An evolutionarily informed perspective on parent-infant sleep contact challenges recommendations regarding appropriate parent-infant sleep practices based on large epidemiological studies. In this study regularly bed-sharing parents and infants participated in an in-home video study of bed-sharing behavior. Ten formula-feeding and ten breast-feeding families were filmed for 3 nights for 8 hours per night. For breast-fed infants, mother-infant orientation, sleep position, frequency of feeding, arousal, and synchronous arousal were all consistent with previous sleep-lab studies of mother-infant bed-sharing behavior, (...) but significant differences were found between formula and breast-fed infants. While breast-feeding mothers shared a bed with their infants in a characteristic manner that provided several safety benefits, formula-feeding mothers shared a bed in a more variable manner with consequences for infant safety. Paternal bed-sharing behavior introduced further variability. Epidemiological case-control studies examining bed-sharing risks and benefits do not normally control for behavioral variables that an evolutionary viewpoint would deem crucial. This study demonstrates how parental behavior affects the bed-sharing experience and indicates that cases and controls in epidemiological studies should be matched for behavioral, as well as sociodemographic, variables. (shrink)

Methods Young healthy heterosexual couples underwent sleep-lab-based polysomnography of two sleeping arrangements: individual sleep and co-sleep. Individual and dyadic sleep parameters (i.e., synchronization of sleep stages) were collected. The latter were assessed using cross-recurrence quantification analysis. Additionally, subjective sleep quality, relationship characteristics, and chronotype were monitored. Data were analyzed comparing co-sleep vs. individual sleep. Interaction effects of the sleeping arrangement with gender, chronotype, or relationship characteristics were moreover tested. Results As compared to sleeping individually, co-sleeping was associated with about 10% (...) more REM sleep, less fragmented REM sleep (p = 0.008), longer undisturbed REM fragments (p = 0.0006), and more limb movements (p = 0.007). None of the other sleep stages was significantly altered. Social support interacted with sleeping arrangement in a way that individuals with suboptimal social support showed the biggest impact of the sleeping arrangement on REM sleep. Sleep architectures were more synchronized between partners during co-sleep (p = 0.005) even if wake phases were excluded (p = 0.022). Moreover, sleep architectures are significantly coupled across a lag of ± 5min. Depth of relationship represented an additional significant main effect regarding synchronization, reflecting a positive association between the two. Neither REM sleep nor synchronization was influenced by gender, chronotype, or other relationship characteristics. Conclusion Depending on the sleeping arrangement, couple's sleep architecture and synchronization show alterations that are modified by relationship characteristics. We discuss that these alterations could be part of a self-enhancing feedback loop of REM sleep and sociality and a mechanism through which sociality prevents mental illness. (shrink)

This paper examines the marital bed through existential themes of spatial, temporal, corporeal and relational experience. It is a collaborative effort in that it relates anecdotes contributed by twelve people who each described – in writing, in interviews and in conversation – very personal moments of life in the “marital bed”. Through other eyes, one sees that what seemed unique has echoes of a shared experience. The everyday noises and movements, the negotiations, even the sorrows of that particular place, are (...) so familiar that, in recognising them as true to one’s own experience, one wonders, “Is it like this for others too?” What is presented here is the culmination of researching a phenomenon by trying to capture it in writing and rewriting, in order to give form to the truth in an experience, while knowing that, by writing it, the real truth becomes limited. Phenomenological writing becomes a conversation which is at once both intimate and universal. The marital tales speak to a specific journey, but, as when one recounts details of any special trip – say Paris, for example – the listeners are drawn inward to their own experience. Personal remembrance enmeshes with public exposure so that the collective sighs, “Ah yes, Paris.” And therefore we know some small fragment of an abandoned bed as truly as we know the family bed. (shrink)

The entropic state that engulfed the East Coast of Australia in the first eight months of 2020 followed thirty years of uninterrupted economic growth and 10 years of tenuous federal governments divided on the question of climate change. The twin geophysical crises of catastrophic bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a public reckoning around our guardianship of the environment, as well as our relationship with science and indigenous knowledge. Congruent with this was the rapid transformation of both schools (...) and universities to online learning, causing the most significant rupture to the traditional ‘grammar of schooling’ for decades. This unprecedented conflation of crises has resulted in the unusual situation where education can be radically transformed, as the material conditions that usually remain latent (thus negating the possibility for change) suddenly exist. As a result, there has been an increased openness to pedagogies of potentiality, as schools and universities resist the urge to ‘return to normal’. Amongst these pedagogies, the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler is unique in its direct response to the entropic state with a counter-impulse, negantropy, which seeks to harness our technological capacity under an ethos of care and unite it with our existential purpose to flourish and thrive. This paper will consider the possibilities of Stiegler’s utopian call for action in relation to the Australian context, as schools and universities reconceptualise the sharing of knowledge and the purpose of education that seeks to rectify the gaps of the past. (shrink)

The relationship between Vietnam and China could be captured in the Chinese expression of “同床异梦”, which means lying on the same bed but having different dreams. The two countries share certain cultural and political similarities but also diverge vastly in their national interests. This paper adds to the extant literature on this topic by analyzing the element of trust/mistrust in their interactions in trade-investment, tourism, and defense-security. The analysis shows how the relationship is increasingly interdependent but is equally fragile due (...) to the lack of trust on both sides. The mistrust or even distrust of Chinese subjects run deep within the Vietnamese mindset, from the skepticism of Chinese investment, Chinese tourists, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, to the caution against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. The paper forecasts that, despite the deep-seated differences and occasional mistrust, going forward, neither side would risk damaging the status quo even when tensions peak. (shrink)

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) has been mainly described from a risk perspective, with a focus on endogenous, exogenous, and temporal risk factors that can interact to facilitate lethal outcomes. Here we discuss the limitations that this risk-based paradigm may have, using two of the major risk factors for SIDS, prone sleep position and bed-sharing, as examples. Based on a multipronged theoretical model encompassing evolutionary theory, developmental biology, and cultural mismatch theory, we conceptualize the vulnerability to SIDS as an (...) imbalance between current physiologic-regulatory demands and current protective abilities on the part of the infant. From this understanding, SIDS appears as a developmental condition in which competencies relevant to self-protection fail to develop appropriately in the future victims. Since all of the protective resources in question are bound to emerge during normal infant development, we contend that SIDS may reflect an evolutionary mismatch situation—a constellation in which certain modern developmental influences may overextend the child’s adaptive (evolutionary) repertoire. We thus argue that SIDS may be better understood if the focus on risk factors is complemented by a deeper appreciation of the protective resources that human infants acquire during their normal development. We extensively analyze this evolutionary-developmental theory against the body of epidemiological and experimental evidence in SIDS research and thereby also address the as-of-yet unresolved question of why breastfeeding may be protective against SIDS. (shrink)

In today’s pandemic, many countries have experienced shortages of medical resources and many healthcare providers have often been faced with dramatic decisions about how to allocate beds, intensive care, or ventilators. Despite recognizing the need for triage, responses are not the same everywhere, and opinions and practices differ around what guidelines should be used, how they should be implemented, and who should ultimately decide. To some extent, triage issues reflect community values, revealing a given society’s moral standards and ideals. Our (...) goal is to study two countries which share many common features—Italy and France—as they deal with the pandemic, revealing the moral organization of medicine and healthcare, the power structures, and the nature of the disruptions in each context. (shrink)

Nella Tempesta shakespeariana, le avversità della vita obbligano il povero Trinculo a condividere il giaciglio con qualcuno assai differente da lui. Si tratta di un’immagine che rappresenta il momento in cui due individui radicalmente diversi sono obbligati a percorrere il medesimo cammino per realizzare uno scopo comune. In questo lavoro, sostengo che alcune delle interpretazioni del misticismo medievale possono identificarsi in una forma di esperienza digitale basata sul World Wide Web, il quale, grazie al rapido sviluppo delle metodologie dell’Intelligenza Artificiale, (...) si appresta a diventare una nuova forma di misticismo. In Shakespeare’s Tempest, the misfortunes of life force poor Trinculo to share a bed with a stranger in order to survive. This image represents the moment where two persons, utterly different in their perspectives, share a path in order to achieve a common goal. In this article, I put forward the claim that some interpretations of Middle Ages philosophy can be identified as a form of digital experience based on the World Wide Web, which, thanks to the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence methodologies, opens up a new kind of mysticism for the future era. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My First Loss:Carrying His LegacyKaran K. MirpuriI love listening to my mentors recount memorable cases they faced in their careers. While they do not always remember the details, the most vivid stories were always those of the first patient they lost. They shared that this was a difficult but important experience in every physician's career. While I prepared myself for the reality that I would eventually lose a patient, (...) I did not expect my first loss to happen two months into my first year of medical school.As a college student, I was intimately exposed to the topic of death through volunteering at a local hospice center. While I had not witnessed a patient's passing, I supported patients and families each week as they faced different phases of their journeys, offering them food, blankets, and a listening ear when needed. Though my volunteering had equipped me with new coping skills and language to navigate my emotions surrounding death, grieving the loss of my first patient was incredibly difficult.________I was nervous but excited as I entered my first shadowing experience with Dr. X in the emergency department. Beyond my previous volunteering at the hospice center, my clinical exposure largely involved watching routine wellness visits or low-risk procedures. While I had seen patients in critical condition before, the rapidly paced and chaotic environment of the ED felt like a completely new world that I looked forward to entering.While Dr. X applied a compression wrap on a woman's sprained ankle about an hour into the shift, a blaring sound echoed through the ED. I was confused as all the providers around us simultaneously checked their phones. Dr. X shared that they had been paged about a trauma patient who was arriving in 10 minutes. A 71-year-old man had sustained serious injuries in a motor vehicle collision and was in cardiac arrest. Given that he needed resuscitation, his case was labeled a "code blue."After Dr. X finished wrapping his patient's ankle and answering her questions, we quickly went [End Page E17] to set up for the incoming trauma. Not knowing what to expect, I marveled as a legion of nurses, physicians, and respiratory therapists filled the room. As they rapidly wheeled in a crash cart, prepared instrument trays, and yelled terms that I only recognized from television shows, I felt overwhelmed, but began to appreciate the organized, intentional nature of each person's actions. What initially appeared as chaos became an intricate orchestra conducted by the senior resident, with each section tuning their instruments and taking their places before the performance. I found a spot in the corner of the room and waited in anticipation of what would come next.I heard the wheels of a gurney approaching as EMS rushed in and the symphony began. Our patient lay unconscious while a large, black piston repeatedly crushed his chest. Although initially alarmed, I later learned that this was a LUCAS® device administering continuous chest compressions to preserve his circulation. Before I could blink twice, the device was gone, and the team surrounded the patient. The senior resident firmly gave orders from the foot of the bed as others inserted chest tubes, intubated him, and administered CPR. Although tensions were high and the clock was ticking, each team member worked calmly and announced when each task was complete to maintain closed-loop communication.As I watched providers line up to administer chest compressions, Dr. X came over to ask if I would like to join the team in providing CPR, given that I was certified. Prior to the shift, he shared that this was a valuable way for medical students to contribute during codes, although the choice was ultimately mine. While I was prepared for the possibility, I was shocked that a code had happened, especially in the first hour of my shift in the ED. Despite my fear, I felt a strong desire and compulsion to offer my support so I could hopefully help save this man's life.Comforted by the confidence in Dr. X's gaze and the knowledge that I was surrounded by a team of trained... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Saw My ReflectionAdrienne Feller NovickI saw my reflection as I looked through the window of the isolation room. The image caused me to pause and look again. The reflection of sunlight had merged my image and the patient's together. For a moment, we seemed to be one person.She was pale with translucent skin, her bald head obscured under a colorful scarf. Her three children sat as still as (...) statues, staring at their mother wordlessly. Then, I realized her children appeared to be the same ages as my children. I felt a surge of emotions jumbled together, a mother should not die like this, leaving her young children motherless. She and I shared the exact same birthday; it could have been me in that hospital bed. However, I did not have a terminal diagnosis and my children were safe at home, complaining about doing homework. In the blink of an eye, without even recognizing what had just happened, I was face to face with my mortality.I tampered my emotions and held them back. I collected myself, and remembered the reason I was there. My professionalism took charge. I am a member of the Medical Ethics consultation service at a large healthcare system. A request was made to help with the ethical dilemma of a patient with a grave prognosis unwilling to discuss a hospice referral. The dilemma here represented two issues in conflict: patient autonomy and provider beneficence versus non-maleficence. Respect for autonomy allows each person the right to make informed decisions about their care that respect their values and personal beliefs. Provider beneficence is balanced by non-maleficence: beneficence is the expectation that physicians make treatment decisions in the best interest of the patient and non-maleficence guides physicians to minimize harm. This case called for analyzing the balance of autonomy with proportionality, weighing the risks versus the benefits of treatment decisions.I knocked on the door and they all turned and looked in my direction. The patient signaled me to enter. Although she was smiling, the sadness in the room was palpable. I introduced myself to the patient and her children and diplomatically explained the reason for my visit. I turned to the children and asked if there was anything I could get for them. I got three weak "no thanks." I asked the patient if I could stop by later. Then, I went to see my next patient. When I returned, I listened with rapt attention as she described the mosaic of her life story. When she finished, we sat together for a long time, neither of us speaking. Out of the blue, she told me she was not afraid of dying. She said she would welcome death to end her pain. She continued, explaining that her fear was that her children were not ready to accept her death. She was worried about how her death would hurt them, and all she wanted to do was to protect them. She reiterated her wish to be kept alive with all aggressive medical treatment possible. She communicated [End Page E6] that she understood and appreciated the severity of her condition. Her reason for continuing treatment was to give her children precious time. She said, "I would lie in front of a car to protect my children." As I was heading towards the door, her eyes welled up with tears. She thanked me for listening and for my kindness. We said our goodbyes. She remained full code and died four days later during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. I walked past her empty room later that day and kept walking.I was not prepared for how her death changed me. Throughout my career as a healthcare professional, I have primarily worked with patients at the end of their lives. I have seen many empty rooms following the death of a patient and helped countless people journey through their stages of grief towards acceptance. After I complete a consultation, I move on to the next patient. I do this every day. This time, something was different. After she died, I was not sleeping well, I had a hard time concentrating, I was not eating well, and I was... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Between Deleuze and DerridaMary Beth MaderPaul Patton and John Protevi, editors. Between Deleuze and Derrida. New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. ix + 207. Cloth, $105.00. Paper, $29.95.One of the many provisions of Gilles Deleuze's prodigious philosophical invention, Difference and Repetition, is an ontological account of how invention is actual. That book itself is an instance of that of which it offers an account. An element of this account (...) is the notion of an intensive system. The intensive system is proposed as a way in which novelty and movement come about. It requires as its basic constituents two heterogeneous organized series which are put into communication through their differences, producing a resonance internal to the system which then yields a novel forced movement. Several of the essays in Between Deleuze and Derrida so put the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida into communication as to themselves amount to intensive systems: movement and novelty emerge in our grasp of the separate oeuvres of the two philosophers.Essays by Daniel W. Smith and Leonard Lawlor tackle in detail the task of comparative explication. Since Deleuze and Derrida treat many of the same philosophical topics, often employing identical terms, these clear cases for their divergences and similarities are especially useful. Smith's historical situation of Deleuze and Derrida relative to the thought of Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche is exemplary. Dense with connections, Lawlor's decisive expositions pursue the implications of his interpretative distinctions rigorously to their ends, tracing the divergent constructions of the two thinkers to a common source in the notion of a simulacrum. Smith and Lawlor themselves part company, however, over the issue of whether Derrida and Deleuze are best characterized as philosophers of immanence or transcendence. Paul Patton crafts a sophisticated cross-reading of their shared vision of philosophy as a "utopian vocation," without homogenizing the differing voices they hear in this call or its unshared ontology.Branka Arsiæ's imaginative contribution on the topic of passive events and Melville's Bartleby is enlightening even without mention of Deleuze's notion of static ordinal genesis. The essays of John Protevi and Tamsin Lorraine are also rich in philosophical imagination. Protevi's extension of Derrida's aporias of the gift and friendship to an "aporia of love" illuminates Derrida's own evolution while refusing a version of undecidability that remains in static indecision. His discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the girl, with its isotropic implications for sexuality per se, is one of the best in print. Lorraine displays the novelty of Deleuze and Derrida's post-Heideggerian thought on the temporality of sense and the limits of representation in readings of Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet that clarify by example some of the more forbiddingly elaborate proposals in the philosophy of time that these thinkers offer.Arkady Plotnitsky's chapter addresses the crucial questions of Deleuze's and Derrida's relations to various sub-fields of mathematics and happily considers Derrida, with his deployment of a notion of undecidability, as a legatee of Gödel. It is confusing, however, that this stimulating essay treats Deleuze's and Derrida's invocations of algebra, geometry and topology by means of the "tropes" of "algebra, geometry and topology." This is especially puzzling in the case of Deleuze, whose use of mathematics in Difference and Repetition is avowedly not metaphorical. Further, although algebra is said to be the prime instrument of Plotnitsky's analysis, it turns out that "the general quasi-algebraic inscriptive structure or operation" (111; my italics) is most fundamental to that analysis. For this reason, it would be preferable to locate in both Deleuze and Derrida a post-structuralist concern with structure itself, making "algebra" another in the Derridean syntagmatic chain of names for a descendent of "structure."The book does contain some disappointing stretches. Eric Alliez's chapter does not read well despite its reliable translation. Alphonso Lingis's ruminations of a blithely bewildered Western roamer ("you" and then "me") on his "detour into exoticism" thanks to the "willing" concupiscence of an Asian female bed-mate ("she" and never "you" or "me") make one regret the era of easy... (shrink)

In late February and early March 2020, Italy became the European epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite increasingly stringent containment measures enforced by the government, the health system faced an enormous pressure, and extraordinary efforts were made in order to increase overall hospital beds’ availability and especially ICU capacity. Nevertheless, the hardest-hit hospitals in Northern Italy experienced a shortage of ICU beds and resources that led to hard allocating choices. At the beginning of March 2020, the Italian Society of Anesthesia, (...) Analgesia, Resuscitation, and Intensive Care issued recommendations aimed at supporting physicians in prioritizing patients when the number of critically ill patients overwhelm the capacity of ICUs. One motivating concern for the SIAARTI guidance was that, if no balanced and consistent allocation procedures were applied to prioritize patients, there would be a concrete risk for unfair choices, and that the prevalent “first come, first served” principle would lead to many avoidable deaths. Among the drivers of decision for admission to ICUs, age, comorbidities, and preexisting functional status were included. The recommendations were criticized as ageist and potentially discriminatory against elderly patients. Looking forward to the next steps, the Italian experience can be relevant to other parts of the world that are yet to see a significant surge of COVID-19: the need for transparent triage criteria and commonly shared values give the Italian recommendations even greater legitimacy. (shrink)

Death is the destiny we all share, and this will not change. Yet the way we die, which had remained the same for many generations, has changed drastically in a relatively short time for those in developed countries with access to healthcare. For generations, if people were lucky enough to reach old age, not having died in infancy or childhood, in childbirth, in war, or by accident, they would take to bed, surrounded by loved ones who cared for them, and (...) fade into death. Most likely, they would have seen their parents and grandparents die the same way, and so this manner of dying would be familiar: it was part of the natural cycle of life. Now less than 25 per cent of Americans die at home, having reached much older ages than people would have dreamed of in past generations, often after surviving many illnesses and even diseases that would have been terminal for their grandparents. We are fortunate to live (and die) today, supported by myriad scientific, medical, and technological advancements, however we also face new problems as a result of the new way in which we die. We can no longer anticipate a peaceful waning at home with family. We know our lives will likely end in hospitals likely after we have endured grueling treatments to prolong life. We have to decide what decisions we want our loved ones, or care-givers, to make when we cannot choose for ourselves. We have to think about whether in any circumstances we would seek physician-assisted death. We know we face other questions as well, but we may not even know where to start. In the face of these decisions, we can feel daunted and afraid. The best remedy is information and planning. In this book, Gregory Eastwood - a physician who has cared for dying patients, served as an ethics consultant, and taught end of life issues to medical and other health profession students - draws from his substantial experience with patients and families to provide the information that will help us think clearly about the choices and issues we will face at the end of our own lives, and when faced with the deaths of our loved ones. With sensitivity and profound insight, Eastwood guides us through all the important questions about death and dying in straightforward, clear language, enhanced by real-life stories. Throughout, he shows us how we can take ownership of the way we want to die, when we must die, and feel more in control as death approaches. (shrink)

This article aims at answering the following questions: What is the influence of age structure on the spread of coronavirus disease 2019? What can be the impact of stringency policy on the spread of COVID-19? What might be the quantitative effect of development levelincome and number of hospital beds on the number of deaths due to the COVID-19 epidemic? By employing the methodologies of generalized linear model, generalized moments method, and quantile regression models, this article reveals that the shares of (...) median age, age 65, and age 70 and older population have significant positive impacts on the spread of COVID-19 and that the share of age 70 and older people in the population has a relatively greater influence on the spread of the pandemic. The second output of this research is the significant impact of stringency policy on diminishing COVID-19 total cases. The third finding of this paper reveals that the number of hospital beds appears to be vital in reducing the total number of COVID-19 deaths, while GDP per capita does not affect much the level of deaths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this article suggests some governmental health policies to control and decrease the spread of COVID-19. (shrink)

1.1 Are commercial societies unfriendly to friendship? Many critics of commercial societies, from both the left and the right, have thought so. They claim that the free-market system of property rights, freedom of contract, and other liberty rights – the “negative” right of individuals to peacefully pursue their own ends – is impersonal and dehumanizing, or even inherently divisive and adversarial. Yet (their complaint goes) the psychology and morality of markets and liberty rights pervade far too many relationships in a (...) commercial society, eroding the bonds of personal and civic friendship. My main aim in this paper is to analyze and evaluate this claim. In this section I will give an overview of the critics’ complaints against various features of the free-market system, discuss the empirical data that might be thought to support their complaints, and show why they largely fail to do so. In Section II I will get to the heart of the matter: the nature of the market and of friendship. I will address the thesis that the modes of valuation proper to production are radically opposed to the modes of valuation proper to friendship, love, sexuality, and so on, arguing that the thesis rests on a misunderstanding of both markets and friendship. A proper understanding of the two reveals that, as voluntary, reciprocal relationships, market relationships and friendship share important moral and psychological properties, and are not the natural enemies, or even the odd bed-fellows, many critics take them to be. In Section III I will address the related thesis that market societies – societies based on the free-market system of property rights, freedom of contract, and other liberty rights - tend to commodify relationships and, thereby, weaken the bonds of personal and civic friendship. I will argue that free markets are the most powerful force for decommidifying or, more generally (since commodification is not the only way of objectifying people), deobjectifying people and relationships.. (shrink)

Human sleeping arrangements have evolved over time and differ across cultures. The majority of adults share their bed at one time or another with a partner or child, and many also sleep with pets. In fact, around half of dog and cat owners report sharing a bed or bedroom with their pet. However, interspecies co-sleeping has been trivialized in the literature relative to interpersonal or human-human co-sleeping, receiving little attention from an interdisciplinary psychological perspective. In this paper, we provide (...) a historical outline of the “civilizing process” that has led to current sociocultural conceptions of sleep as an individual, private function crucial for the functioning of society and the health of individuals. We identify similar historical processes at work in the formation of contemporary constructions of socially normative sleeping arrangements for humans and animals. Importantly, since previous examinations of co-sleeping practices have anthropocentrically framed this topic, the result is an incomplete understanding of co-sleeping practices. By using dogs as an exemplar of human-animal co-sleeping, and comparing human-canine sleeping with adult-child co-sleeping, we determine that both forms of co-sleeping share common factors for establishment and maintenance, and often result in similar benefits and drawbacks. We propose that human-animal and adult-child co-sleeping should be approached as legitimate and socially relevant forms of co-sleeping, and we recommend that co-sleeping be approached broadly as a social practice involving relations with humans and other animals. Because our proposition is speculative and derived from canine-centric data, we recommend ongoing theoretical refinement grounded in empirical research addressing co-sleeping between humans and multiple animal species. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lessons Learned in Room 208Katherine BakkeAuthor's Note. Parts of this story were previously shared here: https://theinterstitium.home.blog/2020/06/01/journeying-to-a-time-of-death/I remember the first time I saw a patient die. I was a medical student on my surgery rotation. Pushed to the sidelines of the resuscitation bay while the trauma team tended to a teenager injured in a motorcycle crash, my attention was drawn to the drama unfolding next door. There, a team of (...) physicians performed CPR on a man. While a curtain and a comforting social worker separated the patient's wife and daughter from the horrors of the resuscitation, I had a full view of everything. I watched as each chest compression threw the man's belly upward, like he had a bad bout of the hiccups. I watched as each pulse check yielded no return of blood flow. I watched as his wife and daughter clenched their hands in prayer, muttering, "Please, please, please." Then, the physician called the code. The instant the doctor pronounced him dead, I felt the presence of one less person in the room. I was surprised by how visceral this departure felt. It seemed like a sacred moment, a small proof that our bodies do indeed house our souls.I started paying close attention to how surgeons talked about death. Discussions of death seemed frequent in windowless work rooms amongst doctors, or in hushed conversations at the nurses station. Discussions of death were notably absent when talking with patients or their families. Sometimes, it seemed that the sicker the patient, the less likely their possible death was acknowledged. I [End Page E12] was fascinated by how challenging it was to speak honestly about our inevitable mortality. I began reading everything I could find about discussing end-of-life issues. I even conducted and published a systematic review on the subject. When it came time for me to begin my own surgical training, I carried with me a naive confidence, eager to engage in these conversations at the bedside.My time finally came eight months into my intern year. I was working in the intensive care unit and was "up" for the next admission. I got a call from the emergency department, saying a 68-year-old woman needed an ICU bed for a heart failure exacerbation. Her breathing was labored. They had given her IV Lasix, but I was told she might need BiPAP or other respiratory support while her heart failure was managed.Ten minutes later, she rolled into Room 208, and the ICU nurses started their work transferring her from the stretcher to the bed, applying EKG leads, a blood pressure cuff, and a pulse oximeter. I stood at the foot of the bed and quickly realized I had never taken care of a patient so ill. Her head drooped to her chest, every ounce of energy used to draw her next breath. She could only mumble indiscernible words; she hardly had the energy to open her eyes. I glanced at the monitor displaying her vitals: heart rate 120, SpO2 84%, BP 70/40. A foley catheter hung at the bedside, and no urine was present. "They gave her Lasix downstairs, right?" I asked the nurse. We both looked at the foley bag, and then at each other. I glanced at the patient's lips, which were dry and cracked. I pinched the skin at the top of the patient's hand, and it tented. I was pleased with my exam skills, and my ability to deduce that she was dehydrated. "This isn't heart failure," I thought, as I considered other reasons for her illness. The nurse awoke me from my self-congratulating stupor and reminded me sternly, "We need orders."The situation rapidly became more critical. The patient's arterial blood gas (ABG) showed a pattern of impending respiratory failure. Her daughters arrived at the bedside; one was wearing hospital scrubs. I introduced myself to them as the resident doctor caring for their mom. I asked if the daughter wearing scrubs had a healthcare background, foolishly thinking that doing so would build rapport. She curtly replied, "I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics by Hak Joon Lee, and: Democracy in Twenty-First Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region by Ronald B. NealReggie L. WilliamsThe Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics HAK JOON LEE Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2011. 256 pp. $25.00Democracy in Twenty-First Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region RONALD B. NEAL Macon, GA: Mercer (...) University Press, 2012. 138 pp. $30.00On Christmas Eve 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. asked the members of a congregation to recognize that they are—every day—interacting with many different nations all around the world as they maneuver throughout their normal daily routines. Hak Joon Lee’s The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics examines the implications of this daily global interaction as the need for a broader ethical perspective in a shrinking world. The need begins with the realization that we do indeed inhabit a shrinking world in which our local behavior has a broader global impact. Once we recognize the moral implications of our local interaction, it becomes clear that we must learn how to live together in a broader community.But how do we speak the language of a global morality? What does a global morality look like? Lee argues that King’s metaphor of a great world house provides a structure on which to frame the content of a healthy global morality in a shrinking world. The metaphor indicates a collective understanding of all humanity as a global community (ix). The notion of a single world house moves people groups beyond rival communities with well-defined in-group and out-group barriers into what Lee describes as a global civil society where we are all seen as members of a collective in-group (13). The concept of a collective in-group helps illustrate what Lee understands to be King’s argument for a global morality; “King’s idea of a great world house redefines what the boundaries and membership of a moral community are: the great world house constitutes a single inclusive ethical community for humanity because it identifies the world as a single unified community” (53). [End Page 234]But as laudable as King’s great world house metaphor is, we are still burdened with the task of imagining a universal moral language in practice. Efforts toward the formation of universal truths have historically been death-dealing for people groups caught on the wrong side of the color line. A one-size-fits-all morality has been a procrustean bed for people who have been racialized and subordinated to white European males. Yet Lee interprets King’s method of universal engagement to begin with convictions shared at home within the particularity of his African American Christian worldview before it moves outward toward a shared vision of a global civil society. The movement from particular to universal for a public morality is unlike the historically harmful practice of universal morality. King’s universal method includes attention to four components: vision, norms, virtues, and political practices. These four components belong to what Lee depicts as a careful and intricate dialectic between what is local and what is universal in a political dialogue that seeks the end of a global civil society with shared conceptions of community and human rights.Ironically, with regard to the conversation about human rights, Lee claims that King’s formative African American interpretation of human rights was primarily informed by the Enlightenment and then blended with an African American experience: “Mostly appropriated from Christianity and the Western Enlightenment tradition, these norms [justice, freedom, and equality] obtained a new significance for African Americans in the context of the sizzling cauldron of slavery and segregation” (55). Yet one would be hard pressed to identify the presence of modern Enlightenment intellectuals within the formative theological worldview of the African American Christianity that Lee identifies. Of necessity, African American Christianity, the Christian worldview that birthed Martin Luther King Jr., was formed to deflect the white Christian worldview that was shaped by the intersection of race, religion, and empire in modernity. The Enlightenment fueled modernity’s... (shrink)

Background Patient-centeredness, respect for patient autonomy, and shared decision-making have now made it to center stage in discussions on quality of care. Knowing what actually counts in care and how it should be accomplished from the patients’ and nurses’ perspective seems crucial. Aim To explore how patients and their nurses perceive the importance and enactment of values in their healthcare. Research design An observational, cross-sectional study using a self-developed questionnaire, consisting of 15 items related to seven values (e.g. uniqueness, autonomy, (...) professionalism, compassion, responsiveness, partnership, and empowerment) as described in the taxonomy of Bastemeijer et al. Participants and research context The survey was completed by 384 patients and 81 nurses. Participants were recruited on eight internal medicine wards of a 1000-bed university hospital in Belgium. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the ethical committee of the Ghent University Hospital (B670201836799). Findings (1) Patients and nurses prioritize values of care differently; (2) nurses report not being able to enact the values they prioritize in actual practice as much as one would like to; and (3) there is a gap in experienced delivery of a comprehensible explanation of all treatment options, a conversation based on equality, making shared decisions, and being non-judgmental between nurses and patients. Discussion Our findings challenge nurses’ overemphasis on professional compassion and uniqueness while arguing for increased attention on authentic shared decision-making and empowerment. The first step to a patient-centered culture truly involving patients in their healthcare is communication and information provision, rather than focusing on tangible and normative constructs. Conclusion Our findings revealed differences in prioritization and actual enactment of values in care between patients and nurses. This was especially so for values related to communication, provision of complete unbiased information, and shared decision-making. Nurses should prioritize providing comprehensible information and using conversations based on equality to make decision together with patients. (shrink)

Born of a terrible insomnia—"a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell"—this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self-described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." _On the Heights of Despair_ shows Cioran's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician (...) of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation. "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity.... His writing... is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Bill Marx, _Boston Phoenix _"The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming.... Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—_Publishers Weekly,_ starred review "This is self-pity as epigram, the sort of dyspeptic pronouncement that gets most people kicked out of bed but that has kept Mr. Cioran going for the rest of his life."—Judith Shulevitz, _New York Times Book __Review_. (shrink)

The author, an ordained Lutheran pastor, reflects upon his experiences as chaplain at a small hospital in southwestern Germany (Tropenklinik – Paul Lecher Krankenhaus, Tübingen). Besides its expertise in the treatment of tropical diseases this 100 + bed hospital serves as the referral hospital for terminally ill and dying patients from the local University hospitals and the surrounding area. The experiences at the bedside of such patients with various denominational and religious backgrounds challenged the chaplain to go beyond the confines (...) of any fixed theological system or counseling technique. They made him to discover three essentials as the very basis of such ministry, which he shares in this article. He identifies these as (1) the necessity to realize the situation sober mindedly, (2) the desire to become a companion, and (3) the venture of confident faith, where holding on to any genuine perspective of life is deemed ridiculous. (shrink)

Anorexia can be characterized as a profound transformation in social relations. These transformations occur across a number of overlapping fields, and include a range of institutional and domestic spaces and myriad mundane bodily practices in each. Through an examination of household space and a conventional treatment programme this article demonstrates the ways in which people with anorexia use and transform space. While there are many treatment programmes available for those with a diagnosis of anorexia, the ethnographic focus here is on (...) those who have undergone bed programmes in public hospitals. As a result of the particularities of time and space, these rooms are transformed into intimate spaces that represent domestic bedrooms, thus fundamentally changing the nature of shared space in institutionalized settings. These transformations, however, are not straightforward, for these bedrooms fuse a number of bodily practices (such as eating, sleeping and abluting) that are sharply demarcated in domestic architecture. In these hospital bedrooms, private and public space is conflated, reversed and made ambiguous. Moreover, this article argues that this institutional transformation of space reproduces many of the private practices associated with anorexia, a factor which has been overlooked in the recorded failure of these types of programmes. (shrink)

Until I was five I shared a bed with my sister, 3½ years older than me. After our parents had switched out the light we would chatter away in the darkness until we fell asleep. But I could never afterwards remember falling asleep. It was always the same: one moment I was talking to my sister in the dark, and the next I was waking up in a sunlit room having been asleep all night. Yet every night there must have (...) come a time when I stopped talking and settled down to sleep. It was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience that, and never remembered it. (shrink)

This article examines Catholic nursing orders in Denmark. In 1849, 300 years after the Reformation, freedom of worship was introduced in Lutheran Denmark. In 1856 the first Catholic nursing order in modern times settled in the country. Others followed, and in 1940 the nursing orders owned 17 general hospitals and had a share of 10% of the hospital beds in Denmark. The purpose of this article is to identify images in the public media text of these Catholic nursing orders in (...) Denmark from 1856 to the present, and to deconstruct the existing angel image the nuns and sisters in nursing have obtained. The assumption is that the public image is an important indicator of how a profession is valued in society. Six images — three positive and three negative — are identified, and it is demonstrated that these images were closely connected to the nursing sisters’ professional activities and confessional affiliation. Until the 1950s the image of nursing sisters as representing a counterculture in Lutheran Denmark persisted. This image was succeeded by one of professional nurses of high standards. The shift was caused by increased secularisation and the renewal of religious life, as a result of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. (shrink)

The definition above nicely encapsulates two of the intertwined meanings of ‘privacy’. In the first sense— physical seclusion —the level of privacy in modern developed societies is extraordinarily high by historical standards. We take it for granted that a bed in a hotel will be occupied by either one person or a couple—not by several strangers. At home, few of us expect to share either bed or bedroom with our children. In these and a variety of other ways, increased physical (...) privacy has come as a byproduct of increased wealth. (shrink)

χαιρέτω ἡμέτερος βασιλεὺς σωτήρ τε πατήρ τε·ἡμῖν δὲ κρητῆρ’ οἰνοχόοι θέραπεςκιρνάντων προχύταισιν ἐν ἀργυρέοις· †ὁ δὲ χρυσὸςοἶνον ἔχων χειρῶν νιζέτω εἰς ἔδαφος.†σπένδοντες δ’ ἁγνῶς Ἡρακλεῖ τ’ Ἀλκμήνηι τε,Προκλεῖ Περσείδαις τ’ ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχόμενοιπίνωμεν, παίζωμεν· ἴτω διὰ νυκτὸς ἀοιδή,ὀρχείσθω τις· ἑκὼν δ’ ἄρχε φιλοφροσύνης.ὅντινα δ’ εὐειδὴς μίμνει θήλεια πάρευνος,κεῖνος τῶν ἄλλων κυδρότερον πίεται.May our king rejoice, our saviour and father; let the attendant cup-bearers mix for us a crater from silver urns; †Let the golden one with wine in his hands wash (...) to the base† Pouring libations piously to Heracles and Alcmene, Procles and the sons of Perseus and Zeus first of all, let us drink, let us play, let our song rise through the night. Dance someone, willingly begin the festivities. And anyone who has a fair girl waiting to share his bed will drink more like a man than all the others.(Ion, fr. 27 West = fr. 90 Leurini). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics Committees in HospitalsPat Milmoe McCarrick (bio)(Literature about hospital ethics committees has grown enormously since Scope Note 3 first appeared. This update provides new information about resources and documents now available while continuing to include important earlier sources.)Hospital ethics committees increasingly have taken hold in the United States since 1983, when the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research encouraged their (...) creation in its report, Deciding to Forego Life-Sustaining Treatment (III, 1983, p. 5).The President's Commission report (pp. 160-64) suggested the following roles for ethics committees: 1) review of treatment decisions made on behalf of incompetent, terminally ill patients; 2) review of medical decisions having ethical implications with the option, in cases of disagreement, to refer cases to a court with proper jurisdiction; 3) provision of social, psychological, spiritual, or other counseling for patients, family members, physicians, or other hospital staff; 4) establishing guidelines regarding treatment or other medical decisions; and 5) sponsoring or conducting educational programs to inform all concerned, including the public, about ethical problems in medicine.No exact count of these committees is available. According to estimates cited by Donald F. Phillips, managing editor of Hospital Ethics, about two-thirds to three-fourths of hospitals with more than 200 beds have ethics committees, as do about one-third of hospitals under 200 beds. He thinks that about half of the 6,000 hospitals in the United States now have working ethics committees.Several journal articles and a court decision in the late 1970s influenced their formation. A 1975 journal article by pediatrician Karen Teel (VII A) urged the use of hospital ethics committees to provide for dialogue in individual care situations as an appropriate sharing of responsibility. Another early article suggested that beyond parents and treating physicians, a "disinterested," mixed lay and medical committee could consider cases about defective newborns to improve the ethical decisionmaking process (VII A, Robertson and Fost, 1976). Three 1977 discussions in the Hastings Center Report highlighted this new concept (VII A, Levine; Shannon; Veatch).Produced at the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. It is supported by funds provided under grant number LM04492 from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Literature available through June 1992 is represented in this Scope Note. [End Page 285]The court decision was the March 31, 1976 ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the Karen Quinlan case. The parents of a young woman in a persistent vegetative state had requested that she be taken off a respirator. The court designated a "prognosis" role for the hospital ethics committee and stipulated that the committee must concur that the patient will never return to a "cognitive, sapient state" before the life-support system can be withdrawn (In the Matter of Karen Quinlan, 70 N.J. 10, 355 A.2d 647, cert. denied sub nom. Garger v. New Jersey, 429 U.S. 922 (1976)). Shortly after the Quinlan decision, Massachusetts General Hospital's Clinical Care Committee created an ad hoc subcommittee (a psychiatrist, a legal counsel, an ICU nurse, an oncologist/internist, a surgeon, and a lay person who had recovered from serious cancer disease) which looked at 15 cases. Based on the subcommittee's success, establishment of a permanent committee to review treatment of the terminally ill was recommended by the critical care committee (VII A, Clinical Care Committee 1976).In its 1984 Baby Doe rules, the federal government recommended establishment of infant care review committees, which promoted the growth of hospital ethics committees (VII C, Povar 1991). In July 1987 Maryland became the first state to require by law that hospitals establish patient care advisory committees to offer advice about choices available in the care of life-threatening illnesses; this requirement was extended to nursing homes in 1990 [codified as amended at Md. Health-Gen. Code Ann. Sections 19-370 to -374 (1990)] (VII C, Hollinger 1991).Recently the role for these committees has been noted in the Accreditation Manual for Hospitals, 1992 Supplement (p. 10, Patient Rights, Section RI. 1.1.6.1) of the Joint Commission... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Mother's Love"Katie L. GholsonWho is going to teach my daughter about becoming a woman?" S said to me. S was 38 and diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She and her husband were high school sweethearts, and she had a young son and a daughter. She had been told that there was no cure for her cancer, and at the point of meeting her, very little was able to be (...) done to manage her symptoms.As a mother of a young daughter, I was humbled by the question she asked me. Her daughter was 12 and was just beginning to learn about becoming a woman. The anticipatory grief of not having the opportunities to care for one's own children in the crucial moments of their development was devastating to S. Her ability to name what she grieves the most was profoundly sad to me and the other team members who witnessed it.As a palliative care chaplain, I am used to sad and tragic cases, but this one felt different. S and I had [End Page 80] a lot in common. I am also 38, married to my high school sweetheart, and I have a son and a daughter. Of course, it was not just these reasons that I felt a connection to S. It was also the tangible despair I felt when I was with her. As a chaplain, I am trained to meet people where they are and not to hurry them from a place of despair and anguish. I visited with S nine different times and watched the progression of her existential distress. Her distress was not always linear. Some days, it took a backseat and other days, it was front and center, but I was there to be a witness to whatever she was thinking and feeling, and a lot of times, it was inexpressible grief.S did not want to meet with "palliative care" initially. She was terrified of her diagnosis and believed that there were treatments that would give her back the life she desired. She was fierce and determined. S was also religious and believed that there was a miraculous cure for her that would allow her the time she desired to spend with her children and her husband. S was a softball mom and loved to watch her daughter play. While in the hospital, she missed many games, and this weighed on her.Along with being an athlete, S's daughter was very artistic and made S a bouquet of paper flowers. Each flower contained an encouraging phrase. S opened one while I was in her room. She had lost her hair, much of her body weight, and was wearing a hospital gown, but when she opened the flower, her daughter had written, "You are beautiful, Mom." In that moment, two 38-year-old women understood that beauty transcends outward appearances. S was beautiful: her story, her life, and her courage.S loved to walk around the hallway of her unit. I think she felt if she could keep moving, she could stay alive. She was able to take a walk outside a few times while she was inpatient and getting fresh air was very positive to her. These walks not only gave her the ability to widen her environmental space, but they also gave her space to think and consider the difficult situation she was faced with. I accompanied her on one of her walks. It was while we walked next to each other that she was able to finally share with me that she was afraid. She told me that the fear of not getting home, and the fear of death was overwhelming. I find that sometimes people can be vulnerable when they are not feeling interrogated by a medical team staring at them as they lay in a hospital bed. The "normal" activity of taking a walk and being side-by-side humanized the experience and I think S felt that at that moment, she could talk to me human-to-human—like friend-to-friend.When S finally decided to go home on hospice, I collected some legacy project supplies. I went to the hospital... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 757 Ramzi Fawaz How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation Let me begin with two stories. In spring of 2013 I organized a semester -long, undergraduate film series at George Washington University titled “Acting Up: Queer Film and Video in the Time of AIDS.” At semester ’s end, after participants had (...) watched nine films about the AIDS epidemic —among them classic AIDS documentaries, activist videos, and mainstream Hollywood productions—I chose to conclude the series with the 1991 documentary Silverlake Life: The View from Here. Silverlake Life documents a year in the lives of Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, a gay couple living in Los Angeles in the late 1980s who share an HIV diagnosis. At the time I made the selection, I did not realize that Silverlake Life documents one of the most devastating lived experiences of the AIDS epidemic ever filmed: during the course of taping, Tom, the initial documentarian, becomes gravely ill and dies on camera while lying in bed after a week-long convalescence. Reviewing this scene before our official screening, I found myself overwhelmed by intense feelings of anxiety. On the one hand, I felt a deep responsibility to expose my students to the aesthetic and political work of this daring documentary, and on the other, to protect them from witnessing forms of suffering that might traumatize them more than illuminate the social history of AIDS. When we convened to discuss the film, many students expressed how devastated they were by what they had seen. Rather than shutting down conversation, however, the depth and intensity of their viewing 758 Ramzi Fawaz experience galvanized an extraordinary conversation about the ethics of documenting the lives (and deaths) of people with AIDS. What they witnessed expanded the very possibilities of what they could feel about issues of collective concern such as the AIDS epidemic, while also transforming their ability to reconsider productive encounters with pain, suffering, and trauma. In my fear of negatively impacting students, I had forgotten both their capacity to respond with generosity and openness to traumatic images as well as my own careful curation of nine previous films and the attendant conversations held around them, which had laid a groundwork of shared affective openness to difficult content. One year later, as a newly minted assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I taught a large lecture course on American fantasy. In the fourth week of class, I screened The Wizard of Oz as part of a unit on the Hollywood musical, and I devoted a lecture to a gay and lesbian interpretation of this classic film. I highlighted the movie ’s camp aesthetics, its gender play and drag elements, and its derailing of traditional heterosexual romance plots. As a gay man well versed in queer media scholarship, I took it for granted that this was a pleasurable but patently obvious interpretation of a film that I assumed most people recognized for its exuberant and visually spectacular gayness. Yet as I spoke, I sensed a visceral tension build in the room. Half the students seemed mesmerized by the possibility of a queer aesthetic underlying the movie, while the other half frowned at me in silent fury, outraged by my daring to desecrate the presumed innocence of a childhood escape. The seething resentment of this latter group was confirmed for me when, weeks later, my teaching assistants disclosed that numerous students had expressed feelings of anger and frustration that my interpretation had “ruined” their pleasure in a beloved film of their youth. This circumstance prompted me to confront my students the following week: microphone in hand, I strolled the room and asked students to account for their feelings of discomfort. I wanted them to explain why their personal pleasure in The Wizard of Oz hinged on the diminishment of alternative viewing possibilities, including unexpected queer delights in transparently “straight” narratives. Students were clearly jolted out of their complacent belief that no one would hold them accountable for their perspective, or that their view might have political or ethical consequences: yet the resistance of some to being called... (shrink)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet best illustrates the problem with which a thoughtful and morally motivated person is confronted if crime, dishonesty and betrayal flourish in his or her social surroundings. The Danish prince finds himself in a genuine moral dilemma upon learning that his father, the former king, died not of natural causes but was insidiously murdered by his own brother, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, who now reigns over Denmark and shares the bed of the victim’s widow, Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet vacillates for some (...) time about what he ought to do. Finally, not without hesitancy and reluctance, he resolves to take revenge. To conceal his intentions, he acts as if he were crazy, astonishing the royal court with his altogether strange behavior. By doing so, however, he provokes the mistrust of King Claudius all the more. Claudius employs the Lord Chamberlain, Polonius, to whose daughter Ophelia Hamlet finds himself attracted, and two friends from Hamlet’s youth, Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, to spy on him. Acting on his emotions, Hamlet kills Polonius, an unprincipled and foolish schemer. This gives Claudius a welcome opportunity to get rid of Hamlet by banishing him, guarded by Rosencrantz and Guildenstem, to England, with the intention of having him murdered there . Yet Hamlet has become suspicious. In the luggage of his companions he finds the king’s letter with the order for his murder, and he replaces it with another, instructing those to whom it is addressed to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He himself succeeds in escaping and returns to the Danish royal court. There he runs into Laertes, the son of Polonius and brother of Ophelia . Laertes, who cannot wait to take revenge for the deaths of his father and sister, becomes entangled by Claudius in a disgraceful attempt on Hamlet’s life. They persuade Hamlet into agreeing to a fencing match, not knowing that, whatever the outcome, he will die. For Laertes fences with a poisoned blade, and Claudius has a poisonous drink for Hamlet in reserve. The tragic end of the story is well known. (shrink)

Born of a terrible insomnia--"a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell"--this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self- described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." On the Heights of Despair shows Cioran's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a (...) theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation. "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."--Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix "The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming. . . . Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."-- Publishers Weekly, starred review "This is self-pity as epigram, the sort of dyspeptic pronouncement that gets most people kicked out of bed but that has kept Mr. Cioran going for the rest of his life."--Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review Emil M. Cioran (1911-1995) is the author of numerous works, including The Fall into Time, A Short History of Decay, and Tears and Saints. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:610 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Raina J. León Pandora’s Box Opens and Terence Crutcher Dies Raina J. León Fresh from the bath, my husband comes nude, beard trimmed, still glistening and pinked. He shares the fullness of his skin, freckles and moles in their constellations. What little fat on his lank jiggles, begs for pinch as he turns to the closet to dig. I am (...) encapsulated by covers. No sleep for hours since I woke to watch the video I couldn’t with him awake. How I watched it, over and over, and knew this might be how I die: a broken-down car, my hands up, helicopters above with a man saying, a real bad dude, must be, and then shot, because Terence is me, like Sandy and Aisha... because just that day, earlier, I was transformed into child, questioned on the body of my work, made invisible and hypervisible, bleeding shadow for another’s feet. One leads to another in a mass of entangled links. Now, he moves. He does not feel the cold I dread out there where reality gnashes. Raina J. León 611 Inside the cocoon, the smell of last night’s tremble sweat, I can imagine entrance into another dreaming, breathe in and out our twining. He slips on boxers, then soft cotton shirt, then jeans. All black, his style. In my mourning, I call him close, and he comes to bed. With his body, he creates another womb as suddenly the weeping starts, says, when you are ready, tell me, because he doesn’t know how the world turns, yet in that moment, there is a hope.... (shrink)

This chapter proposes a version of epistemic contextualism, called inferentialist contextualism, as a promising research program within African epistemology. My suggestion should be seen against the background of the earlier debate between the seemingly incompatible positions of universalism and particularism. Whilst universalism has been charged with not allowing for diversity, of forcing African culture into the Procrustean bed of Western thought, particularism seems to block cross-cultural dialogue. A compromise is therefore called for. I argue that inferentialist contextualism can fill this (...) need. One promising feature is that whilst traditional epistemology always places the burden of justification on the subject of knowledge, inferentialist contextualism distinguishes between three different contexts: except for the traditional one, a second where the burden of proof is shared by both the subject and any fellow who might challenge the belief and a third context where the burden lies solely on the inquiring fellow. The notion of default entitlement depicts beliefs falling within this third context and will be elaborated in some detail here. I argue that inferential contextualism permits greater contextual variety than traditional epistemology without collapsing into relativism. (shrink)

_The Decision Between Us _combines an inventive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy with queer theoretical concerns to argue that while scenes of intimacy are spaces of sharing, they are also spaces of separation. John Paul Ricco shows that this tension informs our efforts to coexist ethically and politically, an experience of sharing and separation that informs any decision. Using this incongruous relation of intimate separation, Ricco goes on to propose that “decision” is as much an aesthetic as it is (...) an ethical construct, and one that is always defined in terms of our relations to loss, absence, departure, and death. Laying out this theory of “unbecoming community” in modern and contemporary art, literature, and philosophy, and calling our attention to such things as blank sheets of paper, images of unmade beds, and the spaces around bodies, _The Decision Between Us _opens in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and Roland Barthes published _Writing Degree Zero_, then moves to 1980 and the “neutral mourning” of Barthes’ _Camera Lucida_, and ends in the early 1990s with installations by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Offering surprising new considerations of these and other seminal works of art and theory by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Catherine Breillat, _The Decision Between Us_ is a highly original and unusually imaginative exploration of the spaces between us, arousing and evoking an infinite and profound sense of sharing in scenes of passionate, erotic pleasure as well as deep loss and mourning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pairing breaths:Rabah Ameur-Zaïmech's Terminal Sud (2019)Marion Froger (bio)Translated by David F. BellAsphyxiaNever had I felt such a sense of suffocation watching a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.1 The poisoned atmosphere of Terminal Sud (2019) recalls the atmosphere of the Algerian War (1955-1962) and that of the decade of darkness (1991-2002) in that country. The filmmaker chose not to make a historical film, however, but rather a dystopia that fuses together (...) periods and places. The story appears to be contemporary, in a country bathed in the colors of southern France, apparently in the grip of all the violence that French and Algerian memories are nowhere near forgetting.2 Bandits wearing combat uniforms, policemen wearing outfits sporting an acronym that strangely resembles one used by Islamist Algerian groups,3 and generals evoking the French putschists of 1961 all fight against each other—ransoming, threatening, kidnapping, killing, and torturing the local population. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, guerrillas (maquisards4) try to care for their dying leader, like North African freedom fighters (fellagas) were doing before them, and this in turn evokes French Resistance fighters in the 1940s. The film's work on confused memories, which, according to Thierry Kuntzel, is related to the condensation, overdetermination, and displacement of dreamwork, transforms being out of breath into a symptom that hounds the doctor, played by Ramzy Bédia ("Inhale…Exhale…Inhale again…Hold your breath…Exhale"), a state of the world in the form of a trap that threatens to suffocate him—and launches the quest for a filmic poetics of calm through the pairing of breaths.Peeling façades with tightly closed doors, lowered metal shop shutters, narrow and tense streets: the doctor, his wife Hazia, and their family slip outside in fear of kidnapping and gunfire, climb up stairs breathing heavily, anxiously await by the window, their bodies obscured in starkly contrasting shadows cast by glaring light, hug each other with endless sighs. As they share their grief, they have barely enough breath left to sing to the memory of someone who has disappeared,5 as if after an argument, [End Page 244] when everything has been said and all that remains is a strangled sob serving as last farewell.The film opens with an attack on a minivan used for public transportation: bandits, who could be soldiers, steal everything from the passengers and driver. The doctor sees his patients in a rundown hospital, treats a woman whose breathing is raucous, her voice taut with anxiety, and who speaks about the disappearance of her husband. Back home, he finds anonymous letters containing death threats and, to calm down, he searches for his breath by taking a deep drag from a cigarette and a swig of whiskey. "I can't take it any longer, I can't even stand up, I can't do anything, I'm at the end of my rope, I'm tired […] Is that what our country has become?" he confides to a friend several hours before losing, in the emergency room, his wife's brother, a journalist assassinated in front of his house. "Stay with me," he says as he runs beside the stretcher calling for help, "Breathe, breathe."The spasmodic breathing of Ramzy Bédia, provoked by the fear, effort, and pain that define his character, intensifies as the film progresses. He barely breathes in the car taking him to treat the rebel leader; he is running out of breath beside the leader's bed as we hear the death rattle and as Bédia shouts to the leader's comrades, "Give him some air, everyone get out!" Later, one of the policemen standing guard at the entrance to the hospital will be mortally wounded by a kamikaze attack and will die on the operating table despite the doctor's exhausting reparatory manipulations. Asphyxia will ultimately directly threaten the doctor after his arrest. Tied to an old bedspring, he will be tortured by electroshock,6 will attempt one last time to justify himself to a soldier who wants to know everything about the rebel leader the doctor has treated, and will nearly suffocate in his... (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

Sarah is a young deaf woman in revolt, refusing to speak. She marries James, an orthophonist who works in a special school for the deaf. However, what gradually emerges in the course of their relationship is the latent suffering caused by what each of the partners isn't getting. James, tired of acting as Sarah's interpreter, frustrated by the limits of what they can share, shouts out:You want to be independent of me, you want to be a person in your own (...) right, you want people not to pity you … then you [must] learn to read my lips and you [must] learn to use that little mouth of yours for something besides eating and showing me you're better than hearing girls in bed! Come on! Read my lips? What am I saying? Say what I'm saying … You always have to be dependent on someone, and you always will for the rest of your life until you learn to speak. Now come on! I want you to speak to me. Let me hear it. Speak! Speak! Speak! …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dying is DifficultClarice DouilleHayden had been a constant in my life since I was eight, as our families were close. He was a single dad who loved to talk and always had a smile on his face. He was obsessed with anything related to his kids and attended every school activity or sporting event.In 2015, Hayden was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer. He was adamant that he didn't (...) want to share any information about his condition with his kids, waiting several months until the eve of his first surgery before breaking the news to them. Hayden made the operation seem trivial and underplayed the severity of the chemotherapy treatments that would follow. Despite whatever he was feeling, he seemed committed to maintaining his happy demeanor, which was probably an effort to convince himself and others to feel better about the situation.Hayden survived his first operation and rounds of chemotherapy. And, over the next several years, he chose to undergo a regimen of additional aggressive treatments, submitting to surgery after surgery, as well as several more rounds of chemotherapy, followed by radiation treatments. I was already working as a home care aide, and because of the close relationship between our families, Hayden asked me to help as his caregiver, including running errands and babysitting for his younger kids. Hayden made it clear that he wanted his kids to remain ignorant of the progression of his condition so that they wouldn't worry and become anxious. It seemed he was motivated by his desire to preserve his young kids' happiness and innocence. In hindsight, I think this prevented his kids from being able to fully savor moments with their dad or prepare for the possibility of his death. I also think Hayden was trying to shelter himself from his own fear of mortality. And it was this fear that made Hayden a "difficult patient."Hayden suffered both physically and mentally, not only from his disease and treatment but also from his fear of mortality. I noticed how he tried to hide his suffering by shutting himself in his bedroom and making excuses when he wasn't eating. He often forgot to take his medications; he refused to use pill boxes and objected to reminders from others. The consequences often meant additional hospitalizations. I wish more palliative options had been introduced to him earlier in his disease course. I believe a palliative care team would have encouraged Hayden to think about and discuss death, helped him change his outlook for treatment and living with cancer, and most importantly, enabled him to better enjoy the remainder of his life with his kids.Nevertheless, I understood why Hayden was worried about his kids, and I could see how his recent personal experiences since his initial diagnosis might have contributed to his choice for the most aggressive treatments: his sister and both his parents had died, leaving no other relatives to care for his kids. He wanted to be there for his kids, yet the side effects of treatment made him so sick that he couldn't leave his bed. He couldn't even do the very activities that made him want to live.Hayden was an extremely social person, but when he found out his cancer was terminal, he [End Page E6] isolated himself from his loved ones for nearly six weeks. Even though I was likely the only person he was communicating with, as the person who helped him and his family, I often didn't see him for weeks at a time. He would text me requests, leave money on the front table, and ask me to drop off the items I purchased and then leave. Hayden's kids continued their daily routines, despite comments from them about his absence.In early August 2020, Hayden was admitted to the hospital. His doctor called the kids at home and told them that their dad would immediately be enrolled in hospice care. They were, as one might expect, shocked at this news. They knew their dad was sick and had been dealing with his cancer for years. But Hayden's health deteriorated slowly, and the kids hadn't known... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Masao Abe: D. T. Suzuki’s Legacies and an “Academic Dharma Lineage” in North AmericaMichiko YusaProfessor Abe is generally regarded as the torch bearer of D. T. Suzuki. But how did that come about? This essay sheds light on the relationship between Suzuki and Abe.Abe’s professor, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, had come to know Suzuki through his mentor Nishida Kitarō. Suzuki was one of Nishida’s closest friends. It appears that Hisamatsu’s and (...) Suzuki’s cordial relationship became closer after Nishida’s death in 1945. Hisamatsu in turn was the link for Abe to come to know Suzuki. Abe recalls his first encounter with Suzuki, which took place in the winter of 1947, when Suzuki was in bed with a bad cold and Abe was sent by Hisamatsu to make a sick call on his behalf. Abe was then Hisamatsu’s teaching assistant ( joshu). Seeing Suzuki in person for the first time, Abe could not help but feel the unique spiritual presence of this man. At that time, Abe, though a committed follower of Pure Land Buddhism, was deeply troubled with his spiritual quest. Perhaps sensing Abe’s agony, Suzuki gave him a copy of his imperial lecture The Essence of Buddhism, in which he had treated Zen and Pure Land thought as sharing the same Mahayana roots.1Abe’s second visit to Suzuki came in the spring of 1949, when Suzuki was preparing to leave for the United States to spend “the rest of his life in order to bring the message of Zen Buddhism” to the West. At that time Abe was to convey Hisamatsu’s concern that Suzuki ought to remain in Japan and contribute to internationalizing Zen by translating Zen texts into English, for, in Hisamatsu’s mind, there was no one better qualified than Suzuki to carry out that task.2Suzuki was ready to make a bold move, however. Having witnessed Hiroshima-Nagasaki, he was convinced that the message of wisdom and compassion based on the awakening to the “true self” that Zen speaks of was an effective and necessary antidote to the egocentric mindset, which manifested also as national ego-centrism, rampant in the post–World War II world. He was convinced that the message of awakening and compassion would give the humanity a better chance at peace. In fact, by the early 1950s, with the intensification of the Cold War and the turmoil in Korea, there was a palpable fear that World War III might break out any day, and Suzuki certainly shared that ominous sense.3 [End Page 111]Zen Must Adopt New ExpressionsSuzuki left for the United States on June 16, 1949, to attend the Second East-West Philosopher’s Conference and to teach at the University of Hawai‘i in the summer and the fall semesters. Through his interaction with Western and Asian thinkers at the conference as well as with his students at the university, he came to feel strongly that (1) it was important to emphasize compassion (hi) in the face of an excessive Zen emphasis on the koan practice, (2) Zen Buddhists must develop their “logical” expression to articulate Zen teaching in language understandable to Westerners, and, in this connection, (3) it was incumbent on him to introduce the thought of Nishida Kitarō to the West. In Suzuki’s own words, “Contemporary Zen is short of compassion (hi). Therefore, it lacks the momentum to engage society and work from within it. Again, it lacks a logical discourse (riron). This is something Nishida always used to say. In order to make Western thinkers understand Zen teaching, one must have a logical system (ronri).” 4These three points are clearly present and developed in Abe’s works. In his introduction to Zen and Western Thought (1985), Abe wrote that (1) Zen embraces a profound philosophy (echoing Suzuki’s concern for the necessity for logical articulation), (2) the ultimate in Zen and in Buddhism is “absolute Nothingness” or “Emptiness” (echoing Nishida’s philosophy), (3) Buddhism is a radical realism and a compassionate way of life (echoing Suzuki’s concern for compassion), and (4) a new cosmology, not a new humanism, is needed in... (shrink)

This book has been designed specifically to support the student through the IB Diploma Programme in Mathematical Studies. It includes worked examples and numerous opportunities for practice. In addition the book will provide students with features integrated with study and learning approaches, TOK and the IB learner profile. Examples and activities drawn from around the world will encourage students to develop an international perspective.

The essay focuses on the concept of mimesis Theodor W. Adorno developed in his Aesthetic Theory. After outlining key motifs of Adorno’s critical theory so as to provide the overall intellectual context, it explains why for Adorno mimesis enacts an ethical relation to the (non-identical) other. Mimesis for Adorno, the paper suggests, counters the violence that reason inflicts on the objects of its cognition by reconstituting the latter in terms of reason’s concepts. The essay discusses mimesis also in relation to (...) other aesthetic concepts that dialectically interanimate in Adorno’s explication. It ends with very provisional thoughts on the possibilities, or lack thereof, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory offers for the aesthetic practices of historically marginalized constituencies. (shrink)

This book has been designed specifically to support the student through the IB Diploma Programme in Mathematical Studies. It includes worked examples and numerous opportunities for practice. In addition the book will provide students with features integrated with study and learning approaches, TOK and the IB learner profile. Examples and activities drawn from around the world will encourage students to develop an international perspective.

I argue that the study of variability rather than invariance should head the reading research agenda, and that strong claims of orthographic are unwarranted. I also expand briefly on Frost's assertion that an efficient orthography must represent sound and meaning, by considering writing systems as dual-purpose devices that must provide decipherability for novice readers and automatizability for the expert.

Empathy is the combined ability to interpret the emotional states of others and experience resultant, related emotions. The relation between prefrontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and emotion in children is well known. The association between positive emotion (assessed via parent report), empathy (measured via observation), and second-by-second brain electrical activity (recorded during a pleasurable task) was investigated using a sample of one hundred twenty-eight 6- to 10-year-old children. Contentment related to increasing left frontopolar activation (p < .05). Empathic concern and positive empathy (...) related to increasing right frontopolar activation (ps < .05). A second form of positive empathy related to increasing left dorsolateral activation (p < .05). This suggests that positive affect and (negative and positive) empathy both relate to changes in prefrontal activity during a pleasurable task. (shrink)