How does literature illuminate the way we live? Maurice Natanson, a prominent champion of phenomenology, draws upon this method's unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, Natanson reveals the "uncanny" that lies at the core of the ordinary. Phenomenology--which involves the questioning of that which we usually take for granted--is for Natanson the essence of philosophy. Drawing upon his philosophical predecessors Edmund Husserl, (...) Alfred Schutz, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Natanson paves his own way with stories and examples that themselves bear witness to how phenomenology occurs in literature. In considering such works as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Natanson shows how literature opens us to the domain of possibility and how metaphor offers philosophical power when we think about freedom and change. This book, written by one of the twentieth century's leading phenomenologists, will interest students in philosophy and in literature. They will value the work particularly for its clarification of concepts and terms that frequently emerge in the contemporary intellectual climate. (shrink)

Geographical features and cultural traits influence the character of big-mountain tourism in Alaska. This research considers the intersectionality of wilderness and frontier concepts on tourism culture, examines guides’ and clients’ motivations for participation, and relates these influences to the larger phenomena of tourism generally and nature tourism specifically. The findings show that Alaska’s big-mountain tourism is globalized in its political and economic scope. Guides imagine themselves as pioneers on a last frontier of mountain pursuits, notions that relate well to images (...) depicted of the region in literature and promoted by the tourism industry. Clients, on the other hand, come to Alaska because of its exceptional geography and unique mountain sporting culture, but are not as enamored with the mythos of the frontier. (shrink)

Geographical features and cultural traits influence the character of big-mountain tourism in Alaska. This research considers the intersectionality of wilderness and frontier concepts on tourism culture, examines guides’ and clients’ motivations for participation, and relates these influences to the larger phenomena of tourism generally and nature tourism specifically. The findings show that Alaska’s big-mountain tourism is globalized in its political and economic scope. Guides imagine themselves as pioneers on a last frontier of mountain pursuits, notions that relate well to images (...) depicted of the region in literature and promoted by the tourism industry. Clients, on the other hand, come to Alaska because of its exceptional geography and unique mountain sporting culture, but are not as enamored with the mythos of the frontier. (shrink)

Mental toughness (MT) is a key psychological variable related to achievement in performance domains and perseverance in challenging circumstances. We sought to understand the lived experiences of mentally tough high-altitude mountaineers, focusing primarily upon decisions to persevere or abort summit attempts. Phenomenological interviews were conducted with 14 mountaineers including guides, expedition leaders, and doctors (Mage = 44 years). A content analysis was employed to identify key themes in the data. Participants emphasized the importance of MT in extreme environments and described (...) rational, flexible, and vigilant decision-making. Turning around without summiting was the toughest decision reported, with recognition of the thin line between persevering and overstretching. In contrast to much MT literature, mountaineers accepted limits, demonstrated restraint, and sacrificed personal goals to aid others. Costly perseverance was also reported with some mountaineers described as “too tough”: overcompetitive, goal-obsessed, and biased decision-makers. These findings revealed both benefits and dangers of MT in mountaineering. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that, with a few notable exceptions, Japanese literature, and especially the work of novelist Yasunari Kawabata, focuses on beauty, emotion, and psychology, and that this focus is at the expense of moral or ethical exploration.Kawabata was Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, so to misunderstand his work so fundamentally is not just a matter for aficionados of arcana. The mistake deprives the international reading public of an important philosophical resource for understanding (...) the modern world, the various phenomena of complicated grief, the effects of the atomic bombings and mass trauma more generally—and, yes, the postwar Japanese.1The Sound of the Mountain,2 serialized in.. (shrink)

Non-heterosexual men have long existed on the social and cultural margins. Gay and bisexual male characters in literature, too, have done so for many generations. This essay explores the construction of gay masculinity in the short story “Brokeback Mountain” in relation to the “imaginative leap” that its author, Annie Proulx, undertook in order to conceptualize and represent this noteworthy form of marginalized otherness. It demonstrates that, despite the story’s various refreshing elements, “Brokeback Mountain” ultimately relies far too extensively on (...) the logic of melodrama when telling the tale of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love in 1963 and continue their sexual relationship over the course of two decades. As a result, this story ends up positioning its two queer protagonists as enemies of the patriarchal social order and the larger society within which it so comfortably exists, implicitly perpetuating both heterosexism and homophobia as it does its cultural work. (shrink)

Current literature suggests that the adversarial legal system may undergo some changes or may even be transformed by a recent influx of women lawyers into the profession. Such research indicates that women may approach ethical problems differently than men. This paper examines the responses of family law lawyers in Vancouver, British Columbia and the surrounding Lower Mainland to a hypothetical case which requires an assessment of professional responsibilities in light of potential conflicts in personal moral values.

This ethnographic research features Shugendō (mountain asceticism), Japan’s centuries-old, mystical tradition. I and approximately fifty other lay participants took part in a three-day Shugendō program for the secular. The program is physically demanding and takes secular trainees to three holy mountains in Yamagata, Japan, where they take part in the water purification and holy fire rituals in the mountain asceticism tradition. Using the theoretical framework of semiotics, I explicate the visual signifiers of this esoteric mysticism in the context of (...) Shugendō teachings represented in twenty photographs taken during the training. The purpose of this article is to promote semiotics as an analytical standpoint alternative to other approaches to studying culture, in this case, a Japanese religion sourced in my fieldwork. I argue that, living in today’s global age and visual culture, college students can and should benefit from learning about semiotics and developing visual literacy for their future career opportunities. (shrink)

Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain' conveys some insights into the distinction between images and reality. Like a prisoner in the Platonic cave, Hans Castorp is enslaved to images. His fascination for the X-ray images of the 'interior portrait,' especially of Clawdia Chauchat, may anticipate the current illusion that brain imaging may allow access to the minds of other persons, may draw their mental portraits. In Mann's novel, Director Behrens, the ardent materialist, anticipates such an illusion. It is only the 'license (...) of fiction,' however, that allows the narrator of this novel access to the minds of some of the characters. (AN PHL2239369) Subjects: BRAIN IMAGING; CINEMA; IDENTITY; IMAGE; METAPHYSICS; MIND; NARCISSISM; REALITY. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen MastersDale S. WrightOpening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters. By Steven Heine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 200. Hardcover $25.00. Paper $17.95.On the beautifully designed cover of Steven Heine's Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters, we gaze at one of the masterworks of Chinese painting, Kuo Hsi's Early Spring, painted in the late eleventh century (...) at what may have been the pinnacle of the Chinese Zen monastic tradition. Allowing our eyes to wander up, down, and across this truly great work, we spot the curved roof of a Buddhist monastery gorgeously nestled in a rugged valley halfway up a towering, mist-covered mountain. No image could more adequately capture the mystique that Chinese Zen monasticism attained in that era and has continued to cultivate into the modern period. Steven Heine's new book masterfully communicates the aura of Zen in those times by highlighting a segment of kōan literature that features the work of Zen masters in "opening a mountain." While it is clear that the mountain in this phrase is really a Zen monastery, and that this phrase became a standard way to refer to the initiation of a new monastery, Heine unravels this act of opening by detailing the enormously interesting historical/cultural tradition behind it.Long before the emergence of the Zen or even the Buddhist tradition in China, mountains symbolized numinous, spiritual power. Early Taoists had already used the image of the mountain as a metaphor of mysterious, otherworldly reality. Chinese [End Page 194] popular tradition pictured the deities residing at these far-off and little-known elevations. Buddhists continued to capitalize on images like this until literature valorizing the T'ang and Sung dynasty Zen masters brought them to their current cultural position. Climbing a mountain, and dwelling there, required the utmost mental and spiritual discipline. Residing in that lofty sphere, one attained a vision of the world that in its depth and breadth trumped any understanding that could be attained in the world below. The mountain recluse and the enigmatic Zen master who drew disciples into remote mountainous regions for mental or spiritual training is by now one of the best known, most powerful images in the world. It is quite understandable that the great Zen masters would "open" their monastic training centers in the kind of setting depicted in Heine's reconstruction of the idea of the mountain in Chinese history.What Heine's analysis makes clear, though, is that there is much more to the act of "opening" than we have hitherto assumed. Prior to the movement of Buddhist monasteries into these remote areas there existed a largely oral tradition concerning enigmatic mountain recluses who, like the legendary Taoist Lao-tzu, had withdrawn from the world in the quest for profound spiritual vision. Popular images of these visionaries were widespread throughout China in the medieval period, and no parallel to them existed in the staid, scholarly world of Buddhist monasticism. The movement of monastic Buddhism into that domain, therefore, necessitated a conflict and melding of images, and the terms in which this ideological battle would take place would not be derived from the rarified philosophical and textual traditions that had made Buddhism so impressive to earlier generations of Chinese converts. Instead, Zen masters would compete for popular recognition in south-central China in terms that were familiar to the residents of that area, namely of magical powers, demons, local deities, and the visions, apparitions, and exorcisms that supported that premodern metaphysical world.The innovation of Opening a Mountain is that, while not denying what Heine calls the "conventional understanding" of the kōan tradition, which has been communicated in largely modern, demythologized, psychological images, the book undertakes the study of kōan literature by being particularly attentive to these clear representations of the extent to which Zen was born and cultivated in a premodern world. Opening new territory in Zen kōan studies, Heine works his way back into the medieval Chinese mentality that would have set the context for the emergence of the kōan tradition... (shrink)

Yasunari Kawabata’s 1952 novel The Sound of the Mountain is widely praised for its aesthetic qualities, from its adaptation of aesthetics from the Tale of Genji, through the beauty of its prose and the patterning of its images, to the references to arts and nature within the text. This article, by contrast, shows that Kawabata uses these features to demonstrate the effects of the mass trauma following the Second World War and the complicated grief it induced, on the psychology of (...) moral/ethical understanding, decision-making and action. The stream of consciousness traces the protagonist’s growing awareness of social changes and the ensuing difficulties of ethical decision-making. (shrink)

In this study, the authors utilize mountain pass lemma, variational methods, regularization technique, and the Lyapunov function method to derive the unique existence of the positive classical stationary solution of a single-species ecosystem. Particularly, the geometric characteristic of saddle point in the mountain pass lemma guarantees that the equilibrium point is the ground state stationary solution of the ecosystem. Based on the obtained uniqueness result, the authors use the Lyapunov function method to derive the globally exponential stability criterion, which illuminates (...) that under some suitable conditions, a certain internal competition is conducive to the global stability of the population, and a certain amount of family planning is conducive to the overall stability of the population. Most notably, the regularity technique of weak stationary solution employed in this study can also be applied to some existing literature related with time-delays reaction-diffusion systems for the purpose of regularization of weak solutions. Finally, an illuminative numerical example shows the effectiveness of the proposed methods. (shrink)

It is a story presenting various hiking trips “with Karol Wojtyła”. During these trips a lot of philosophical and scientific problems were discussed. That produced a basis for seminars including those which were held in Castel Gandolfo in 1980–2003.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 61-72 [Access article in PDF] From Personal to Social Transaction:A Model of Aesthetic Reading in the Classroom Mark A. Pike This article seeks to define more precisely the nature of the individual transaction that occurs between reader and text and the potential for aesthetic reading in literature classrooms by relating knowledge of the way pupils engage in literary transactions to theoretical (...) perspectives that address the issue. The validity of Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of the literary work, expounded in Literature as Exploration and The Reader, The Text, The Poem, and its relevance for contemporary educators, particularly in the field of English education, has recently been reasserted by Jeanne Connell in her timely and cogent article in this journal. 1 The present article, however, seeks to refocus debate by problematizing and subsequently developing some aspects of key theories such as Rosenblatt's while examining the individual and social nature of reading in schools. Rosenblatt's view that aesthetic experiences can have both social origin and effect certainly deserves further theorizing if aesthetic experience in school communities and classrooms is to flourish.The influence of John Dewey's Art as Experience upon Rosenblatt is evident as this seminal text conceives of our primary task as the restoration of "continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and everyday events." 2 Such continuity with experience is vital because, for Dewey, "experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ." 3 Applying such a notion to education in schools, Rosenblatt saw the aim of literature lessons as the growth of experience rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Yet, despite such progress, in the United Kingdom, teachers of English are in the unenviable position of having to deliver an extensive body of knowledge prescribed by the National Curriculum and also to focus explicitly upon the features of certain types of text as they teach the National Literacy Strategy. 4 In Rosenblatt's work the emphasis on our experience of [End Page 61] literary works provides a much needed alternative to positions such as that adopted by New Criticism where "it is never what a poem says which matters, but what it is" because we acknowledge we can only ever gain access to what a poem says as "the sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one." 5 Clearly, understanding the reader's transaction with texts is where we must begin if we wish to foster aesthetic reading in our classrooms.Transactional theory also appears to be closely related to Martin Heidegger's thought in Being and Time where Dasein (givenness, existence, being) is seen as a distinctive characteristic of the human being as our consciousness projects things of the world and is also subjected to the things of the world which belong to us, in some sense, only as long as our consciousness is projecting them. 6 The validity of Dewey's view, where experience is not separated from art, can be seen when we acknowledge that we can "never adopt an attitude of detached contemplation, looking down on the world as if from a mountain top" for we are "inevitably merged with the very object of our consciousness." 7Such a view reflects Hans-Georg Gadamer's position in Truth and Method in which Heidegger's explanation of situation is applied to literary theory because, for Gadamer, the literary work cannot appear as a packaged and completed artefact in which meaning is neatly wrapped because it is influenced by a particular reader's actions at a particular moment. 8 Rosenblatt's realistic conception that "each reading involves a particular person at a particular time and place" is developed in this article as it seems that, even now, many reader response critics and curriculum designers "write as though people read literature in a vacuum or in a generalized kind of academic setting" which often does not apply... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments ENJOYING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN FICTIONS by John Morreall There is a puzzle going back to Aristotle and Augustine that has sometimes been called the "paradox of tragedy": how is it that nonmasochistic, nonsadistic people are able to enjoy watching or reading about fictional situations which are filled with suffering? The problem here actually extends beyond tragedy to our enjoyment of horror films and other fictional depictions (...) of situations which we would not enjoy in real life. What is it about fiction that turns intensely unpleasant situations into situations we can enjoy? Ofthe many solutions proposed to this puzzle, I shall mentionjust four. Aristotle held that in viewing tragedy we experience negative emotions — pity and fear — but get pleasure from the experience nonetheless because we are thereby purged of excess pity and fear. For Aristotle, too, there is a pleasure which tragedy shares with fiction in general, the delight we take in representations.1 Hume put more weight on this latter delight. Our pleasure in tragedy, he said, is based on our appreciation of the skill with which the literary or other artist has depicted the unpleasant scenes.2 Susan Feagin has recently located the pleasure we take in tragic art not in our direct responses to the work, which are "unpleasant experiences," she says, but in our meta-response of moral self-congratulation at these responses.3 The fourth solution to our puzzle is really a dissolution: it consists of denying that we actually feel fear, pity, and other negative emotions in our experience of fiction. The guiding principle here is that in order to have some emotion toward a situation, we must believe that it is a real situation. This principle is articulated in an influential article by Kendall Walton, though he does not apply it to our puzzle.4 95 96Philosophy and Literature I believe that this last solution is no solution at all because we do in fact feel emotions in our appreciation of fiction (a point I will develop later). The other three solutions above address the puzzle, and the pleasures they appeal to all have some explanatory power. But these solutions seem to me to overlook perhaps the most basic pleasure we take in tragedy, horror films, and the like — the direct pleasure of feeling (ear, pity, and similar emotions. The idea of enjoying negative emotions seems counterintuitive at first; indeed it may seem analytically false. But let us look more closely at those emotions to see what there might be to enjoy in them. Because the idea that we experience real emotions in response to fiction is controversial, we will begin not with fiction but with real life. After seeing how negative emotions can be enjoyed in real life, we can then consider their enjoyment in response to fiction. Fear is perhaps the most basic negative emotion, and at first glance one of the least likely to be enjoyed. To feel fear, many have claimed, we have tojudge that we are in danger, and danger is disturbing to us. And so it is natural that in fear there is the motivation to eliminate the danger, by fleeing, protecting ourselves, or attacking. Changes in the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system equip us forjust such actions. They produce an increase in alertness and muscle tension, a faster and stronger heartbeat, a redistribution of the blood from the skin and internal organs to the voluntary muscles and brain, and a release of stored sugar from the liver into the bloodstream. Now although we may not be able to identify all these changes when we are in a state of fear, we can feel many of them directly, and we certainly feel the overall excitement which they produce. It is this excitement, I think, that makes fear potentially enjoyable. Especially for someone who leads a relatively dull life, the stimulation provided by fear can be pleasurable by contrast with the ordinary lack of stimulation. Many people, indeed, go to considerable trouble to put themselves into dangerous situations, in part, at least, for the thrill of fear that the danger will provide. Consider mountain climbers and skydivers, for instance. Now there are many sources... (shrink)

"Matters"! This is an odd word when used as a verb. Of course we know what it means. The verbal form of "matter" means "count for something," "have import," "have effects in the real world," "be worth taking seriously." Using the word as a noun, however, someone might speak of "literature matters," meaning the whole realm that involves literature. The Newsletter of the Maine Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club is called Wilderness Matters, punning on the word as (...) a noun and as a verb. We might say, analogously, "Literature Matters," as my title does. In medieval Europe learned people spoke of "the matter of Rome," "the matter of Arthur," "the matter of Greece," meaning the whole set of stories that lay behind .. (shrink)

Unmanaged recreation presents a challenge to both researchers and managers of outdoor recreation in the United States because it is shrouded in uncertainty resulting from disagreement over the definition of the problem, the strategies for resolving the problem, and the outcomes of management. Incomplete knowledge about recreation visitors’ values and relationships with one another, other stakeholders, and the land further complicate the problem. Uncertainty and social complexity make the unmanaged recreation issue a wicked problem. We describe the wickedness inherent in (...) unmanaged recreation and some of the implications of wickedness for addressing the problem for the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Conclusions about the nature of the problem are based on a problem appraisal that included a literature review and interviews of key informants. Addressing wickedness calls for institutional changes that allow for and reward the use of trust building, inclusive communication, and genuinely collaborative processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:All Mine!: Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Cenury China by Stephen OwenNguyen T. Thanh-Huyen (bio)All Mine!: Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Cenury China. By Stephen Owen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Paperback $30.00, isbn 978-0-231-20311-1. Reading Stephen Owen's new book, All Mine!: Happiness, Ownership, and Naming in Eleventh-Century China (hereafter All Mine!), many readers will find that the perspectives of eleventh-century Song scholar-officials on finding (...) happiness in material things are still highly relevant to the increasingly materialistic culture in China and the world in the present day. Under the Song dynasty, the pursuit of happiness through material objects is "what contemporaries themselves recognized as uncomfortable topics" (p. 14). In writing this book, Owen attempts to survey a literary phenomenon in which material-contingent happiness permeated Song literature despite the moral surveillance of classical ideology on happiness and ownership that stretched back to the Lunyu (Analects of Confucius). At the same time, the author elucidates how material-contingent happiness in literature drove and was driven by the sociocultural changes and the growth of commercialization in the Song. All Mine! is a fine balance between literary study and intellectual history. Owen's approach tends to be all-inclusive, as he covers a diverse range of genres (including prose, poetry, miscellany, and biography) and texts with which readers generally have different levels of familiarity. For every text, Owen provides thorough explanation on its background, allusions, and references, while also offering in-depth cultural, aesthetic, and structural analysis. He calls our attention to the subtle differences between similar texts, such as the biographies of Ouyang Xiu 歐陽脩 and Tao Yuanming 陶淵明, to show how they deliver entirely different ideas about happiness and ownership and signal a radical transition from the old to a new world of values. Regarding intellectual history, the book studies the conflicts between different discourses on happiness. Owen reveals different forces of censorship against happiness of acquisition and ownership, presenting them especially clearly with Ouyang Xiu's stories in Chapter 1 ("The Biography of the Retired Layman Six") and Chapter 2 ("The Magistrate of Peach Blossom Spring"). The author also pays close attention to the act of naming as a form of ownership. As he points out, the process of Song literati trying to "get the right name" for objects and sites often converged with the process of elaborating different [End Page 1] person-thing relationships based on the social status of the owner and the characteristics of the object of ownership, thereby grounding the principles for judging the morality of material-contingent happiness. Readers can also see the happiness-ownership paradox in literature as closely related to the commercialization of elite-praised goods that was flourishing in Song society. This validates Owen's choice "to think of cultural and historical phenomena as ecosystems or solar systems in constant change, each particular changed by and changing the whole" (p. 13). Perhaps the most impressive chapters in the book are 3 and 5, which deal with the Song's perspective on ownership as transient and unstable, and its relationship with happiness. Chapter 3 explores the pervasive awareness that "things are held by power, not by right" (p. 67). The source of "power" could be financial, social, political, and military advantage, or something humans can't control, like death. Owen relates many sad Song stories of elites whose things were taken by someone with greater power. The most interesting one is perhaps that of Su Dongpo 苏東坡 and his "Nine Blossoms Mountain in a Jug," in which Su was not willing to give up the little world that he attached to this rock mountain, despite being very conscious about the dangers of possession. "It is alright if the superior man lets his interests be temporarily invested in things, but it is not alright if he lets his interest remain in those things," the author writes (p. 72). Chapter 3 contains many examples of "names as a form of ownership." Ownership of physical things can be transient and infringeable, but the writings on names of objects and sites by famous Song literati like Ouyang Xiu and Su Dongpo... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching Ethics in the Health Care SettingPart II: Sample SyllabusMary Carrington Coutts (bio)The National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics receives many inquiries from instructors at institutions that are just beginning to teach medical ethics. In an effort to assist those individuals, we have devised a syllabus that could be adapted for many uses. This is intended to be an introductory level syllabus, (...) perhaps one that would be appropriate for continuing staff education in a hospital or for an undergraduate college course. Of course, every instructor has his or her own style and preference for course content. This is offered merely as a place to start.Recognizing that participants bring a variety of backgrounds to a course, four possible text books and two casebooks have been selected as texts for a course in health care ethics. There are a number of other books that also could have been chosen. Some of these are listed in Scope Note 15: Basic Resources in Bioethics (published in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 1 (1): 75-90, March 1991). Other video selections are listed in Scope Note 9: Bioethics Audiovisuals: 1982-Present (1988); (available directly from the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature). Additional recommendations for works that provide cross-cultural or international views of medical ethics appear in the supplemental readings list at the end of this syllabus.TextbooksBiomedical Ethics. Edited by Thomas A. Mappes and Jane S. Zembaty. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990, 641 pp. Cited: (M&Z). This text is well-suited for undergraduate education, with selected readings by philosophers, lawyers, and physicians. Includes 45 brief case studies to [End Page 263] illustrate various units of readings.Contemporary Issues in Bioethics. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and LeRoy Walters. 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1989, 655 pp. Cited: (B&W). Appropriate for upper-level undergraduate or graduate education, this text includes selected readings by important philosophers, lawyers, physicians, and organizations. Includes the abridged texts of many significant court cases and government or organizational documents. Does not include case studies.Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine. Compiled by John Arras and Nancy K. Rhoden. 3rd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1989, 585 pp. Cited: (A&R). This text is suitable for upper-level undergraduate or graduate studies. It includes selections from well-respected lawyers, philosophers, and a few physicians. Includes excerpts from important court cases and policy documents. Provides only a few hypothetical case studies but does relate some authentic cases that are relevant to the various sections.Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Bioethical Issues. Edited by Carol Levine. 3rd ed. Guilford, CT: Dushkin Pub. Group, 1989, 370 pp. Cited: (L). A compilation of contrasting readings from the popular Hastings Center Report, this book is appropriate for undergraduate or continuing health care education. It does not include an introduction to basic biomedical ethical theory. Perhaps less systematic in its approach to bioethics than the previous textbooks, this book covers twenty topics relating to reproduction, death and dying, human and animal experimentation, and selected public policy issues. Provides pro and con arguments for each issue.CasebooksCases in Bioethics: Selections from the Hastings Center Report. Edited by Carol Levine. Rev. and updated ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989, 291 pp. Cited: (HCR). This text includes cases studies taken from the well-known Hastings Center Report. Two or three commentaries usually accompany each case.Pence, Gregory E. Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics, With Philosophical, Legal, and Historical Backgrounds. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill, 1990, 398 pp. Cited: (CC). This book describes a collection of famous (and infamous) cases from the history of biomedical ethics. The accounts of the cases here are more detailed than in other texts, and the style is more casual. [End Page 264]Course OutlineBelow are possible topics for discussion, listed with the relevant portions for each book. It is anticipated that only one textbook and one casebook would be chosen for a course. Whenever possible, price information for video purchase or rentals has been included, however this information is subject to change.Session 1... (shrink)

우담(愚潭) 정시한(丁時翰, 1625∼1707)은 우리나라 유학사에 있어서 영남 주리파의 학통을 계승한 도학자로 알려져 있다. 본고에서는 현재 남아있는 우담의 한시 작품과 문집에 나타나는 문학 관련 기록과 산중일기의 내용을 중심으로 우담 정시한의 세계관, 곧 주리적 재도적 문학관점이라는 문학관, 내성적 낙천적 인생사유라는 인생관, 청박적 탈속적 산수취미라는 자연관 등을 살펴보았다.첫째, 우담 정시한은 주리적 재도적 문학관점을 지향하였다. 유가의 학문이란 자신의 뜻을 겸손하게 하는 데 있다고 하여 스스로 문기(文氣)를 자랑하고 남을 능멸하는 태도를 경계하였으며, 주리적인 입장에 근거한 도덕적 관념의 시문이 넉넉한 심성과 청아한 정신을 바탕으로 표출되었다. 또한 온후하고 (...) 평담하며 소쇄하고 청아한 시세계를 선호하였으며, 실제로 자신의 문장에 있어서는 정밀하고 심찰하는 태도를 보였다. 둘째, 우담 정시한은 내성적 낙천적 인생사유를 확립하였다. 철저하게 자기 내면을 성찰하고 주리적이고 명도적인 학문적 입장을 지켰으며, 낙천지명하는 순천적인 도학자의 인생관을 추구하면서 상도(常道)를 궁구하고 의리를 준수하며 천명과 천리를 따르는 순응적인 삶을 보여주었다. 셋째, 우담 정시한은 청박적 탈속적 산수취미를 향유하였다. 속세의 거추장스런 것을 끊어버리고자 시작한 산행에서 자신의 마음에 맞는 곳을 찾아 스스로 즐기는 탈속적인 취미를 체득하였다. 세상 밖의 청아하고 소박한 경치를 감상하면서 가슴 속의 티끌과 어둡고 막힌 것을 씻어내려 하였으며, 청아하고 절묘한 경치를 즐기면서 음영하는 선비의 풍류를 좋아하였으며, 한적하고 그윽한 곳에 은거하면서 청박한 운치를 누리고자 했으며, 누정에 올라 학문을 강마하고 유식(遊息)하는 기쁨을 누리고자 하였다. 이에 우담 정시한은 조선 후기 도학자로서의 건실하고 순정하며 실천적인 삶의 모습을 보여주었으며, 조선시대의 대표적인 유일(遺逸)로서 청아하고 소박한 문학적 세계관을 살펴볼 수 있었다. (shrink)

A focus on the ideological use of popular culture has been one of the major innovations in the study of the Cold War over the past years. Films played a central role in the popular culture of that period and the spy genre was a very important direction in the battle for winning domestic and global hearts and minds for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Cinematography had a critical importance because it met the demands of both entertainment (...) and ideological functions. Utilising extensive archival research in film production files, this article attempts to fill a gap in the literature by providing an overview of how the tensions between East and West were exploited into the Romanian films of the first two decades of the Cold War. Focusing on the cultural and political context in which films such as Viața învinge (Life Triumphs—Dinu Negreanu, 1951), Alarmă în munți (Alarm in the Mountains—Dinu Negreanu, 1955), Vultur 101 (Eagle 101—Andrei Călărașu, 1957), Secretul cifrului (The Secret Code—Lucian Bratu, 1960) and Pisica de mare (Stingray—Gheorghe Turcu, 1964) were produced, while analysing the evolution of the image of spies and secret agents in these cinematic productions, this paper reveals how the spy film genre emerged in communist Romania during the period when Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was in power, and how it contributed to the creation of images that marked the collective mind of the period for decades. (shrink)

This was written for the Archdiocese of Calcutta's mouthpiece, The Herald in 2009 and published there. The audience is chiefly popular and not the usual academic audience both within Catholicism or in the academe in general. This essay makes a case for us in understanding and empathizing with the essential loneliness of the Catholic Religious (as understood by a married Hindu man). Further, literature is shown hear as effective therapy for resisting loneliness and as a therapeutic tool for self-help (...) by Catholic Religious. The author is not in possession of the published article but has been informed that copies of The Herald, Kolkata are kept at Goethals's Library, St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. (shrink)

An account is given of the work on glacial phenomena in the English Lake District from the time of Adam Sedgwick until the mid-twentieth century, with emphasis on the nineteenth century. In the early years, the following theories were envisaged: 'diluvialism'; the theory of 'waves of translation'; the theory of 'ice rafting'; the 'glacial-submergence' hypothesis ; and the 'land-ice' theory. While it was quite easy to recognize ice action and the former existence of glaciers, it was difficult to work out (...) a persuasive sequence of events that would account satisfactorily for the great variety and quantity of evidence available, considering land-forms, and the distribution of moraines, tills, gravels, and glacial erratics. When the first systematic geological survey was being undertaken in the Lake District both local amateurs and the surveyors favoured the glacial-submergence theory, but there were problems about explaining the distribution of glacial erratics, and controversy developed as to whether this distribution was best explained in terms of floating icebergs or landice. The problem was difficult in that there was uncertainty as to how many glaciations there had been, though the preferred number was two, following the early observations in Wales by Andrew Ramsay, in Lancashire by Edward Hull and others, and by some Continental geologists, of two different tills, and one intermediate water-deposited unit. These seemed to have equivalents in the Lake District. However, the Scottish surveyors, under the influence of their theorist colleague, James Croll, with his astronomical explanation of ice ages, favoured multiple glaciations. Croll himself sought to apply the land-ice theory to explain the distribution of glacial erratics in the regions round the Lake District. James Geikie read widely in the Continental literature, and thought that the theory of several glaciations, developed by Albrecht Penck in the 1880s, on the basis of observations of the valleys and rivers terraces running north from the Alps, fitted well with Croll's theory. Thus the idea of a sequence of glaciations was applied to Britain with some success, partly as a result of Geikie's advocacy. But the evidence of such a sequence in the Lake District itself was by no means clear, and it was not developed for the region until the work of Frederick Trotter and Sidney Hollingworth . In the meantime, much geomorphological work on the form and formation of lakes and tarns had been done by the chief aficionado of Lakeland geology, Cambridge professor, John Marr. But he thought there might have been only one major glaciation. The paradox is that, for England, the glacial sequence has had to be worked out more by examination of deposits in the flatter southern regions, as much as in the mountains where the glaciers were formed and most active. In the Lakeland mountains, as in other parts of the world, the last glaciation has tended to remove or obscure the products of earlier glaciations. (shrink)

The vast majority of theologians accept true news, sound senses and healthy working mind as sources of knowledge. Due to the fact that the mind is counted among the sources of knowledge, reason-based evidence has been used in many subjects. It is known that Māturīdī was the first theologian who dealt with the mentioned sources of knowledge in his work. At the very beginning of his Kitāb al-Tawhīd, he determined the ways of acquiring knowledge as correct news, sound senses and (...) reason, and elaborated them in detail. Māturīdī mostly prefers the term inference to describe the use of reason. He has proven his views on theological issues with many types of inference as well as true news and sense knowledge. These include matters related to the hereafter, too. The visible over the invisible, which is a type of inference, was used as evidence by Māturīdī to prove almost every subject. Many definitions of the method of the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible have been made. However, it is possible to understand the structure on which it is built as follows: There are areas that human beings cannot comprehend and have will no definite knowledge about. These areas called as al-ghaib “the invisible” may be related to ontological differences or may be due to differences in time and space. The difference between humans and Allah is ontological difference, and Allah is an ontological invisible for humans. While events that have not yet happened are invisible in terms of time, happenings what beyond the mountain for example, are invisible in terms of spatial difference. It is not possible for human beings to fully understand (perceive) the attributes of Allah, who is ontologically invisible. For this reason, many theologians have used the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible especially in making the attributes of Allah understandable and have tried to explain the divine attributes with this method. Belief in the hereafter is also related to the realm of the unvisible. There are a lot of revelations (true knowledge) about the hereafter. However, because of the conditions of the hereafter are different from this world, it is necessary to make the revelations about that place comprehensible. Accordingly, it is interesting how Māturīdī uses the aforementioned method to understand the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which is the area of the unvisible. Māturīdī sometimes understood the verses about reward and punishment in the hereafter with their real meanings, and sometimes attributed different meanings to these verses. In this context, while dealing with the verses about the afterlife, he listed the possibilities regarding what they might mean, and included interpretations based the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible. Thus, Māturīdī tried to make the hereafter, intelligible based on human being’s experiences in this world. According to Māturīdī, the mind also has a function in understanding the hereafter. The mind has the capacity to go beyond the senses and gives us information about that field. Our mind, based on what we can perceive and understand, can go beyond itself and make inferences about the issues that are incapable of understanding. Knowing the pleasures and tortures of the world in order to understand the reward and punishment that will be given to humans in the hereafter happens in a similary way. In addition, he makes inferences based on events, situations, characteristics, etc. (visible) that people know from worldly life in order to better understand the expressions in such verses, which is quite remarkable for our study. In this context, while interpreting many verses, Māturīdī bases on the aspects of the realm of the visible similar to the realm of the hereafter. He explains the similarities of the hereafter to the worldly life, mostly through human nature, the Arabs’ perception of reward and punishment, and people’s perception of color and direction. In addition to these, he takes our knowledge, which has increased to the knowledge of observation, as a basis even though we learn through news, and evaluates the divine narrations for the hereafter on these principles. For the hereafter can be understood through things known, visible, lived and experienced in the life of this world. Māturīdī emphasizes the similarity of the world and the hereafter as well as the different aspects of the hereafter and uses these differences as a basis for his inferences. Our study is aimed at understanding how Māturīdī brings evidence to what people know from worldly life while explaining the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter. In this context, methods such as interpretation, comparison, concept analysis, and literature review were used, and the study was limited to the books of Kitāb al-Tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt of Māturīdī. (shrink)

In White Noise by Don DeLillo, two characters visit a famous barn, described as the “most photographed barn in America” alongside hordes of picture-taking tourists. One of them complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore. This implies that there was once a real barn, which has been lost in the “virtual” image. This is in line with Plato’s concept of the simulacrum as a false or “corrupt” copy, which has lost all (...) connection with the “original.” Plotinus, however, offered a different definition: the simulacrum distorts reality in order to reveal the invisible, the Ideal. There is a real building which has been called “the most photographed barn in America”: the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park. The location—barn in the foreground, mountain range towering over it—forms a striking visual composition. But the site is not only famous because it is photogenic. Images of the barn in part evoke the heroic struggles of pioneers living on the frontier. They also draw on the tradition of the “American sublime.” Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the sublime as “the influx of the Divine mind into our mind.” He followed Plotinus in valuing art as a means of “revelation”—with the artist as a kind of prophet or “seer.” The photographers who collect at the Moulton Barn are themselves consciously working within this tradition, and turning themselves into do-it-yourself “artist-seers.” They are the creators, not the slaves of the simulacrum. (shrink)

Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: in the spirit of Zora : traveling with the "eternal feminine" -- Returning to the margin : changed -- African American literature : like a bridge over troubled water -- Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes : envisioning the (new) "Negro artist" -- Striking down colorism in color struck : a play in four scenes -- We are not tragically colored -- Langston Hughes writing about the "the Negro artist and the racial mountain" -- (...) Transgressing boundaries of white male power in the ways of white folks -- Blackness from the inside out -- Seeing "women loving women" -- Black female journey to sexual in(sight)fullness -- "What if Mama finds out?" : entering a life-changing place of self-liberation -- When "nobody was lesbian, nobody was feminist, nobody was gay" -- Higher education that makes a difference -- "Still children of the night" : survivors against the odds -- Black boys' lives still matter : in search of a loving father -- "Spilled salt" on a Black mother's table and the struggle for maternal survival -- No shame: recovering our mother's way(s) of being -- Remembering where we came from -- Getting to the heart of the lessons : Black women teaching "other" ways of loving -- Epilogue: continuing to teach in the image of "an alternative Black man" -- It's about revolutionary manhood. (shrink)

It has been fashionable in the generalist literature to argue that the Ottomans lacked knowledge in European geography and politics. This chapter first offers some comments regarding Istanbul's understanding of geography and environment in the context of Ottoman strategy and frontier warfare. The, it presents a short overview of the importance of rivers, marshlands and mountains with regard to the formation of the opposing Hapsburg and Ottoman defence systems in Hungary. The last part of the chapter deals with (...) the relationship between landscape, climate and fortifications and offers some preliminary results and tentative observations regarding deforestation and marshlands. The discussion also argues, although in somewhat different ways, that the Ottomans and their Hapsburg rivals both had a keen interest in geography and mapped their empires and resources, and possessed adequate information as to the terrain and river systems of their lands and frontiers. (shrink)

Chris Pincock is offended that I presumed to write a historical overview of analytic philosophy without filling it with scholarly detail provided by specialists. Instead of relying on them, I simply read the works of leading philosophers and tried to figure out for myself what they were up to. Didn’t I know that this is impossible? I myself point out in the Epilogue that the history of philosophy is now a specialized discipline. How, Pincock wonders, could I have failed to (...) recognize the implications of this lesson for my own project? Don’t try this at home! Read the original works, if you must, but don’t dare say anything about the views you find – let alone evaluate them by contemporary standards -- unless you first vet your remarks with those in the archives. History isn’t easy, you know! On the contrary, Pincock tells us, “the overriding lesson of work in the history of analytic philosophy is that history is hard.” Conveying that lesson should, he tells us, be the main goal of any historical introduction to the subject. “Above all,” he says, “I would hope that the reader would finish reading such a book with an appreciation of the difficulties inherent in the study of the history of philosophy.” This, I submit, is self-serving nonsense. Conveying its own difficulty is not an overriding goal of any worthwhile intellectual enterprise. The chief difficulty that daunts Pincock is, of course, the secondary literature produced by those like himself. According to him, any proper historical introduction “would have to build on the mountain of books and papers” – by which he means the mountain of secondary literature – and, “judiciously choose from all the proposed interpretations of those details,” carefully referencing alternative interpretations. I disagree. There are different kinds of historical work, with different goals, which make different contributions. My goal was to present analytic philosophy by identifying both its most important 2 achievements and those of its failures from which we have the most to learn.. (shrink)

Forest Ecosystem Services are widely recognised by the society nowadays. However, no study in the literature has analysed a ranking of FES after the pandemic. This paper investigated civil society’s perception and knowledge toward these services; in addition, the presence of attitudinal or behavioural patterns regarding individual’s preference, was assessed. A choice experiment was conducted using the Best-Worst Scaling method on a sample of 479 individuals intercepted in the Argentera Valley, in the Western Italian Alps. Results, showed a strong (...) interest in biodiversity, aesthetic landscape quality and psychophysical health and a lower interest in provisioning services. Based on the individual preferences, civil society was clustered into five groups for FES, named “Hedonistic,” “Individualist with cultural and health interests,” “Sensitive to regulatory and utilitarian functions,” “Climate change sensitive” and “Livelihood and hedonistic wellbeing.” In general, there was a growing appreciation by civil society for the intangible services offered by the forest, driven by modern lifestyles and an interest in learning more about the provided services. Based on these elements, we believe that similar research should be extended to other mountain contexts to validate the results or to find new insights, and that it is now necessary to study how to involve civil society in decision-making processes of forest planning and management at a local level. (shrink)

SinceDaphnis and Chloeis a work of fiction, modern criticism has paid little attention to the topographical details of Lesbos which Longus scatters through his work. Today a preoccupation with biographical or topographical realism in literature is out of fashion, and Longus's world has in any case been described, by one of his most percipient modern critics, as ‘un monde des plus irréels’. Yet just as Longus's women reveal a striking blend of fictional romance and social realism, so the background (...) to his narrative, however much adorned with items of baroque fancy, nevertheless remains solidly based on the geography and ecology of Lesbos itself. The cave of the Nymphs, with its grotto, its spring, and its clutter of statues, may derive from the pastoral property-closet; but Longus's description of Mytilene agrees with those given by Strabo and Pausanias, and many other details—the trailing vines, the wine, the flourishing orchards, the prevalence of hares for hunting—suggest familiarity with the terrain. The description in the proem of the grove of the Nymphs, thick with flowers and trees and watered by a single spring, at once calls to mind the site of the great temple at Mesa, in the Kalloni plain. Most striking of all, since often used as evidence for Longus'signoranceof Lesbos, is his vivid description of a heavy snowfall, much at odds with later travellers' accounts of the climate's perennial mildness. But in the winter of 1964, when I was living on the island, snow lay three feet deep in the chestnut forest above Aghiassos, while Methymna was icebound, with frozen taps and sub-zero temperatures, for ten days, so that all the eucalyptus trees outside the schoolhouse died. The worst winter in living memory was that of 1953/4; the mountains are frequently snowbound. Longus, like Alcaeus, who also describes such conditions, knew what he was talking about. (shrink)

My research explores Maya perspectives on neo-traditional farming as a source of metabolic health and resilience to the global epidemic of type-two diabetes. This article is based on long-term ethnographic research and interviews in Maya Mountains Reservation communities in southern Belize, an area with low diabetes prevalence relative to national and global populations. Research participants see lower rates of diabetes in the MMR as the result of neo-traditional peasant and subsistence farming on ancestral lands. Good metabolic health represents the (...) embodiment of food systems that routinize healthy material and social relationships to the landscape. This research suggests that diabetes is endemic to modern food systems and proposes neo-traditional food ways as a societal antidote to nutritional disease. My research demonstrates and responds to a need for further disaggregated data on diabetes prevalence in Indigenous communities, contributes to the social scientific literature on the importance of small-scale agricultural models for community health, and provides a case study of success in diabetes prevention. I engage Maya perspectives with anthropological literature on embodiment and small-scale agriculture to suggest neo-traditional food ways as healthier alternatives to capitalist agricultural development. (shrink)

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of (...) animals and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)

“Adam was hurled into Hindustan. In this land there is a mountain called Serandib, and it is reported that there is no higher mountain in all the universe. Adam landed on this mountain.” The subject of Serendib plays an important role in both the geographical and travel literature of the Arabs. Serendib, or Sarandib, is the transcription of the Singhalese name Sinhaladîpa, which means “island of the descendants of lions” (singha, “lions,” in Singhaly). Already, in the Middle Ages, in (...) the year 949, Arab merchants, who were well acquainted with the island of Ceylon, set up a branch in Colombo. The natural beauty and wealth of the island so touched the imagination of Arab voyagers that it appeared in the sixth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, and it was also believed that Adam lived on the island after having been driven from Paradise: “The island of Serendib is located directly under the equinoctial line…. Men fish for pearls along its banks and at the mouths of its rivers, and some of its valleys are rich in diamonds. As an act of faith I myself took a trip to the mountain, to the very spot where Adam was banished after being exiled from Paradise. I even climbed to its summit.”This excerpt, from The Thousand and One Nights, well summarizes the feelings of those Arab merchants whose accounts of their travels, in large measure, contributed to the spread of myths and legends about Ceylon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. SebaldMark R. McCullohIFor all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable (...) of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 :At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.(p. 176)The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair..." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to... (shrink)

This article examines the feelings of discomfort in the works of Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Ōe. Focusing on Ōe's first short story “Prize Stock”, Shiiku, the article discusses how the incredible event of a black pilot falling from the sky in the mountains near a small Japanese village during World War II refers to more general racial issues than those described. The discussion argues that Ōe's story, criticized as racist because of the treatment of the black airman, should be (...) read in a broader view, thematising the problems of race and marginalisation in Japan and beyond. (shrink)

How has the Ismaili branch of Shi'i Islam interacted with other Islamic communities throughout history? The groups and movements that make up Islamic civilisation are diverse and varied yet, while scholarship has analysed many branches of Islam in isolation, the exchanges and mutual influences between them has not been sufficiently recognised. This book traces the interactions between Ismaili intellectual thought and the philosophies of other Islamic groups to shed light on the complex and interwoven nature of Islamic civilisation.Based on a (...) broad range of primary sources from the early medieval to the late nineteenth century, the book brings together different disciplines within Islamic Studies to cover polemical and doctrinal literature, law, mysticism, rituals and philosophy. The main Ismaili groups, such as the Fatimids, Nizaris and Tayyibis, are represented, as well as lesser known traditions such as that associated with the mountain region of Badakhshan in Central Asia. Religious syncretism, particularly in the Indian subcontinent and in Yemen, is considered alongside cultural interactions as reflected in the circulation of books in Fatimid markets, and various literary and mythical traditions, some still little explored. (shrink)

Taking Maurice Natanson's posthumously published book, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, as its point of departure, the essay argues that "fictive reality" is the specific content of transcendental-phenomenological reflection. Elaborating this concept allows us to see how phenomenological concepts such as constitution, horizon, and the "transcendental" have a tropological, rather than a psychological, meaning. Specifically, the article considers the metonymical structure of reality's "spatial horizon" and the metaphorical structure of reality's "temporal horizon." This latter is demonstrated on Natanson's (...) analysis of Thomas Mann's concept of the "leitmotiv" in The Magic Mountain. The essay concludes by pointing toward the ontology of metaphor entailed by Natanson's analysis, while suggesting the difference between phenomenology, as the "poetic essence" of philosophy, and philosophy itself, as the categorial elaboration of what phenomenology uncovers. (shrink)

From a perspective of multiculturalism, this paper aims to analyze Ang Lee’s Wedding Banquet and Brokeback Mountain by elaborating on the issues of sex/gender/identity in the hope of exploring the process and problematics of cultural formations in the era of globalization characterized by multiculturalism. Based on Judith Buthler’s deconstructive/postmodernist view of sex/gender/identity, the first part of this essay evaluates simultaneously both the positive and negative aspects of these two films; whereas Deleuze’s literary aesthetics of minor literature offers me a (...) subtle perspective on Ang Lee’s extraordinary achievement in creating a minoritarian artistic work that exposes the complexity of human psyche/desire, which constitutes the second part of this essay. In addition, both parts intend to reexamine, from a perspective of multiculturalism, how Ang Lee’s special micropolitics/aesthetics enables him to rewrite successfully Annie Proulx’s short story for the screen so as to create a globally popular American love story that not only distinguishes him from the mediocre Hollywood commercial romance film makers but also simultaneously brings him fame and profit. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

BackgroundVulnerability is a key concept in traditional and contemporary bioethics. In the philosophical literature, vulnerability is understood not only to be an ontological condition of humanity, but also to be a consequence of contingent factors. Within bioethics debates, vulnerable populations are defined in relation to compromised capacity to consent, increased susceptibility to harm, and/or exploitation. Although vulnerability has historically been associated with older adults, to date, no comprehensive or systematic work exists on the meaning of their vulnerability. To fill (...) this gap, we analysed the literature on aged care for the meaning, foundations, and uses of vulnerability as an ethical concept.MethodsUsing PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a systematic review of argument-based ethics literature in four major databases: PubMed, Embase®, Web of Science™, and Philosopher’s Index. These covered biomedical, philosophy, bioethical, and anthropological literature. Titles, abstracts, and full texts of identified papers were screened for relevance. The snowball technique and citation tracking were used to identify relevant publications. Data analysis and synthesis followed the preparatory steps of the coding process detailed in the QUAGOL methodology.ResultsThirty-eight publications met our criteria and were included. Publication dates ranged from 1984 to 2020, with 17 publications appearing between 2015 and 2020. Publications originated from all five major continents, as indicated by the affiliation of the first author. Our analyses revealed that the concept of vulnerability could be distinguished in terms of basic human and situational vulnerability. Six dimensions of older adults’ vulnerability were identified: physical; psychological; relational/interpersonal; moral; sociocultural, political, and economic; and existential/spiritual. This analysis suggested three ways to relate to older adults’ vulnerability: understanding older adults’ vulnerability, taking care of vulnerable older adults, and intervening through socio-political-economic measures.ConclusionsThe way in which vulnerability was conceptualised in the included publications overlaps with distinctions used within contemporary bioethics literature. Dimensions of aged care vulnerability map onto defining features of humans, giving weight to the claim that vulnerability represents an inherent characteristic of humans. Vulnerability is mostly a value-laden concept, endowed with positive and negative connotations. Most publications focused on and promoted aged care, strengthening the idea that care is a defining practice of being human. (shrink)

Pour yourself glass of Three Wizard's Chardonnay, Winkle's Old Peculiar, or Soggy Mountain Dew, pull up a three-legged chair, and for Om's sake, stay out of the bathtub! Keep and eye open for the octarine flashes that would indicate magic is trying to escape from the pages and be ready to grab something made of copper in order to ground uncontrolled magic without harmful incident (Some would Consider the Copper Safeguard Unnecessary) You are now ready to dive into Discworld and (...) Philosophy and join a group of philosophical Discworld fans as they explore truth, history, death, luck, morality, and reality in the magical inverse of the Disc. (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)

In this article, we provide the first commented edition and translation of an important fragment from Vladimir Zabugin’s posthumous work “The History of the Christian Renaissance in Italy” (Milan, 1924). Zabugin was a Russian historian, philologist and thinker, who lived and worked in Italy in the first quarter of the 20th century. He made an important contribution to the history of ideas with his concept of “Christian Renaissance”, abolishing the postulated antithesis of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as well as (...) the idea of the Renaissance as the revival of antiquity. A sudden death in a mountaineering accident in the Italian Alps prevented Zabugin from completing his outstanding monography: editing the text, compiling notes, bibliography, name index, the absence of which made it very difficult for specialists to refer to the text. That is because a special focus of the present article lies in commenting the fragment and guiding the reader through Zabugin’s key conceptional points. The presented fragment of the first chapter of the book sought to emphasize the continuity of classical and christian culture in Italian proto-Renaissance literature, philosophy, architecture, fine arts. Refering to the eve of the Renaissance (13th century), Zabugin clearly demonstrates how the Christian culture “imperat” here, and the pagan one “ministrat”. (shrink)

In Paradise Wild, David Oates addresses this and many other provocative questions as he explores the persistent myth of Eden from several different angles. As a lifelong mountaineer and reader of nature literature, as a scholar, as a descendant of naturalist William Bartram, and as a gay ex-Baptist who took to the mountains to test his masculinity, Oates has thought deeply about how nature and culture interact in our lives and about the contemporary debate over wilderness and environment. (...) Paradise Wild brings all these elements together in a lively, genre-hopping book that will move readers emotionally and intellectually, at the same time that it contributes to the ongoing debate in scholarly and environmental circles over the meaning of "nature" and "wilderness." Paradise Wild tells stories, explores major scholarship and literature of nature, and analyzes how the misapplied myth of Eden has mired Americans in a hopeless "Paradise Lost" mentality that belies the true, ever-present wildness in our lives. Oates argues that mourning for a lost paradise is a dead end that cannot help us combat the real damage we're doing to ourselves and the rest of the world. He proposes a healthy re-mythologizing of the Eden story as a way of celebrating "wildness" -- the Eden in each moment and in each cell, that cannot be lost. His book is about welcoming that wildness into the midst of daily life. This bold and original work will appeal to general readers as well as to scholars and students with an interest in environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing, cultural studies, and queer studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Athenian Religion: A HistorySusan Guettel ColeRobert Parker. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xxix 1 370 pp. Cloth, $55.Parker begins by acknowledging Durkheim’s claim that “religion is something eminently social” (1), but he is not interested in demonstrating how ritual activity was embedded in Athenian social relationships or even how traditional rituals colored Athenian political life. His target is not Athenian society itself, and his project (...) is not an analysis of the ways and means by which ritual created or defined community. His real interest, in fact, is not religion at all, but rather the administration of public ritual.Parker admits that issues of topography and the organization of space are important for understanding Attic ritual, but his preference for Athenian literature and epigraphical sources inevitably shapes his view of a “web of religious life in Attica... spun by the spider at the centre” (25). The calendar of the Salaminians is more important to his argument as a source on institutions than it is as a source for administration of ritual at the edges of Attica. This preference for center over hinterland overcomes even the lack of sources. Solon’s calendar of festivals and that shadowy ghost, the Attic genos, assume more importance than the great sanctuaries at Eleusis and Brauron.Recognizing archaeological material when relevant, Parker is nevertheless skeptical about current work that claims a relationship between material culture and the expression of polis identity (citing in particular Snodgrass, De Polignac, and Morgan). For Parker the “polis” is an abstraction, and an abstraction, he claims, cannot have a history. He does comment on issues of identity and community organization, but these issues are important only in the context of the community’s regulation of ritual, where Parker prefers the written word, preferably inscribed, to the material artifact.The history of Athenian religion, as laid out here, is a history of collective decision making and collective ritual. Parker begins with mountain rituals of Zeus, chiefly because Mount Hymettos preserves our earliest Attic inscriptions, but his interests and chronological range are otherwise limited by the evidence for Attic public record keeping. His interests are also limited by a narrow definition of collective ritual, conditioned perhaps by modern notions of political autonomy and an exaggerated affection for the institutions of Athenian democracy. His targeted time period therefore begins rather conventionally with Solon’s calendar of “sacrifices from the kurbeis” (Lys. 30.17) and ends with the latest evidence for tribe and deme decrees, evidence that trails off in the middle [End Page 293] of the third century b.c. In between we have chapters arranged chronologically, on hereditary priesthoods and the Attic genos, the sixth century and the organization of festivals, democracy and empire, new gods in the fifth century, the trial of Socrates, and the ritual innovations of the fourth century. This looks like a conventional list of topics, but with Parker’s interest in public institutions this sequence is actually only a chronological framework for his real project, the administration of ritual. Seen in this context the Attic genos is not, as once argued, a relic of archaic aristocratic institutions or a privileged group within the phratry, but an administrative solution to an organizational problem. In Parker’s view, the genos provided priests for public cults. Expansion of political rights in the fifth century eventually required ritual by committee, and although, he argues, the genos, as an institution, did not go out of existence, the privileged families that controlled the traditional priesthoods had to yield to the boards of officials that now supervised some of the more important public rituals.Innovations, perhaps because they are more easily detectable in the kind of evidence Parker prefers, stand out more than tradition. Ritual innovations of the fifth century included rites modeled on those elsewhere in Greece (Artemis Agrotera, Pan, and Boreas, for example). Parker explains these innovations in political terms, describing their introduction as a reflection of Athenian pride in overcoming the Persian threat. Religious innovations of the second half of the fifth century (rituals associated with Adonis, Sabazius, and Cybele, for instance) are treated not as an incoming surge of foreign influence (as... (shrink)

This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)