The profession of nursing has recognized the need for contextual and relational frameworks to inform knowledge development. Two‐Eyed Seeing is a framework developed by Mi'kmaw Elders to respectfully engage with Indigenous and non‐Indigenous knowledges. Some scholars and practitioners, however, are concerned that Two‐Eyed Seeing re‐instantiates dichotomized notions regarding Western and Indigenous knowledges. As dichotomies and binaries are often viewed as polarizing devices for nursing knowledge development, this paper explores the local worldviews in which Two‐Eyed (...) class='Hi'>Seeing emerged, proposing that the onto‐epistemological and axiological ‘roots’ of the framework are antithetical to divisiveness, paradoxically asserting space for the dichotomy to stand. Two‐Eyed Seeing, if understood as a relational, decolonial praxis, could fundamentally change the way nursing scholarship and practice operate by facilitating space for diverse knowledges, ways of being, doing and relating. In this paper, considerations for nursing scholarship and practice, as well as recommendations to support the uptake of Two‐Eyed Seeing are explored. The authors assert that conceptual divisiveness, dichotomization and exclusion can be mitigated if nursing is informed by contextual knowledge, seeks to enact accountable partnerships with Indigenous knowledge holders, and holds the Mi'kmaq worldview upon which the concept developed in positive regard. (shrink)

This paper examines the resonances between Deleuze's theory of subjectivity and the Buddhist view of subjectivity. Although much scholarship has been focused on Deleuze's theory of subjectivity, relatively little has been directed at a comparative study of how his theory of subjectivity resonates with the idea of de-centred subjectivity in Buddhist philosophy. In addition to this, the paper explores the ethical and political implications of such a notion of subjectivity. In the first part, it examines Deleuze's theory of subjectivity and (...) in the second part, it examines the theory of subjectivity in Buddhist philosophy. In the third part, it considers the ethical implications of the Deleuzian and Buddhist theory of subjectivity. (shrink)

In his late lecture course titled “Nature and Logos: The Human Body” (1959-1960), Merleau-Ponty proposed that we understand human symbolism, language, and reason by viewing the human being initially as a variant on animal embodiment and perception prior to being a rational animal. To elaborate this project, he outlined an “esthesiology” informed by the study of evolution. However, in the sketches that survive of “Nature and Logos,” we find neither a detailed explanation of how Merleau-Ponty understood this approach nor its (...) concrete execution with respect to the human body. In this paper I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology. An animate body possesses two “sides”: it is a sensing organism open onto the world and a sensible part of the natural world. Visual animals such as humans can see, see themselves, and be seen by others. To understand their way of life, we must study not only the body’s capacities for perception and action, but also how those capacities are seen by other organisms, especially conspecifics. The body’s visibility shapes the social prospects of a species and its potential for developing complex sociality, language, and cognition. I apply this basic esthesiological principle to study the human eye. Both in its vision and its visibility, the human eye is a distinctive variation of animality and one that conditions and shapes human sociality and cognition. I develop this insight with respect to a central philosophical theme of Merleau-Ponty’s late work, the relation of the visible and the invisible. I conclude by discussing the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology for his late thought and current discussions of the naturalization of phenomenology. (shrink)

This article analyzes the moral reasoning implied in a very commonly used expression, namely, "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over", or "What you don't know won't hurt you." It especially deals with situations in which it is used for trying to justify acts that are, in themselves, reprehensible. For instance, when a cheating husband tries to justify his adultery by appealing to the alleged fact that he does not tell his wife about it and thus she (...) is not harmed by it: "If you are not informed, you are not hurt" (NINH). The components of NINH reasoning are unfolded, as well as its grounds, starting from a consequentialistic, deontological, or virtue ethics perspective. Two special characteristics of NINH reasoning are discussed, namely, that it tries to bridge deontological and consequentialistic approaches of morality in a commonsense way and that it contains a special type of paternalism. Finally, some ethical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This book explores the resonances between Deleuze’s philosophy and a range of philosophical concepts in Buddhism. Focusing on this rarely examined relationship, this book gathers perspectives from scholars around the globe to explore the continuities and discontinuities between Deleuze’s and Buddhist thought. They examine immanence, intensity, assemblages and desire, and the concepts of ethics and meditation. This volume will prove to be an important resource for readers and scholars interested in philosophy, critical theory and comparative studies. They will find this (...) an engaging and invaluable examination of two different yet similar modes of thought. (shrink)

A comprehensive paradigm of environmental ethics should encompass two things: (1) a particular way of life, and (2) a path to achieve that ideal. An effective paradigm must also be internally consistent, yet externally workable in the real world. On the whole, the modern environmental movement has failed to provide these essential components and qualities in its associated philosophies, most of which suffer from being too abstract or too utopian.This paper suggests that Islam, as a religion and as a body (...) of knowledge, is capable of providing its followers with a comprehensive and practical system of environmental ethics. The basic principles and guidelines of the faith represent the conceptual ideal, while Islamic institutions and laws provide the operational components of an ethical system. (shrink)

We explore the following two cognitive questions regarding crosslinguistic variation in lexical semantic systems: Why are some linguistic categories—that is, the associations between a term and a portion of the semantic space—harder to learn than others? How does learning a language‐specific set of lexical categories affect processing in that semantic domain? Using a computational word‐learner, and the domain of color as a testbed, we investigate these questions by modeling both child acquisition of color terms and adult behavior on a non‐verbal (...) color discrimination task. A further goal is to test an approach to lexical semantic representation based on the principle that the more languages label any two situations with the same word, the more conceptually similar those two situations are. We compare such a crosslinguistically based semantic space to one based on perceptual similarity. Our computational model suggests a mechanistic explanation for the interplay between term frequency and the semantic closeness of learned categories in developmental error patterns for color terms. Our model also indicates how linguistic relativity effects could arise from an acquisition mechanism that yields language‐specific topologies for the same semantic domain. Moreover, we find that the crosslinguistically inspired semantic space supports these results at least as well as—and in some aspects better than—the purely perceptual one, thus confirming our approach as a practical and principled method for lexical semantic representation in cognitive modeling. (shrink)

In recent years, many studies have shown that perceiving other individuals’ direct gaze has robust effects on various attentional and cognitive processes. However, considerably less attention has been devoted to investigating the affective effects triggered by eye contact. This article reviews research concerning the effects of others’ gaze direction on observers’ affective responses. The review focuses on studies in which affective reactions have been investigated in well-controlled laboratory experiments, and in which contextual factors possibly influencing perceivers’ affects have been controlled. (...) Two important themes emerged from this review. First, explicit affective evaluations of seeing another’s direct versus averted gaze have resulted in rather inconsistent findings; some studies report more positive subjective feelings to direct compared to averted gaze, whereas others report the opposite pattern. These contradictory findings may be related, for example, to differences between studies in terms of the capability of direct-gaze stimuli to elicit feelings of self-involvement. Second, studies relying on various implicit measures have reported more consistent results; they indicate that direct gaze increases affective arousal, and more importantly, that eye contact automatically evokes a positively valenced affective reaction. Based on the review, possible psychological mechanisms for the positive affective reactions elicited by eye contact are described. (shrink)

Within the context of sports, the term 'miracle' is regularly associated with game-winning shots, holes-in-one, completed Hail Marys and other improbable outcomes. These conceptions of miracles largely focus on the success of specific sport actions at specific times when such success is deemed highly improbable. While prominent in the popular sports literature, most scholars agree that this perspective on miracles is very simple and highly unsophisticated. Events portrayed as simply 'beating the odds' would represent pale versions of miracles at best. (...) Some conceptions of miracles, however, include characteristics that reach beyond improbable outcomes. From more sophisticated perspectives, miracles are often viewed as divine action guiding the ordinary course of human experience. To be considered 'miraculous', improbable outcomes in sport would need to be perceived as interactions between the supernatural (God or other divine entity) and the natural (physical world). In addition, miraculous occurrences would have to be a part of a divine master-plan. Scholars argue that without such connections, miracles would yield no direction or meaning to the evolving world. The differences between these two perceptions raises several questions: Why do some view these extraordinary athletic performances from spiritually sophisticated perspectives while others have not the 'ears to hear' or the 'eyes to see' the divine possibilities in these experiences? Why are common uses and perceptions of miracles in sport simplistic and thin? What is a sophisticated view of miracles? What human abilities and processes are needed for one to achieve a sophisticated perspective? And, finally, what is the purpose of the true or sophisticated miracle in sport? In this paper, I will examine the notion of the miracle in sport. At its core, this paper describes how an athlete intellectually and spiritually moves from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated conception of a miracle. Through the writings of James, Lewis, Polanyi and others, I will show how human intellectual operations allow one to have 'ears to hear' and 'eyes to see' the spiritually miraculous in sport. I will begin by presenting an unsophisticated version of miracles in sport. After critically examining several types of miracles, I will present a more sophisticated definition. I will then explore the human processes necessary to view miraculous experiences in sport as interactions between the natural and the supernatural rather than interpreting these experiences simply as improbable outcomes. Finally, I will show how miracles present opportunities for spiritual conversion and have a use and place in the divine's master plan. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] A Pedagogy of Two Ways of Seeing:A Confrontation of "Word and Image" in My Name is Red 1 Feride Çiçekoglu The novel of Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, recently the center of controversy, not only in its homeland Turkey but in all the countries where it was translated, focuses on the debates around image-making in (...) late sixteenth-century Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital. It is also a contemporary tale. Its focus is not only the tradition of miniature painting during the Ottoman period in particular, but also the tradition of Western painting. Above all, My Name is Red is a detective and love story, starting with a murder and resolving the mystery at the end, like many other novels in this genre. What is unique is the role that the confrontation of different traditions of painting, Western and Islamic, and that between "word and image" play in the resolution of the love story and the solving of the mystery. The tradition of miniature painting, the illumination and illustration of narrative texts, which legitimized itself as the art of the book, may be interpreted as a way of dealing with the iconoclastic tradition of Islam. In this context, images are not seen as things-in-themselves but they are treated as "footnotes" even when the image seems to dominate the written word on the page. Image-making becomes an extension of the text, rather than an independent art. It serves the purposes of the words for a better understanding of the meaning, for a description of the aura of the narration, for the depiction of the images the reader of the story will paint in the mind's eye. Images, it has been said, do not represent real life; they are an externalization of the inner life. Thus, contrary to meaning and interpretation in Western art, the meaning in Islamic illumination is "inwards, converging on a private truth" rather than disclosing itself with an "outwards movement" 3Such a way of seeing is a totally different story than the discipline of art history traditionally allows: [End Page 1] the history of art, everywhere interlaced with the problems of representationalism, is in large part a commentary of the Western tradition upon itself, even if examples may be chosen from beyond its borders. Representationalism and its attendant problems are integral to the history of Western art, but not to the history of all art. 4Pamuk's novel provides a rich frame of reference for wandering in both traditions of image-making, Western and non-Western, which have seldom — if ever — been presented in the same framework. My Name is Red reconstructs two different ways of seeing in retrospect within the fictional atmosphere of late sixteenth-century Istanbul, weaving a rich panorama of the now lost tradition of Islamic illumination, faced by the "troubled notions of representation, naturalism, realism, and mimesis" due to the impact of Venetian painting. 5It is incidental that in the novel, the contradiction of traditions fails to liberate the imagery of the Ottoman miniatures from the pages of the books and from the yoke of the narrative text. Pamuk himself certainly does not wish to be seen or evaluated as writing from the viewpoint of "positivistrationality" from a teleological standpoint of "enlightenment." In his words, "I do not see it as: The miniaturists were going to be westernized if they were not prohibited by Islamic tradition." 6Pamuk is well aware of the fact that "Westernization of the West" isbased on the idea of the Renaissance as a "myth." 7 He finds it ironic that "this nineteenth-century myth of the Renaissance is still taken seriously by many people"; even more so in non-Western cultures, since "the West" itself is in a process of "de-Westernization" by demystifying the myth. 8 He cites Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing in this context, as a work which impressed and inspired him for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] A Pedagogy of Two Ways of Seeing:A Confrontation of "Word and Image" in My Name is Red 1 Feride Çiçekoglu The novel of Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, recently the center of controversy, not only in its homeland Turkey but in all the countries where it was translated, focuses on the debates around image-making in (...) late sixteenth-century Istanbul, then the Ottoman capital. It is also a contemporary tale. Its focus is not only the tradition of miniature painting during the Ottoman period in particular, but also the tradition of Western painting. Above all, My Name is Red is a detective and love story, starting with a murder and resolving the mystery at the end, like many other novels in this genre. What is unique is the role that the confrontation of different traditions of painting, Western and Islamic, and that between "word and image" play in the resolution of the love story and the solving of the mystery. The tradition of miniature painting, the illumination and illustration of narrative texts, which legitimized itself as the art of the book, may be interpreted as a way of dealing with the iconoclastic tradition of Islam. In this context, images are not seen as things-in-themselves but they are treated as "footnotes" even when the image seems to dominate the written word on the page. Image-making becomes an extension of the text, rather than an independent art. It serves the purposes of the words for a better understanding of the meaning, for a description of the aura of the narration, for the depiction of the images the reader of the story will paint in the mind's eye. Images, it has been said, do not represent real life; they are an externalization of the inner life. Thus, contrary to meaning and interpretation in Western art, the meaning in Islamic illumination is "inwards, converging on a private truth" rather than disclosing itself with an "outwards movement" 3Such a way of seeing is a totally different story than the discipline of art history traditionally allows: [End Page 1] the history of art, everywhere interlaced with the problems of representationalism, is in large part a commentary of the Western tradition upon itself, even if examples may be chosen from beyond its borders. Representationalism and its attendant problems are integral to the history of Western art, but not to the history of all art. 4Pamuk's novel provides a rich frame of reference for wandering in both traditions of image-making, Western and non-Western, which have seldom — if ever — been presented in the same framework. My Name is Red reconstructs two different ways of seeing in retrospect within the fictional atmosphere of late sixteenth-century Istanbul, weaving a rich panorama of the now lost tradition of Islamic illumination, faced by the "troubled notions of representation, naturalism, realism, and mimesis" due to the impact of Venetian painting. 5It is incidental that in the novel, the contradiction of traditions fails to liberate the imagery of the Ottoman miniatures from the pages of the books and from the yoke of the narrative text. Pamuk himself certainly does not wish to be seen or evaluated as writing from the viewpoint of "positivistrationality" from a teleological standpoint of "enlightenment." In his words, "I do not see it as: The miniaturists were going to be westernized if they were not prohibited by Islamic tradition." 6Pamuk is well aware of the fact that "Westernization of the West" isbased on the idea of the Renaissance as a "myth." 7 He finds it ironic that "this nineteenth-century myth of the Renaissance is still taken seriously by many people"; even more so in non-Western cultures, since "the West" itself is in a process of "de-Westernization" by demystifying the myth. 8 He cites Svetlana Alpers's The Art of Describing in this context, as a work which impressed and inspired him for... (shrink)

Large changes in a scene often become difficult to notice if made during an eye movement, image flicker, movie cut, or other such disturbance. It is argued here that this _change blindness_ can serve as a useful tool to explore various aspects of vision. This argument centers around the proposal that focused attention is needed for the explicit perception of change. Given this, the study of change perception can provide a useful way to determine the nature of visual attention, and (...) to cast new light on the way that it is?and is not?involved in visual perception. To illustrate the power of this approach, this paper surveys its use in exploring three different aspects of vision. The first concerns the general nature of _seeing_. To explain why change blindness can be easily induced in experiments but apparently not in everyday life, it is proposed that perception involves a _virtual representation_, where object representations do not accumulate, but are formed as needed. An architecture containing both attentional and nonattentional streams is proposed as a way to implement this scheme. The second aspect concerns the ability of observers to detect change even when they have no visual experience of it. This _sensing_ is found to take on at least two forms: detection without visual experience (but still with conscious awareness), and detection without any awareness at all. It is proposed that these are both due to the operation of a nonattentional visual stream. The final aspect considered is the nature of visual attention itself?the mechanisms involved when _scrutinizing_ items. Experiments using controlled stimuli show the existence of various limits on visual search for change. It is shown that these limits provide a powerful means to map out the attentional mechanisms involved. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * The gaze drifts where the stare dares not. The gaze is attentive while the stare is intent. Dériver : Equally to drift and/or to derive. —When drifting then, something must be taken along. Something must be derived from the drift. Something of oneself must always become other. Incorporating the other, incorporating oneself as other. Je est un autre , Rimbaud disait; 1 this in his last letter to Georges Izambard, a final correspondence to a former mentor and friend, from whom he was drifting away, having derived much. The drift is a control incomplete. To drift is to come closer and closer, but to always be turning away, pulling apart, pulling oneself apart. It is parabolic in the sense that it is always eluding a formerly established intent. Of all axes, it never finds room to rest. Filling new spaces, always changing places, ever escaping the Cartesian; the indubitable pinpointing of position. It is never pinned down. Love together what we will be apart. Once together, we will drift apart. Il le faut . Attention is held; it traces the path. It follows each point which traces the arc, the line, the swerve. It is not concerned with the figure being drawn, but rather the movement between one point and the next. The smallest movement. The clinamen of De Rerum Natura is the smallest of swerves, it is nothing more than the minimum — nec plus quam minimum . Michel Serres says of the clinamen , that it is an absurdity — a logical, geometrical, mechanical, physical absurdity. 'The clinamen, from here (its state of absurdity), finds refuge in subjectivity; it passes from the world to the soul, from the physical to the metaphysical, from the theory of inert bodies in freefall to the theory of the free movements of the living.' 2 So this swerve is something of the mind and something of the body, both in action, rather than a body which is merely acted upon. Swerve, however, has a connotation of suddenness. It is a movement which is made to avoid an otherwise inevitable impact. Drift, on the other hand, is the unleashing of something which is then allowed to follow a more complex series of forces. These forces now come from within as well as without. It is no longer tethered; now following tides, winds, flows or pitched slopes, now acting on its own. We are not atoms in freefall. Our attention long ago pulled us from this precipitous descent. We now live, ourselves, as one of the many forces. In the drift, as with the gaze, there is an ease. ‘Ease is the proper name of this unrepresentable space.’ It is the space nearest, the next, the neighboring space. To occupy this space requires a turn, a shift or a drift. It cannot be reached by proceeding straight ahead. ‘..the space adjacent, the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation.’ 3 Intention always seeks to straighten this line, to make it less complex, to isolate the point of departure and the desired destination. It believes there can be two points and, between them, there must be a straight line. Can there be? Maybe. Must there be? Never. Straight lines may exist, but they can never be followed to the finish. After leaving this point, we will never reach that one without being buffeted at least a little — at least the least. One foot in front of the other, this is a very restrictive dance, less even than a two-step. Straight lines lead only to lost intentions, being the shortest and quickest way to get there. When attention drifts it slowly turns away from the intended target, leaving it for something which pulls the attention away. Now we are for a moment free; all at once we can pivot, now we can waltz. Drifting along the page, deriving from what is seen. Reading is seeing; the movement of the eyes as they drift. Reading in the eyes what has been seen, what has been derived from the act of reading. Reading eyes drift back and forth down the page, now and then jump back and forth, up to the top, one word, back down, quickly a few pages back, now gaze out towards the horizon. When attention drifts it is the gaze that follows. Our attention is not restricted to the path the words follow, but links them together; deriving what is to be seen, rather than read. La philosophie fait voir . ‘Thus, philosophers speak through proverbs, and demonstrate. They connect their imaginations with foreign rings, flown into famous tombs.’ 4 Now drifting off to sleep, dreams come as unintended visions. To dream is pure drift, vision without an object, gazing into the dark, reading the unknown of the night. NOTES: Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies (Paris: Bibliothéque de Cluny, 1958), 57. Michel Serres, La Naissance de la Physique (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 25. Louis Aragon, Une Vague des Rêves (Paris: Editions Seghers, 2006), 10. Translation courtesy of R.H. Jackson.  . (shrink)

The author of the paper analyzes John Milton’s great epic narrative through the lenses of Paul Ricoeur’s biblical hermeneutics and his philosophical reflection, in particular the second chapter of the philosopher’s last book, Parcours de la Reconnaissance, devoted mainly to the prospects and pitfalls of recognizing oneself. Two excerpts from St. Paul’s Letter to Romans and the Letter to Corinthians highlight the main points of reference in this argument: the concept of involuntary wrongdoing and the contrast between the present opacity (...) and the projected transparency of the knowing subject, connected with the promise of seeing face-to-face, whose fulfilment is rooted in God’s antecedent knowledge of a human being. It is argued that Ricoeur’s focus on the precarious fate of the “fallible man” and his simultaneous desire to outline the destiny of the “capable man” elucidate Milton’s masterpiece evocations of the Aristotelian anagnorisis in Paradise Lost. (shrink)

Foetal images have been central to the medicalized abortion debate since the 1960s. Feminists have extensively analysed such pictures, arguing that the pregnant body is separated from the foetus and erased from view, and that the rights of women and foetuses are set in opposition. In this article I introduce the latest image in this debate, the 3D sonogram, which is widely reported as new evidence for a reduction in the gestational time limit. Through close analysis of two examples, I (...) argue that the rhetorical use of these images can be characterized by a conflation of knowing with seeing. With the new clarity of sonograms to the untrained eye, image producers are legitimated by a discourse of public information and concerned citizens are called upon to exercise their rights to see/know. For feminist theory, this implies the need for continued analysis of the epistemology of foetal images and renewed focus on the subject position of the viewer. (shrink)

The striking color patterns of butterflies and birds have long interested biologists. But how these animals see color is less well understood. Opsins are the protein components of the visual pigments of the eye. Color vision has evolved in butterflies through opsin gene duplications, through positive selection at individual opsin loci, and by the use of filtering pigments. By contrast, birds have retained the same opsin complement present in early-jawed vertebrates, and their visual system has diversified primarily through tuning of (...) the short-wavelength-sensitive photoreceptors, rather than by opsin duplication or the use of filtering elements. Butterflies and birds have evolved photoreceptors that might use some of the same amino acid sites for generating similar spectral phenotypes across 540 million years of evolution, when rhabdomeric and ciliary-type opsins radiated during the early Cambrian period. Considering the similarities between the two taxa, it is surprising that the eyes of birds are not more diverse. Additional taxonomic sampling of birds may help clarify this mystery. (shrink)

This paper compares the phenomenological structure of zoological exhibition to the pattern prevalent in pornography. It examines several disanalogies between the two, finds them lacking or irrelevant, and concludes that the proposed analogy is strong enough to serve as a critical lens through which to view the institution of zoos. The central idea uncovered in this process of interpretation is paradoxical: Zoos are pornographic in that they make the nature of their subjects disappear precisely by overexposing them. The paper asserts (...) that the keep are thus degraded or marginalized through the marketing and consumption of their very visibility and criticizes the pretense of preservation. Furthermore, the paper subjects the related framework of captivity to Foucauldian analysis and critique—we see that the "zoöpticon" deserves designation as an island of power in the carceral archipelago of hegemonic social institutions mapped by Foucault. Hence, this paper suggests that the zoo as we know it be phased out in favor of richer and less oppressive modes of encountering other forms of life; toward this end, the paper explores and assesses alternative approaches to, and practices of, nonhuman animal spectatorship and cross-species conviviality. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two methodological questions that arise from Plato’s account of collection and division. First, what place does the method of collection and division occupy in Plato’s account of philosophical inquiry? Second, do collection and division in fact constitute a formal “method” (as most scholars assume) or are they simply informal techniques that the philosopher has in her toolkit for accomplishing different philosophical tasks? I argue that Plato sees collection and division as useful tools for achieving two distinct (...) goals – generating real definitions and discovering the basic natural kinds of a given domain of knowledge – both of which occupy a preliminary stage in his account of philosophical inquiry. As to the second question, I claim that the evidence for seeing collection and division as a formal method is weak. Although Plato calls the procedure a technê and a methodos, he makes no real attempt to formalize it in any way. For Plato, collection and division do not constitute an algorithmic process that can be learned from a rule book. Instead the ability to collect and divide properly are skills that good dialecticians must acquire through the kind of hands-on training illustrated by the Sophist and Statesman. Whereas Aristotle insists on formal rules for making proper divisions, Plato seems to emphasize the need to recognize where the natural joints of the world are. In this sense, Plato’s Sophist and Statesman and Aristotle’s Topics and Analytics present two very different pictures of collection and division. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Buddha through Christian EyesElizabeth J. HarrisIt was in Sri Lanka in 1984 that I had my first ‘encounter’ with the Buddha. When at the ancient city of Anuradhapura, I stole away from the group I was with to return for a few minutes to the shrine room adjacent to the sacred bo tree, the one believed to have grown from a cutting of the original tree under which (...) the Buddha gained enlightenment. Devotees dressed in white were sitting or prostrating silently. I joined them and looked toward the image, which showed the Buddha sitting in meditation against a painted scene of pale blue sky, white clouds, and mountains. Suddenly the image became more than mere plaster. All I can say is that it communicated. It beckoned. Against the blue of the sky, the serene head became suffused with cosmic significance. I know that there was unfinished business between me and the Buddha.The moment was prophetic. Two years later, I returned to Sri Lanka to study Buddhism and stayed over seven years. ‘Study’ is not quite the right word because, together with the academic, I also sought to immerse myself in Buddhism with the wish to see it through the eyes of Buddhists. I practiced meditation under Buddhist teachers, participated in temple devotion, and joined pilgrimages. It was a process that meant temporarily letting go of much that was dear to me as a Christian. But the rewards were inestimable. Never again has the image at Anuradhapura ‘spoken’ to me. In fact, on return visits it has appeared artistically poor, certainly no match for the older stone images, open to the air, in other parts of the city. But then, around and inside that very shrine room in May 1985, Tamil guerrillas gunned down 146 innocent devotees, rupturing centuries of devotion with pools of blood.My seven and a half years in Sri Lanka make it almost impossible for me to write about the Buddha as a complete outsider. I remain a Christian, but the Buddha has become part of me. An exquisitely carved wooden image of the Buddha in meditation is now part of my home. The peace that emanates from it gives me strength. In complete honesty, I can say that I revere the Buddha.But what Buddha do I revere? Do I revere the Buddha in the same way as Buddhists? To reflect on how my appreciation of the Buddha may be different from that [End Page 101] of Buddhists is not easy, for Buddhism contains within itself so many faces of the Buddha. There is the historical Buddha of the earlier parts of the Pali canon, the Buddha of the later hagiographic biographies, the Buddha of popular devotion, Mahayana Buddhism’s vision of multiple Buddhas and cosmic buddhahood, the Buddha of what has been termed Protestant Buddhism. Yet I sense that there is a common thread within all of these faces—namely, the Lord Buddha as the supreme embodiment of compassion and wisdom, the one who has seen into the nature of reality and the human predicament and has taught the path of liberation.All that I know of Buddhism tells me that the person of the Buddha is central. The devotion shown to the image is more than would be given to a human teacher and more than would be given to a god. Acchariya manussa is one phrase used in the Pali texts—“wonderful man.” He is human, yet more than human in that he was enlightened and worked toward this enlightenment without outside aid through countless lives of self-sacrifice and virtue. This I believe all Buddhists would agree to, and such a being is supremely worthy of reverence.How does my appreciation tally with this? It is the Theravada tradition that has nurtured my own understanding, and it has done so in three ways. First, there has been my reading of the Sutta Pitaka of the Pali canon. In the first two years of my time in Sri Lanka, I read through most of the nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka, albeit in translation, and I found myself encountering again and again a teacher I could respect and revere. “How... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 54-82 [Access article in PDF] Seeing With The Body The Digital Image In Postphotography Mark B. N. Hansen In a well-known scene from the 1982 Ridley Scott film Bladerunner, Rick Deckard scans a photograph into a 3-D rendering machine and directs the machine to explore the space condensed in the two-dimensional photograph as if it were three-dimensional [see fig. 1]. Following Deckard's commands to zoom (...) in and to pan right and left within the image space, the machine unpacks the "real" three-dimensional world represented by the two-dimensional photograph [see figs. 2-3]. After catching a glimpse of his target—a fugitive replicant—reflected from a mirror within the space, Deckard instructs the machine to move around behind the object obstructing the two-dimensional photographic view of the replicant and to frame what it sees [see figs. 4-5]. Responding to the print command issued by Deckard, the machine dispenses a photograph of the replicant which is, quite literally, a close-up of an invisible—indeed nonexistent—part of the two-dimensional original [see fig. 6]. And yet, following the fantasy of this scene, this impossible photograph is—or would be—simply the image of one particular data point within the data set comprising this three-dimensional data space. As fascinating as it is puzzling, this scene of an impossible rendering—a rendering of two-dimensional data as a three-dimensional space—can be related to the crisis brought to photography by digitization in two ways. On the one hand, in line with the film's thematic questioning of photography as a reliable index of memory, this scene foregrounds the technical capacity of digital processing to manipulate photographs. In this way, it thematizes the threat posed by digital technologies to traditional indexical notions of photographic realism. On the other hand, in what has turned out to be a far more prophetic vein, the scene presents a radically new understanding of the photographic image as a three-dimensional "virtual" space. Such an understanding presupposes a vastly different material existence of the photographic image: instead of a physical inscription of light on sensitive paper, the photograph has become a data set that can be rendered in various ways and thus viewed from various perspectives.The first position corresponds to the arguments made by William Mitchell in his now classic book, The Reconfigured Eye. In a comprehensive analysis of the techniques and possibilities of digital imaging, Mitchell concentrates on demarcating the traditional photographic image from its digital doppelgänger. While the specter of manipulation has always haunted the photographic image, it remains the exception rather than the rule: "There is no doubt that extensive reworking of photographic images to produce seamless transformations and combinations is technically difficult, time-consuming, and outside the mainstream of photographic practice. When we look at photographs we presume, unless we have some clear indications to the contrary, that they have not been reworked" [Mitchell 7]. To buttress this claim, Mitchell sketches three criteria for evaluating traditional photographic images: (1) does the image follow the conventions of photography and seem internally coherent? (2) does the visual evidence it presents [End Page 54]Stills from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space." width="72" height="33" />Click for larger viewFigure 1Still from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space.Stills from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space." width="72" height="32" />Click for larger viewFigure 2Still from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space.Stills from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), courtesy of Warner Brothers Home Video. Rick Deckard navigates a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional space." width="72" height="33" />Click... (shrink)

As Macnamara (1978) once asked, how can we talk about what we see? We report on a study manipulating realistic dynamic scenes and sentences aiming to understand the interaction between linguistic and visual representations in real-world situations. Specifically, we monitored participants’ eye movements as they watched video clips of everyday scenes while listening to sentences describing these scenes. We manipulated two main variables. The first was the semantic class of the verb in the sentence and the second was the action/motion (...) of the agent in the unfolding event. The sentences employed two verb classes—causatives (e.g., break) and perception/psychological (e.g., notice)—which impose different constraints on the nouns that serve as their grammatical complements. The scenes depicted events in which agents either moved towards a target object (always the referent of the verb-complement noun), away from it, or remained neutral performing a given activity (such as cooking). Scenes and sentences were synchronized such that the verb onset corresponded to the first video frame of the agent motion towards or away from the object. Results show effects of agent motion but weak verb-semantic restrictions: causatives draw more attention to potential referents of their grammatical complements than perception verbs only when the agent moves towards the target object. Crucially, we found no anticipatory verb-driven eye movements toward the target object, contrary to studies using non-naturalistic and static scenes. We propose a model in which linguistic and visual computations in real-world situations occur largely independent of each other during the early moments of perceptual input, but rapidly interact at a central, conceptual system using a common, propositional code. Implications for language use in real world contexts are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seeing without Recognizing? More on Denuding Perceptual ContentArindam ChakrabartiTo be in the presence of something is not necessarily to see it. Everyone knows that. Even if an onlooker looks at me and sees me 'looking at' a particular wall with eyes wide open, she cannot be sure that I am seeing that wall. Apart from the possibility that I am distracted or inattentive, I may be focusing (...) on the color of the wall or some particular graffiti on it so attentively that I may not be noticing that it is the color of a wall or that the graffiti is on a wall. Even if the wall causes my perception, it need not be the object of my perception, just as my retina or sunlight is not.Thus, I must have some say on what it is that I am seeing. That does not mean that I may not be mistaken about my own current perceptual content. Neither does it mean that to have a say is to be able to 'say' in descriptive words what one is seeing. All it means is that I cannot be clueless about it. I cannot be, to use Sydney Shoemaker's phrase, strongly "self-blind" (which is worse than being self-oblivious). Now, the myth of immaculate perception, in both of its (radically unlike) Nyāya and Buddhist versions, requires us to admit some such perceptual states that are so radically un-self-ascribable, or—to use Phillips' terminology—unapperceivable, that the subject is "never able to say anything" (in Siderits' words) concerning what she is perceiving during these states. This comes dangerously close to self-blindness. To admit, for other systemic reasons, that one is acquainted directly and pre-predicatively with either a bare featureless fleeting particular (the Sautrāntika Buddhist claim) or a pure universal feature as yet cognitively un-pasted to a particular (the Nyāya claim) is to consign a nook of our own minds to such self-blindness, and also to acknowledge that an awareness can take something as its object without recognizing it as anything whatsoever.Even to see a particular as a unique uncategorizable something is to see it as something, even to see a man as 'that man whom I can't recognize' is to bring him under the general concept of an unknown stranger currently in front of me, a negative demonstrative covering concept. That is why I think seeing is not possible without recognizing. (Seeing cannot even be caused by a bare particular since there aren't any in the world. That is what my realism tells me.) If it were, then we would have to be partially self-blind. But we are not.Recently two parallel controversies have erupted on the pages of this journal: one between myself and Stephen Phillips regarding the necessity of Indeterminate Perception within Nyāya epistemology, and the other between Monima Chadha and Mark Siderits on the issue of whether a realist needs perception of particulars without deployment of concepts. The first controversy is muddied with technical Nyāya assumptions—for example, about how many moments a perceptual cognitive state [End Page 365] lasts or what can be called the instrumental cause of a perception with full-fledged qualificative content. The latter controversy is muddied with the turbid understanding one has of what Kant meant by concepts or the use of concepts in the shaping of an experience.Now, I have for a long time felt that not just Kant's but just about every Western philosopher's concept of a concept (except Frege's, which is an odd notion) is regrettably unclear. Notwithstanding his book A Study of Concepts (MIT Press, 1992), even Peacocke's notion of a concept (which is different from Fodor's notion of a concept) does not yield obvious answers to such simple queries as: "Can two people possess the same concept?" or "When I use a concept that I possess to process a perceived content, do I make the concept itself an object of my perception?"Siderits' bringing in Externalism versus Internalism, the hotly debated issue in current philosophy of content, has also complicated matters. Chadha's initial mistaken... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gordon Kaufman InterviewGordon Kaufman, emeritus professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, has been a member of the Cobb-Abe Buddhist-Christian dialogue since its inception in 1987. As he mentions below, that experience has profoundly affected his work as a theologian and his conviction that theology is an activity of “the imaginative construction of a comprehensive and coherent picture of humanity in the world under God.” This perspective has characterized (...) his work from Systematic Theology (1968) through his more recent In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (1993). Rita Gross and Terry Muck, coeditors of Buddhist-Christian Studies, explored with Gordon the important role Buddhism has played in his theological construction.Buddhist-Christian Studies: Does religious pluralism present Christian theologians with a unique task?Gordon Kaufman: Yes. Through most of Christian history theologians have argued that God revealed Godself to the Christian church in a way unlike any other religious group. Christians had the truth about human beings, their nature, their deepest problems, and solutions to those problems. Now, especially since World War II, a much greater consciousness of the significance of other religious traditions has grown among Christians. The unique challenge to Christian theologians is: What do we as theologians say to believers about what to do with this old tradition of uniqueness and infallible truth?Are Buddhist ‘theologians’ faced with a similar challenge in their communities?Yes.Are there specific features of either Christian theology or Buddhist theology that make either one of these religions more able or less able to step up to the challenge? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these two religions when it comes to the issues religious pluralism raises?I don’t want to speak for the Buddhist tradition in this respect. But I will say that both traditions have adapted to many different cultures around the world and there is a kind of flexibility in these traditions that gives hope. Christian monotheism, for example, is sometimes seen as contributing to exclusivism. But monotheism can be seen as including the notion of one source and ordering principle working in all of life, and that means we are all equal within the world and all related within the world to each other. And that leads to a central teaching of the Christian message: what God requires of us is that we be reconciled with those brothers and sisters from whom we are alienated. The simple Christian demand that we love not only our [End Page 43] neighbors but also our enemies now becomes a very powerful mandate if connected up with that one high monotheistic principle.Is there a certain commensurability between the way Buddhist and Christian theologians do their work?Let’s start by defining the terms. I don’t use the phrase ‘Buddhist theology’ but ‘Buddhist reflective thinking.’ This is less loaded than ‘theology,’ the study of God, but I have no objection if others want to call it Buddhist theology. Now, regarding ‘commensurability.’ I don’t regard myself as a good enough scholar of the history of religion to use that phrase. I’m a little suspicious of it because I am deeply impressed with the difference in lifestyles and commitments and value orientations that different symbols in various religious traditions promote. Thus I don’t want to assume there is a basic commensurability. The basic requirement for the Christian theologian is that we be open to all human beings. Then we’ll see what commensurability there is.So it’s not so much a cognitive category as an attitude or an approach—a common, human desire?Not necessarily a common human desire. I suspect there are strong motivations in all human beings, at least in many, not to be ‘open’ to all other persons. Many simply identify with the groups they are in and are not concerned much about others. I do say that there is a strong Christian imperative to enter into loving relationship with strangers, and whether that is true or not on the other side is for me to find out.How important is it to find out?Very important. It may have been that in earlier times we could continue to live in... (shrink)

Rensink [Rensink, R. A. . Visual sensing without seeing. Psychological Science, 15, 27–32] has presented evidence suggesting visual changes may be sensed without an accompanying visual experience. Here, we report two experiments in which we monitored observers’ eye-movements whilst they searched for a difference between two simultaneously presented images and pressed separate response keys when a difference was seen or sensed. We first assessed whether sensing performance was random by collecting ratings of confidence in the validity of sensing and (...) assessing gaze location during sensing. Sensing was not random: fixation position and confidence ratings were different when a difference was present compared to catch trials. Furthermore, the uniformity of objects in the images and the type of difference appear to affect seeing and sensing differently, suggesting that these processes are dissociated. The possibility is discussed of a sensing mechanism that increases vigilance toward unconsciously registered differences, particularly changes to scene layout. (shrink)

As many as two million people in the United Kingdom repeatedly see people, animals, and objects that have no objective reality. Hallucinations on the border of sleep, dementing illnesses, delirium, eye disease, and schizophrenia account for 90% of these. The remainder have rarer disorders. We review existing models of recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) in the awake person, including cortical irritation, cortical hyperexcitability and cortical release, top-down activation, misperception, dream intrusion, and interactive models. We provide evidence that these can neither (...) fully account for the phenomenology of RCVH, nor for variations in the frequency of RCVH in different disorders. We propose a novel Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model for RCVH. A combination of impaired attentional binding and poor sensory activation of a correct proto-object, in conjunction with a relatively intact scene representation, bias perception to allow the intrusion of a hallucinatory proto-object into a scene perception. Incorporation of this image into a context-specific hallucinatory scene representation accounts for repetitive hallucinations. We suggest that these impairments are underpinned by disturbances in a lateral frontal cortex–ventral visual stream system. We show how the frequency of RCVH in different diseases is related to the coexistence of attentional and visual perceptual impairments; how attentional and perceptual processes can account for their phenomenology; and that diseases and other states with high rates of RCVH have cholinergic dysfunction in both frontal cortex and the ventral visual stream. Several tests of the model are indicated, together with a number of treatment options that it generates. Key Words: Blindness; Charles Bonnet; cholinergic; cortical release; delirium; dementia; dream intrusion; hallucination; Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model; schizophrenia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form early (...) in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European CultureDallas G. Denery IIStuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00.A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form early (...) in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions.Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20).Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3).Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from... (shrink)

This paper discusses two distinct strategies that have been adopted to provide fine-grained propositions; that is, propositions individuated more finely than sets of possible worlds. One strategy takes propositions to have internal structure, while the other looks beyond possible worlds, and takes propositions to be sets of circumstances, where possible worlds do not exhaust the circumstances. The usual arguments for these positions turn on fineness-of-grain issues: just how finely should propositions be individuated? Here, I compare the two strategies with an (...) eye to the fineness-of-grain question, arguing that when a wide enough range of data is considered, we can see that a circumstance-based approach, properly spelled out, outperforms a structure-based approach in answering the question. (Part of this argument involves spelling out what I take to be a reasonable circumstance-based approach.) An argument to the contrary, due to Soames, is also considered. (shrink)

There is an urgent call for nurses to address climate change, especially in advocating for those most under threat to the impacts. Social justice is important to nurses in their relations with individuals and populations, including actions to address climate justice. The purpose of this article is to present a Global Nurse Agenda for Climate Justice to spark dialog, provide direction, and to promote nursing action for just‐relations and responsibility for planetary health. Grounding ourselves within the Mi'kmaw concept of Etuaptmumk (...) (two‐eyed seeing), we suggest that climate justice is both call and response, moving nurses from silence to Ksaltultinej (love as action). We review the movement for climate justice in nursing, weaving between our own stories, our relations with Mi'kmaw ways of knowing, and the stories of the movement, with considerations for the (w)holistic perspectives foundational to nursing's metaparadigm of person, environment, and health. We provide a background to the work of the Global Nurse Agenda for Climate Justice steering committee including their role at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, 2021, and share our own stories of action to frame this agenda. We accept our Responsibility for the challenges of climate justice with humility and invite others to join us. (shrink)

PurposeIf an individual has been blind since birth due to a treatable eye condition, ocular treatment is urgent. Even a brief period of visual deprivation can alter the development of the visual system. The goal of our structured scoping review was to understand how we might better support children with delayed access to ocular treatment for blinding conditions.MethodWe searched MEDLINE, Embase and Global Health for peer-reviewed publications that described the impact of early and extended bilateral visual deprivation.ResultsOf 551 reports independently (...) screened by two authors, 42 studies met our inclusion criteria. Synthesizing extracted data revealed several trends. The data suggests persistent deficits in visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, global motion, and visual-motor integration, and suspected concerns for understanding complex objects and faces. There is evidence for resilience in color perception, understanding of simple shapes, discriminating between a face and non-face, and the perception of biological motion. There is currently insufficient data about specific habilitation strategies to update low vision services, but there are several insights to guide future research in this domain.ConclusionThis summary will help guide the research and services provision to help children learn to see after early and extended blindness. (shrink)

: Armed with a photometer originally designed for evaluating telescopes, Richard Potter in the early 1830s measured the re(integral)ective power of metallic and glass mirrors. Because he found significant discrepancies between his measurements and Fresnel's predictions, Potter developed doubts concerning the wave theory. However, Potter's measurements were colored by a peculiar procedure. In order to protect the sensitivity of the eye, Potter made certain approximations in the measuring process, which exaggerated the discrepancies between the theory and the data. Potter's measurements (...) received strong criticisms from wave theorists, not because they felt they needed to defend their theory, but because they believed that Potter was wrong in using the eye as an essential apparatus in the experiments. Potter's photometric measurements and the subsequent debate reveal the existence of two incompatible sets of measuring procedures, each of which consisted of a body of practices concerning how photometric instruments should be used properly. In the debate, the differences regarding measuring procedures shaped the participant's judgments of experimental evidence and eventually their evaluations of the optical theories. (shrink)

A curious irony hangs over the two similes of the lantern and the clepsydra which Empedocles used to describe his theories of seeing and breathing. Similes were a feature of Empedocles' style, and it is clear that on these two in particular he has lavished considerable care. They have been preserved in their entirety, as almost the longest continuous quotations which Aristotle makes from any author. Despite such auspicious beginnings, these two similes have proved peculiarly resistant to modern attempts (...) at interpretation. The reason for this, I shall try to show, is that certain features in the two similes took on a spurious significance as a result of Plato's remodelling of Empedocles' theories. Difficulties of interpretation have been caused by trying to read back these innovations of Platonic theory into details of the similes that in their original context were fortuitous and inessential.In Plato vision occurs when fire leaves the eye and joins fire outside to form a single compacted body, along which movements from the visible object are communicated as sensations to the eye.According to Theophrastus, Empedocles explained vision as the result of effluences which are given off from objects and enter the appropriate pores of the eye. Dark effluences enter the watery pores of the eyes, and bright effluences enter the fiery pores of the eye. As I have tried to show in an earlier article, Empedocles distinguished good and bad vision, by day and by night, for eyes with a predominance of fire and for eyes with a predominance of water. Good vision results when the dark and light elements which enter the eye are equally balanced. Poor vision results either when there is too much fire in the eye, so that we are dazzled, or when there is too much water in the eye, so that our vision is dimmed. In the whole of his detailed and one would have thought exhaustive account, Theophrastus says nothing about fire leaving the eye as a factor in the act of vision. (shrink)

To what extent is the choice of what to say driven by seemingly irrelevant cues in the visual world being described? Among such cues, how does prior description affect how we process spatial scenes? When people describe where objects are located their use of spatial language is often associated with a choice of reference frame. Two experiments employing between-participants designs (N = 490) examined the effects of visual cueing and previous description on reference frame choice as reflected in spatial prepositions (...) (in front of, to the left of, etc.) to describe pictures of object pairs. Experiment 1 examined the effects of visual and linguistic cues on spatial description choice through movement of object(s) in spatial scenes, showing sizeable effects of visual cueing on reference frame choice. Experiment 2 monitored eye movements of participants following a linguistic example description, revealing two findings: eye movement “signatures” associated with distinct reference frames as expressed in language, and transfer of these eye movement patterns just prior to spatial description for different (later) picture descriptions. Both verbal description and visual cueing similarly influence language production choice through manipulation of visual attention, suggesting a unified theory of constraints affecting spatial language choice. (shrink)

This article identifies two tendencies in left-wing approaches toward the social sciences. The first expresses skepticism towards science as a kind of product of the ruling ideology that solely reproduces the status quo. The second worries about the capacity of scientific inquiry to actually change people's ingrained beliefs and prejudices. Antonio Gramsci and W.E.B. Du Bois are representative of these two diverging approaches. Their views on science, however, offer more commonalities than at first meet the eye. They are both critical (...) of sociological traditions that seek to discover universal laws of society, arguing that such an approach fails to grasp the complexity of causality and the role of human action in shaping their lives and history. On the other hand, both see the potential for rigorous and nuanced scientific analysis to offer grounds for concrete action and warn off wishful thinking. By combining their views, this article presents a conception of the role and potential of social scientific inquiry for progressive movements toward social change that navigates between the double-sided concerns represented by Gramsci and Du Bois. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Poems MICHAEL TROCCHIA SEE FOR YOURSELF The gods, in effect, have given Euenius the gift of inner vision…because he has lost his outer vision. —Michael Attyah Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece Come to a field of stones baking in the late sun. Drop your knee to the groundup earth and feel the warmth climb your thigh. Run your finger across a palm-sized stone, as if inspecting the (...) liver of the shegoat, the white one who follows you everywhere, always. Follow that old vision of yourself, its light dying in your eye as you look and look for one last rock one last time, its edge weathered into a fine and deadly thing. Hold the stone high—a red sun sinking behind you— and count down to the day’s complete darkness and in that completion between you and what will be arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 64 two poems a darker endlessness, carve out the gift of sight, hearing only shivers of your own body, hooves running off. YOUNG CALCHAS SLEEPS And down he sat again as Calchas rose among them, Thestor’s son, the clearest by far of all the seers. —Homer, The Iliad Calchas, you dream of children dreaming of the sparrow’s head, of the bird’s eye deadened into view, of flutter and firelight, of the nest shredded at your feet and then spring again, berry, and leaf-meal and petalwind and whole glossaries of bone and egg bloodied in the hollow of your hand. But never a sure sign, no second sight clear and bright within the first order of things. No opening widening out of wing or song. Just the nearness of living, a feather suspended by a string, the halfmeaning of seeing the whole world suffer and sway— youth divined and past and forecast into the fray and saying this ruin and sacrifice again, this blueness sailing back in with the breeze. The world circles outside our window and light gives way to more light and you sleep soundly in a bed of down. Rise, Calchas, rise and walk out of the god’s mouth and see image after image fall away. See this life lifting out of one dream and into no other. Michael Trocchia 65... (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the nature of visuo-auditory crossmodal cueing in a triadic setting: participants had to detect an auditory signal while observing another agent’s head facing one of the two laterally positioned auditory sources. Experiment 1 showed that when the agent’s eyes were open, sounds originating on the side of the agent’s gaze were detected faster than sounds originating on the side of the agent’s visible ear; when the agent’s eyes were closed this pat-tern of responses was reversed. Two additional (...) experiments showed that the results were sensitive to whether participants could infer a hearing function on the part of the agent. When no ear was depicted on the agent, only a gaze-side advantage was observed , but when the agent’s ear was covered , an ear side advantage was observed only when hearing could still be inferred but not when hearing was inferred to be diminished . The findings are discussed in the context of inferential and simulation processes and joint attention mechanisms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 87-92 [Access article in PDF] Christian Prayer Seen from the Eye of a Buddhist Kenneth K. Tanaka Musashino Women's University, Tokyo When I think about Christian prayer, the image I get is that of a young girl of about eight years old with long brown hair. Wearing a nightgown, she is kneeling next to her bed with her hands clasped and her head bowed. I (...) have often queried myself about the source of this image. This is an interesting question in itself. I personally don't know of anyone who fits that description or who has actually witnessed someone like her in prayer. Nevertheless, it is interesting how a Buddhist raised in a predominately Christian society comes to form his image of Christian prayer.Working further with this image, I see this little girl—let's call her Megan—doing two things in her evening prayer. One is that she is giving thanks to God for the benefits she has received. She thanks him for her food, clothing, friends, and family. Then, she also makes a request. In this petitionary element of her prayer, she is asking God to make her sick father get well soon. As she does so, her expression turns more serious, and she clasps her hands more firmly and brings them closer to her chest. She then looks up toward the ceiling, expressing her heartfelt wish for her father's early recovery. What is noteworthy is that Megan's prayers are spoken aloud as in a human conversation.I realize that this image does not do justice to a topic as enormous as "Christian prayer," but I believe that it provides a glimpse into how one Buddhist imagines the topic. I have a number of questions about Megan's prayer, particularly as I try to understand what may be going on inside of her. I wonder first and foremost, what God looks like to her. Is God a male or a female, or neither? I would think that even for her (in this gender-sensitive age), God is still a male. If so, does she see him as an elderly man with a long white beard, holding a cane and sitting in a throne? Next, where does God reside? If he is in heaven, what is heaven like to her? I wonder if heaven is located somewhere amidst the lofty, puffy clouds. In regards to her father's illness, how does she think God can make her father get well? What is the mechanism by which a personified God can heal? Perhaps I am being too analytical and overly rigorous with my questions about a spiritual act, and that of an eight-year-old at that.Perhaps I should, instead, turn the questions toward me, asking how I would [End Page 87] answer the same questions about a Buddhist girl "praying" before the Buddha or a bodhisattva for the same kind of wish? The image that immediately crops up in my mind is of a girl of about twelve and her mother whom I saw at a pagoda in Rangoon, Burma, a number of years ago. The girl is wearing a large, red fresh flower in her hair and has on traditional apparel. She sits with her mother on a marble floor of a spacious area in front of Buddha images that are several meters in height. She holds a bouquet of flowers held upright between the palms of hands in a gesture of reverence. She sits with her legs folded but thrown out to her side, a style common in her country as well as in Thailand. Her eyes appear closed, and her head is slightly bowed down toward the Buddha images. She stays in that posture for what seems like several minutes; her mother does the same. I don't know, of course, what is going on inside, but she is certainly not meditating.I believe this is an important point to make here, for Buddhists are stereotypically seen to only meditate. However, the vast majority of lay Buddhists... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious LifeA. Mark SmithDallas G. Denery, II. Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Fourth Series), 63. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. x + 202. Cloth, $75.00.Among the metaphors we live by (to borrow from Lakoff and Johnson), (...) visual metaphors figure prominently in our common discourse about cognition. We are well aware, of course, that in claiming to "see" meanings or "view" ideas in certain lights, we are speaking figuratively. Yet the analogy between thinking and seeing is more than a linguistic artifact. Until the seventeenth century, Western thinkers took it seriously, none more seriously perhaps than the thirteenth-century scholastic community. The upshot was an epistemology based on two cardinal assumptions: first, that the physical world manifests itself to us through species passing from external objects into the soul, and second, that visual perception is providentially designed to yield a faithful conceptual picture of physical reality and its ordering structure.This latter assumption found strong support in Perspectivist optics, which took mature form in the 1260s as an amalgam of Alhacenian visual analysis and species-theory. Hence, by the later thirteenth century it was widely believed not only that vision is essentially cognitive but also that cognition is essentially visual. During the first half of the fourteenth century, this idea was subjected to trenchant criticism and thereby rejected out of hand by several thinkers, among whom Nicolaus of Autrecourt is a particular subject of emphasis in this study.It has become something of a truism lately that theories are neither accepted nor rejected on logical grounds alone. This one, Denery claims, is no exception since there were compelling theological grounds for its adoption. Foremost among these was a new emphasis on self-presentation in the thirteenth century. That emphasis manifested itself at two levels. On the one hand, the clerical orders were encouraged to give the right appearance and to suit the appearance to specific settings. This was especially important among the new preaching orders, whose members had to put on so many public faces that they came to adopt what Denery calls "heuristics of adaptation." On the other hand, new modes of confession and penance required deep introspection on the penitent's part, so that he might "see" himself for the complex of sinful motives and actions he is, as well as experience the contrition-yielding horror such a sight arouses. In both cases, the appearances should reveal the underlying reality: the preacher's spiritual commitment reflected in his mien, the penitent's contrition in the recognition of his vitiated nature.But how can we be sure that what we see in these instances is true? This question is particularly vexing in the case of religious introspection, for, as St. Paul reminds us, our moral vision is distorted by the mirror that darkens it. Enter the analogy between physical vision and cognition. Visual illusions, such as those arising from reflection, were of paramount concern to Perspectivist theorists, who devoted considerable effort to rationalizing them according to unmet normative conditions, such as adequate illumination, appropriate distance, or a healthy eye. Reflected vision is subject to transgressions of these conditions, but adding insult to their injury is that, when seen in mirrors, objects invariably appear displaced and often look distorted in size, shape, and orientation. Fortunately, reason enables us to rectify such illusions according to specific rules that govern visual perception in general and reflection in particular.If the analogy between physical and moral vision holds true, then reason ought to be the corrective in both cases. At first blush, this seems to be Peter of Limoges's position in the Tractatus moralis de oculo (c. 1280), but, as Denery insists, Peter's real point is that our inner, moral vision is so clouded we can rarely tell either how or even that it is distorted. The hoped-for normative circumstances and principles enabling us to rectify it are far too vague and protean to yield certainty from introspection. Given the tight conceptual linkage between... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hobbits as Buddhists and an Eye for an "I"Paul Andrew PowellWhen a medieval scholar friend of mine1 (knowing that I am a longstanding student of Zen), asked me if I would read J. R. R. Tolkien's famous fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings to see what Buddhism, if any, could be culled from it, I was not enthusiastic, especially after watching the movie (yes, I watched the movie (...) before I embarked on the text), so full of heroes, their passionate violence, monster-like foes, and fantastic scenarios.2 Hardly the compassion of the Buddha, I thought. The trilogy is as well replete with Christian references and Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and much has been written on these and that, but I decided that that literature would not b e germane to this short and singular investigation. At any rate, I was not encouraged about the project, and yet, a certain character did happen to exhibit one intriguing feature that caught my Buddhist attention from the beginning. And as I began to read deeper into the text, a larger—implausible, some would say—thesis began to form in my mind around this character's one particular attribute. And I thought that at least I might cultivate one's imagination and jar one's thinking in productive ways. So I confess that the inferences I make and conclusions I draw here may be a bit fantastic (perhaps to match the material). But, to answer the question: Is there any Buddhism in The Lord of the Rings? Please keep an open mind, and in the spirit of fantasy, indulge my commentary on this quest.Sauron's EyeSauron's Eye can be associated with at least two considered forms of consciousness: will and omnipresence. It is "The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable."3 Also, we find that "The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him [Frodo], the Eye piercing all shadows... Its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom... [I]ts thought was now bent with all its overwhelming force upon the Mountain."4 But will (we will return [End Page 31] to "omnipresence" some other time) is a neutral force. And clearly, Sauron's will is not neutral; it is a profoundly malevolent will. For we can also read that Sauron is a "dreadful menace of power... brooding in deep thought and dreadful malice."5 He is full of "policies and webs of fear and treachery... stratagems and wars."6An Eye For An I?Buddhism is a practice which reveals the true nature of things: self, reality, suffering. So let's more deeply consider the nature of Sauron's corruption. It seems unlikely, from a Buddhist view, that the Oxford scholar's central villain is a simple stand-in for brute evil (as might appear upon a first reading), for if evil is ontological then the only reasonable response to it is to strategize how best to cope with its encounter. This, in fact, is the Christian response to evil. Evil is: it exists a priori as a supernatural force outside of human intervention and its temptations may be successfully resisted through self-discipline and moral strength, and possibly an appeal to the supernatural, but never defeated absolutely by a stratagem of human will. It is true that Frodo struggles to resist the Ring's power, but mere coping is not the Fellowship's strategy. The fact that Tolkien's Fellowship actually undertakes to destroy the Ring through stratagem admits that Sauron's corruption is an emergent property of an underlying and vulnerable source rather than a supernatural, a priori property outside of human intervention.Instructively, and like the Fellowship, Buddhists as well understand that human suffering possesses an underlying and vulnerable source that can be overcome in human terms, and this vulnerable source of suffering is the human I. The Buddha... (shrink)

The following lines are a famous crux: τ μν τι βασιλες σσ μεγαλν πολων ει συγγενς φθαλμς αδοιτατον γρας τε τοτο μειγνμενον φρεν. The reading is that of all MSS., save for the necessary correction αδοιτατον for αδοιςτατον, which will not scan. I have purposely left it without punctuation. The core of the difficulty of course is the word φθαλμς Farnell, it seems to me, has made it abundantly clear that this cannot be literal, for, apart from the oddity of (...) the epithet συγγενς in such a context, to take it as meaning the actual physical eye of Arkesilas involves giving ει the impossible meaning ‘sees’. But the metaphorical meaning is not much easier. A person or group of persons can be the ‘eye’, that is to say the most precious part, of something, as the Emmenidai were the ‘eye of Sicily’, Ol. ii, 10, Amphiaraos the ‘eye’ of Adrastos' army, Ol. vi, 16, the eldest or only son, or even the presence of the master, the ‘eye’ of the house , a child the ‘eye’—we should perhaps say ‘light’—of his mother's life, Eurip. Andr., 406, and perhaps, for the interpretation is not too certain, a chosen band of Athenians the ‘eye’ of Theseus' land, Aesch., Eumen., 1025. In these instances we may I think acquiesce in Groeneboom's remark on Pers., loc. cit., that ‘eye’ is used to signify the most precious or noble part of something, its glory. (shrink)

More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing - vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book is unique in focusing on vision as an 'active' process. It goes beyond most accounts of vision where the focus is (...) on seeing, to provide an integrated account of seeing AND looking. The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new approach. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how the approach has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarises progress by showing how this approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world. Written by two leading vision scientists, this book will be valuable for vision researchers and psychology students, from undergraduate level upwards. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A "Hypostatic Union" of Two Practices but One Person?Paul F. KnitterThis is going to be an awkwardly personal reflection. But that, I understand, is what the assignment given to the members of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies panel "Constructing Buddhist Identities in the West" called for: I was asked to reflect upon "How I as a Western Christian have appropriated Buddhist practice and teachings into my religious identity." I'm (...) grateful for this invitation, because it has provided me with the occasion to realize, quite startlingly, that what I have thought and written about my "Buddhist-Christian identity" in the past really isn't quite accurate.But first let me offer a bird's eye, and therefore limited, view of my two-faced identity: I was born into a traditional, not very critical, Catholic family in the Chicago of seventy-three years ago. At thirteen, I decided (against my parents' wishes) to enter a minor seminary in order to become a priest, and went through the whole fourteen years of training. For the last four years of that training I had the profoundly good fortune to be sent to Rome, arriving there in 1962, two weeks before more than two thousand bishops marched into St. Peter's Basilica to start the Second Vatican Council (the renewing effects of which were much more lasting, it seems, in my psyche than in the psyche and structures of the Vatican!). Ordained a priest in 1966 and animated with Vatican II's new openness to other religions, I did a dissertation at the University of Marburg, Germany, on Christian theologies of religions. When I returned to the United States in 1972, I taught theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and when I decided to leave the Catholic priesthood in 1975, I moved to Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I continued teaching theology for some twenty-eight years.It was during those years, in the 1980s, that I began not only to teach courses on Buddhism but also to practice daily Zen meditation. Gradually, I came to realize that Buddhism, its theory and practice, was seeping into and coloring the way I understood and practiced my Christian creed—to the point that in 2007 I took refuge in the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition and since then have been under the guidance of my teacher, Lama John Makransky. It was around this time that I faced the need to figure out just what or who I was—a Buddhist Christian or a Christian Buddhist. So, typical academic that I am, I wrote a book. [End Page 19]In Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, I declared and defended my primary identity as a Christian who was thoroughly drenched in Buddhism.1 But when I recently read Rose Drew's penetrating analysis of various ways of blending dual religious belonging in her Christian or Buddhist? An Exploration of Dual Religious Belonging, I started to wonder.2 From her ethnographic study of actual dual belongers, she found that (a) some have a primary religious identity (the group to which I thought I belonged), (b) some alternate between both primary identities, (c) some cannot attribute primacy to either or any identity, and (d) some are too bewildered by it all to say anything.3 As I pondered Drew's description and analysis of her interviewees' meanderings back and forth across religious lines, I had to admit that I wasn't sure where I belonged. So when the request for this paper came along, I saw it as an opportunity to help myself sort things out.An Inappropriate AnalogyMy problem is that as my Christian and Buddhist practices have continued over these recent five to ten years, more and more, I cannot keep them apart. They remain clearly distinct, but unlike Roger Corless, of blessed memory, I have not been able to honor their distinct identities by practicing them, as Roger apparently did, separately: being a Buddhist from Monday to Thursday, and a Christian from Friday to Sunday (and then waiting to see what would happen). Rather, for me, when I am at Mass, I hear the words of the Scripture readings or of... (shrink)

Can one see one thing as another without possessing a concept of it? The answer to this question is intuitively negative. This is because seeing x as F is usually taken to consist in the application of the concept F to x . Seeing the duck-rabbit figure as a duck figure, for instance, involves applying the concept DUCK to the figure; thus, one cannot see the figure as the figure of a duck unless one has the concept of (...) a duck and is able to deploy it when looking at the figure. Nearly by definition, then, one cannot see x as F without possessing a concept of F. Contrary to this line of reasoning, this article treats the question of whether we can see x as F without possessing a concept of F as an open and partially empirical question. Seeing x as F involves seeing x in a certain way, namely as F, and whether concepts are required in order to see something in a certain way is an open question. Accordingly, what follows offers a proposal for an alternative way of understanding seeing–as that does not appeal to concept application. (shrink)

_Seeing the World through Children’s Eyes_ brings an overarching emphasis on ‘seeing’ to early years research and provides an opportunity to see and hear from leading researchers in the field concerning how they work with visual methodologies in their early years research.

It is shown in this article that the Gospel of John describes a battle between darkness and light, life and death, chaos and God’s new order. Although the certainty is given right at the beginning of the Gospel that the darkness will not overcome the light, God does not take the possibility of darkness away. Darkness in John is darkness of the mind, not seeing the light, not comprehending, not accepting and not believing the Word. The battle between light (...) and darkness is described at two levels – the visible level that you can see with your eyes and the invisible level that only those who have been regenerated by the Spirit can see. Although it may seem that the contrary is true, God is in control of both levels. Jesus made the invisible visible with his words and deeds and, eventually, with his resurrection. The diakonoi of Jesus are called to follow him in his task to honour the father by speaking the words of the father and doing the work of the father. In doing this, they will make the invisible God visible by their diakonia. Real social change will take place in God’s time, and he will use the diakonia of his children to bring order in the chaos, like he did in the beginning when he created the heavens and the earth. The results of the research are used to suggest guidelines on social change in South Africa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard LOVE DELIGHTS IN PRAISES: A READING OF THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Valentine and Proteus have been friends since their earliest childhood in Verona, and their two fathers want to send them to Milan for their education. Because of his love for a girl named Julia, Proteus refuses to leave Verona; Valentine goes to Milan alone. In spite ofJulia, however, Proteus misses Valentine greatly and, after a (...) while, he, too, goes to Milan. The two friends are reunited in the ducal palace; the duke's daughter, Silvia, is present and Valentine briefly introduces Proteus. After she departs, Valentine announces that he loves her and his hyperbolical passion irritates Proteus. Once alone, however, Proteus has his own announcement to make: he no longer loves Julia; he, too, has fallen in love with Silvia: Even as one heat another heat expels, Or as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite forgotten.1 If there ever was a "love at first sight," this must be it, we think, but Proteus is not so sure: in three crucial lines, he suggests a different explanation: Is it mine eye, or Valentinus' praise, Her true perfection or my false transgression, That makes me reasonless, to reason thus? (Il.iv. 196-98) 231 232Philosophy and Literature The entire comedy massively confirms the crucial role of Valentine in the genesis of Proteus's sudden passion for Silvia. According to our romantic and individualistic ideology, a borrowed sentiment such as this one is not genuine enough to be really intense. This is not true in Shakespeare; Proteus's desire is so furious that he would actually rape Silvia if Valentine did not rescue her in extremis. When Shakespeare wrote his plays, the second-hand desire he portrays had no name, no official existence, but this is no longer true. We call it mimetic or mediated desire. Valentine is the model or mediator of this desire. Proteus is its mediated subject and Silvia is their common object. Mimetic desire can strike with the speed of lightning because it does not really depend upon the visual impact made by the object; it only seems to. Proteus desires Silvia not because their brief encounter made a decisive impression on him but because he is predisposed in favor of whatever Valentine desires. Mimetic desire is not some modern idea that I would force upon an unwilling writer; it is Shakespeare's own idea and we can see this again in Proteus's soliloquy, which keeps minimizing the role of perception in the genesis of his desire for Silvia: She is fair; and so is Julia that I love, That I did love,... (Il.iv. 199-200) IfSilvia is no more desirable objectively thanJulia, her only advantage is that Valentine already desires her. Shakespeare undermines the predominance of sight in the expression love at first sight. In A Midsummer Night's Dream as well, the two girls are said to be equally beautiful, also for the purpose of reinforcing the case for mimetic desire. II The dramatic context of this first mimetic desire, and of many others in Shakespeare, is the close and ancient friendship of the two protagonists. When Proteus is about to arrive in Milan, Valentine describes this friendship to Silvia and her father: I knew him as myself; for from our infancy We have convers'd and spent our hours together. (II.iv.62-63) René Girard233 When two young men grow up together, they learn the same lessons, they read the same books, they play the same games, and they agree on just about everything. They also tend to desire the same objects. This perpetual convergence is not incidental but essential to the friendship ; it occurs so regularly and inevitably that it seems preordained by some supernatural fate; it really depends on a mutual imitation so spontaneous and constant that it remains unconscious. When we think of imitation, we imagine two people copying each other's manners, habits, accents, and even their likes and dislikes in the still childish and innocent manner of two childish friends. We never think of what Proteus's desire for... (shrink)