The human sensory system is continuously engaged in experiencing and interpreting every interaction with other living beings, objects, and the environment. The purpose of this article is to describe the impact limited opportunities for rich sensory experiences have on students with severe disabilities in two middle school classrooms situated in a public separate school in the southeastern USA. The study employed a postcritical ethnographic approach and grounded theory thematic analysis of fieldnotes gathered over a two-year period. Three major themes supported (...) by the data are presented and discussed in depth. They are: students are afforded limited sensory rich experiences, everyday routines make students passive recipients to school, and instructional approaches result in little interaction with extended periods of waiting. The implications of the findings for improved sensory experiences and possible future directions are described. (shrink)

Résumé L’œuvre d’art contemporaine, fréquemment, se veut provocante, dans ce but : fouetter les consciences, précipiter un mécanisme de réformation mentale et civique. Elle peut aussi souhaiter privilégier l’exemplarité. L’œuvre d’art suggère alors qu’on peut faire mieux que ce dont s’arrange l’univers des mœurs en termes de qualité de vie. Elle entend alors forcer le cours des choses pour mieux moraliser les conduites. Il y a dans les deux cas défi à l’« éthique », cette délimitation du champ de la (...) moralité publique instituée, le premier délibérément hard, le second plus soft. (shrink)

Notre époque est émotionnelle : elle aime les sensations fortes, les défis délirants, la violence. Ces excès en tous genres, elle se les représente volontiers sous une forme extrême, où l'accent est mis sur ce qui chavire nos sens : l'intensité, la démesure, le moralement inadmissible, l'horreur. Un élan destructeur au point de rendre légitime, en termes spectaculaires, une " esthétique de la limite dépassée ". L'objet de ce livre est double. D'une part, documenter par le menu les formes d'expression (...) contemporaines fortes de ce désir de dépassement esthétique : spectacles superlatifs, performances artistiques engageant la souffrance, documents d'actualité insoutenables, images de la pornographie dure, cinéma violent, mises en scène de la scatophilie, idolâtrie de la mort et du cadavre. D'autre part, analyser le glissement vers l'esthétique extrême que consacre, plus qu'aucune autre, la société occidentale. Magnétique et médiatique, la représentation de l'extrême y constitue désormais une véritable culture, un nouveau référent, un but. Fourmillant d'exemples, cet essai s'attache enfin à apporter une réponse à ce questionnement cardinal : quel avenir, en Occident, pour le spectacle du pire? Car à l'esthétique extrême il y a, en bout de course, une conséquence dramatique : l'épuisement du désir de voir. Que faire dès lors pour revivifier ce désir sinon, à plus ou moins court terme, devoir extrêmiser l'extrême lui-même et ses représentations? (shrink)

This is the first full-length biography of John Langshaw Austin (1911–60). The opening four chapters outline his origins, childhood, schooling, and time as an undergraduate, while the next four examine his early career in professional philosophy, looking at the influence of Oxford Realism, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein. The central twelve chapters then explore Austin’s wartime career in British Intelligence. The first three examine the contributions he made to the campaigns in North Africa; the next seven the seminal (...) role he played in ensuring the outstanding accuracy of the D-Day Intelligence; while the final two explore his contributions to Arnhem, the Ardennes, and the post-war administration of Germany. The last main section of the book then outlines and assesses Austin’s contributions to post-war Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy. The first three chapters discuss the impact on Oxford philosophy of the cultural atmosphere of post-war Britain and the later Wittgenstein’s ideas. The next four look at Austin’s influence on post-war Oxford, particularly his Saturday morning discussion group and his perception lectures. The next five chapters concentrate on America’s influence on Austin and vice versa, paying particular attention to Austin’s work on speech-acts and his semesters in Harvard and Berkeley. The final two chapters examine Austin’s declining influence in Oxford, and his tragically premature death. (shrink)

Ex/in Australia--anonymous architecture -- In/editorial --In/interviews: F. Soler, J. Ferrier, W.J. Neutelings & M. Riedijk, R. Ricciotti, J. Moussafir, P. Gazeau, C. Hauvette, F. Seigneur, MVRDV, J. Nouvel, D. Lyon & P. du Besset, M. Vitart & J-M Ibos, ACTAR Arquitecura, M. Fuksas, A. Gigon & M. Guyer ,F. Druot, J. Herzog & P. de Meuron -- Ex/exteriors--Road movie -- In/reflexion on the peripherical stance--Paul Ardenne --Ex/exhibitions: Cécile Paris, Stalker, Access local, Anne Frémy --In/interests: University Paris 8 St.-Denis, garden shed, (...) Café musiques, etc. (shrink)

Dans les années 2000, Paul Ardenne avec l'art contextuel et Nicolas Bourriaud avec le concept d'esthétique relationnelle, donnaient forme à un nouvel ensemble de pratiques artistiques participatives. Qu'en est-il aujourd'hui de cette activité qui ne vise pas tant à produire des objets que des relations humaines? En donnant la parole à des artistes, des designers, des chercheurs de disciplines associées pour évoquer les questionnements qui sont les leurs, dans le cadre de la plate-forme de recherche Artem (ARt, TEchnologie, Management), ce (...) livre montre comment ces pratiques débordent désormais le champ de l'art et développent une nouvelle conception de la créativité où être créatif n'est pas seulement renouveler un ensemble de produits ou de gestes, mais aussi repenser les milieux auxquels ces produits sont destinés et au sein desquels ils sont conçus, posant les bases d'une nouvelle individuation individuelle et sociale. (shrink)

Quand on évoque la philosophie comme manière de vivre, on imagine le bleu de la Méditerranée, le soleil d’Italie et les rivages hellènes. Parfois on s’aventure jusqu’à penser à une bibliothèque, au premier étage d’une vieille tour, à ses poutres sur lesquelles le maître des lieux faisait peindre des sentences en grec et en latin ; certains vont jusqu’à évoquer un étang en Nouvelle-Angleterre, une cabane en Norvège. Qui imaginerait un presbytère, des grands marronniers, une église de village, et, en (...) toile de fond la forêt des Ardennes? On trouve la philosophie dans les lieux les plus insolites, et les plus inattendus, là où, les hommes simples vivent, simplement en hommes. (shrink)

Sanskrit text with commentaries on the theories of error in Mīmāṃsa school in Hindu philosophy by Maṇḍanamiśra, 7th century philosopher.

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, (...) Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine. (shrink)

During the nineteen years of her play-writing career, Aphra Behn had far more new plays staged than anyone else. This book is the first to examine all her theatrical work. It explains her often dominant place in the complex theatrical culture of Charles II's reign, her divided political sympathies, and her interests as a free-thinking intellectual. It also reveals her as a brilliant theatrical practitioner, who used the seen as richly and significantly as the spoken.

Liberty; Islamic philosophy; religious aspects; Islam.

Electronic communication and commerce facilitate the collection of information about individual use of the Internet. Focusing on the case of Comet Systems Inc. and its data gathering practices, this paper explores the technical details of gathering personal information in databases in general and the special character of the privacy issue raised by 'anonymous' information about individual behavior on the Internet. The case analysis suggests new insights for our understanding of privacy and frames a discussion of policy alternatives with respect to (...) the privacy of Internet communication. (shrink)

In the last decades of the XXth century we have witnessed a still growing interest in applied ethics, among them also bioethics, which in Slovak ethical literature was paid only a little attention as yet. The paper tries to examine the needs that led to the rise of bioethics, analyzing at the same time the concept of bioethics, its substance and subject. It deals also with its sources, putting stress on utilitarist and deontological ethics.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems and its Criticisms” by Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnold. Upshot: Autopoiesis based on meaning is a rich conceptual tool. It would be a pity to reduce it to a few general statements on self-reference in social systems.

The question of providence and contingency in contemporary Western thought: a critical study from an Islamic perspective.