Virginia Woolf set about answering three questions. How should war be prevented? Why does the government not support education for women? Why are women prevented from engaging in professional work? Many at the time saw the matter of how best to prevent war as entirely unconnected with “women’s issues”; Woolf linked together the answers, and connected them too with discussions of such matters as social class, in what has come to be (...) acknowledged as a landmark both of feminist and of anti-war writing. Included in the first and other early editions—and integral to the work—was a series of five photographs of men of high position wearing garments that mark their status . Unlike most editions available today, this facsimile edition includes the illustrations as well as the text of the original. (shrink)

Many activities formerly not in the market are being “marketized,” and women's labor is increasingly in the market. I consider the grounds on which to decide what should and what should not be “in” the market. I distinguish work that is paid from work done under “market norms,” and argue that market values should not have priority in education, childcare, healthcare, and many other activities. I suggest that a feminist ethics of care is more promising than Kantian ethics or utilitarianism (...) for recommending social decisions concerning limits on markets. (shrink)

We review major developmental evidence on the continuity from action to gesture to word and sign in human children, highlighting the important role of caregivers in the development of multimodal communication. In particular, the basic issues considered here and contributing to the current debate on the origins and development of the language-ready brain are: (1) links between early actions, gestures and words and similarities in representational strategies; (2) importance of multimodal communication and the interplay between gestures and spoken words; (3) (...) interconnections between early actions, gestures and signs. The innovation of this report is in connecting these themes together to relevant findings from studies on children between 6 and 36 months of age and highlighting interesting parallels in studies on ape communicative behavior. (shrink)

This paper deals with custom in action, namely, with the relationship between custom and action against the background of Amedeo Giovanni Conte’s nomotropism. Starting with Frerichs’ provocation of the peculiarity of saying ‘handeln nach der Sitte’ (acting according to custom) in favor of ‘sich handelnd nach was üblich ist’ (acting after what is usual), this paper will begin an exploratory research regarding the semantics and the ontology of custom to investigate the possibility of a nomotropic behavior in the field of (...) custom. Therefore, this paper will quote, at first, Rudolf von Jhering’s theory, and, at second, Ferdinand Tönnies’ theory. In conclusion, this paper suggests that an inquiry into custom in action (and in particular Tönnies’ ontology of the normative) could benefit from the nomotropic categories of analysis – such as adeontic and deontic regularities. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that social factors are related to health outcomes: much research served to establish correlations between classes of social factors on the one hand and classes of disease on the other hand. However, why and how social factors are an active part in the aetiology of disease development is something that is gaining attention only recently in the health sciences and in the medical humanities. In this paper, we advance the view that, just as bio-markers help trace (...) the causal continuum from exposure to disease development at the biological level, socio-markers ought to be introduced and studied in order to trace the social continuum from exposure to disease development. We explain how socio-markers differ from social indicators and how they can be used in combination with bio-markers in order to reconstruct the mixed mechanisms of health and disease, namely mechanisms in which both biological and social factors have an active causal role. (shrink)

Nursing professionalization is both ongoing and global, being significant not only for the nursing workforce but also for patients and healthcare systems. For this reason, it is important to have an in‐depth understanding of this process and the factors that could affect it. This literature review utilizes a welfare state approach to examine macrolevel structural determinants of nursing professionalization, addressing a previously identified gap in this literature, and synthesizes research on the relevance of studying nursing professionalization. The use of a (...) welfare state framework facilitates the understanding that the wider social, economic, and political system exercises significant power over the distribution of resources in a society, providing a glimpse into the complex politics of health and health care. The findings shed light on structural factors outside of nursing, such as country‐level education, health, labor market, and gender policies that could impact the process of professionalization and thus could be utilized to strengthen nursing through facilitating increased professionalization levels. Addressing gender inequalities and other structural determinants of nursing professionalization could contribute to achieving health equity and could benefit health systems through enhanced availability, skill‐level, and sustainability of nursing human resources, improved and efficient access to care, improved patient outcomes, and cost savings. (shrink)

Denounced by neighbors and scrutinized by demonologists, the early modern French witch also confessed, self-identified as a witch and as the author of horrific deeds. What led her to this point? Despair, solitude, perhaps even physical pain, but most decisively, demonology's two-pronged prosecutorial and truth-seeking confessional apparatus. This book examines the systematic and well-oiled machinery that served to extract, interpret, and disseminate witches' confessions in early modern France. For the demonologist, confession was the only way to find out the truth (...) about the clandestine activities of witches. For the witch, however, trial confessions opened new horizons of selfhood. In this book, Virginia Krause unravels the threads that wove together the demonologist's will to know and the witch's subjectivity. By examining textual and visual evidence, Krause shows how confession not only generated demonological theory but also brought forth a specific kind of self, which we now recognize as the modern subject. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transformed Lives: Making Sense of Atonement Today by Cynthia S. W. CrysdaleVirginia W. LandgrafTransformed Lives: Making Sense of Atonement Today Cynthia S. W. Crysdale new york: seabury books, 2016. 192 pp. $16.00Cynthia Crysdale aims to show how atonement can have meaning for modern and postmodern Christians who reject the idea that God wills Jesus's violent death. She starts with stories of people who were estranged from God but (...) have been given grace to love God anew. Their subsequent lives are not perfect and involve multiple deaths of the old self and resurrections into the new. Yet there is a reconciliation not present beforehand: not a change in God, who has always loved us, but a change in us. Crysdale seeks to navigate between two undesirable positions: a penal substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, which she thinks posits a violent God, or a rejection of the idea of atonement altogether. She sees atonement as not only moral influence showing an example but a relationship that involves our whole being.Crysdale then presents a historical overview to show that this understanding of atonement is a plausible interpretation of scripture and tradition. Biblical sacrifices were not intended to propitiate an angry deity but to expiate human sin. New Testament writers who saw Jesus's death on the cross in continuity with these sacrifices were not implying that God was punishing Jesus. Jesus's statements about giving his life as a ransom prophesied the subversion of patron–client power relations rather than predicting a transaction whereby Jesus would pay for sin. Subsequent writers who saw Jesus as gaining victory over the devil saw God and Jesus as united against the powers and Jesus as attaining justice by love. Even Anselm, sometimes blamed for the penal substitutionary view, intended to avoid the idea of the crucifixion as God's punishment of Jesus. In the honor code of the time, either satisfaction or punishment was required. Therefore, Jesus's act of making satisfaction is precisely not punishment. Crysdale sees subsequent conflations of satisfaction and punishment as distorting Anselm's original intent and implying that God requires violent punishment of sin. [End Page 208]Crysdale then takes readers on a tour of changes in scientific, historical, and epistemological consciousness in the modern era to ask how theology might be done today. Drawing on Bernard Lonergan, she describes multiple dimensions of conversion that are all instances of grace when they occur. She then interprets the incarnation as indicating God's offer of friendship with humanity and Jesus's death and resurrection as indicating the transformation of power and oppression. Believing that an abstract atonement over the heads of human beings does not exist, she concludes with further stories of lives transformed by an encounter with God, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day.This book is suitable for educated lay adults, advanced undergraduates, or introductory seminary courses. Protestant audiences may find it typically Catholic, even though Crysdale is an Anglican, because it emphasizes changed lives rather than God's act of justification prior to any change in us. Theologically, it does not deal with every possible objection to its thesis. Those concerned with cultures of impunity, where malevolent lawlessness gets its way, may think that rejecting any sense of punishment of sin in the crucifixion throws the baby out with the bathwater. Recently, Fleming Rutledge (in The Crucifixion), drawing on Karl Barth, has made a point of retaining punishment as one meaning of the atonement even while emphasizing that God's wrath is always in the service of God's love. Transformed Lives does not have the last word on the atonement and would not claim to, since Crysdale wants to invite readers to do theology befitting their changing context. However, readers at many levels will benefit from its accessible treatment of its topic and invitation to reflection that befits a loving, reconciling, evil-opposing God.Virginia W. LandgrafAmerican Theological Library AssociationCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Theories of justice, argues Virginia Held, are usually designed for a perfect, hypothetical world. They do not give us guidelines for living in an imperfect world in which the choices and decisions that we must make are seldom clear-cut. Seeking a morality based on actual experience, Held offers a method of inquiry with which to deal with the specific moral problems encountered in daily life. She argues that the division between public and private morality is misleading and shows convincingly (...) that moral judgment should be contextual. She maps out different approaches and positions for various types of issues, including membership in a state, legal decisions, political activities, economic transactions, interpersonal relations, diplomacy, journalism, and determining our obligation to future generations. Issues such as these provide the true test of moral theory, since its success is seen in the willingness of conscientious persons to commit themselves to it by acting on it in their daily lives. (shrink)

The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced to refer to several different physical action types, were rarely used by either group of participants. Both signing children and adults usually produced specific depicting predicates by (...) incorporating, through a representational strategy, the object and/or the modality of the action into the sign. As for the different types of representational strategies, the adults used the hand-as-object strategy more frequently than the children, who, in turn, preferred to use the hand-as-hand strategy, suggesting that different degrees of cognitive complexity are involved in these two symbolic strategies. Addressing the symbolic iconic strategies underlying sign formation could provide new insight into the perceptual and cognitive processes of linguistic meaning construction. The findings reported here support two main assumptions of cognitive linguistics applied to sign languages: there is a strong continuity between gestures and language; lexical units and depicting constructions derive from the same iconic core mechanism of sign creation. (shrink)