The approach the majority of neuroscientists take to the question of how consciousness is generated, it is probably fair to say, is to ignore it. Although there are active research programs looking at correlates of consciousness, and explorations of informational properties of what might be relevant neural ensembles, the tacitly implied mechanism of consciousness in these approaches is that it somehow just happens. This reliance on a “magical emergence” of consciousness does not address the “objectively unreasonable” proposition that elements that (...) have no attributes or properties that can be said to relate to consciousness somehow aggregate to produce it. Neuroscience has furnished evidence that neurons are fundamental to consciousness; at the fine and gross scale, aspects of our conscious experience depend on specific patterns of neural activity – in some way, the connectivity of neurons computes the features of our experience. So how do we get from knowing that some specific configurations of cells produce consciousness to understanding why this would be the case? Behind the voltages and currents electrophysiologists measure is a staggeringly complex system of electromagnetic fields – these are the fundamental physics of neurons and glia in the brain. The brain is entirely made of electromagnetism phenomena from the level of the atoms up. The EM field literally manifests the computations, or signaling, or information processing/activities performed by connected cellular ensembles that generate a 1st-person perspective. An investigation into the EM field at the cellular scale provides the possibility of identifying the outward signs of a mechanism in fundamental terms, as opposed to merely describing the correlates of our mental abstractions of it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Origins and Evolution of Bioethics: Some Personal ReflectionsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio)AbstractBioethics was officially baptized in 1972, but its birth took place a decade or so before that date. Since its birth, what is known today as bioethics has undergone a complex conceptual metamorphosis. This essay loosely divides that metamorphosis into three stages: an educational, an ethical, and a global stage. In the educational era, bioethics focused on a (...) perceived “dehumanization” of medicine by the rising power of science and technology. Remedies were sought by introducing humanities, ethics, and human “values” into the medical curriculum. Ethics was one among the humanistic disciplines, but not the dominant one. In the second era, ethics assumed a dominant role as ever more complex dilemmas emerged from the rapid pace of biological research. As such dilemmas were applied to medical practice, the need for a more rigorous and more formal analysis of their moral status was clear. Philosophically-trained ethicists had an obvious role. They began to teach, write, and profoundly influence medical education and practice. In the third—and present—period, the breadth of problems has become so broad that ethicists must, themselves, draw on disciplines well beyond their expertise—e.g., law, religion, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and the like. The era of bioethics as a global enterprise is upon us. The original hope for humanizing medicine has not been overtly successful; however, much has been accomplished of value to patients, the profession, and society. Medical morality has been transformed into a formal, systematic study of a whole range of issues of the greatest significance to humanity. Now the major challenge is one of identity, or inter-relationships and connections between the theoretical and the practical. Bioethics has outgrown its beginnings.I have been invited to give a “personal recollection” of the early development of bioethics. Such invitations are notoriously hard to resist, but also problematic when they are the recollections of a participant [End Page 73] in the events to be described. We need only be reminded of the vagaries common to the plethora of memoirs on the book stands today. Few have escaped the perils of selective memory, self-promotion, or the settling of old scores. Yet their perils notwithstanding, memoirs may serve some useful purpose. They are the raw material—verbal kitchen middens so to speak—out of which historians can later sift fact from fancy. They enable “tribal elders” to give witness to the past from which the present can fashion some sense of continuity.I will organize my reflections around three very arbitrary time periods that represent my own way of thinking about the evolution of bioethics: (1) an era of “proto-bioethics” (1960–1972), (2) an era of philosophical bioethics (1972–1985), and (3) an era of global bioethics (1985-present). Each era, of course, overlaps with the others, and the dominant strand of each runs through the others as well.In the proto-bioethics period, the language of human values predominated; in the era of bioethics philosophically construed, it was the language of philosophical ethics; and in the era of bioethics globally construed, the social and behavioral sciences have gained greater prominence. In each period, interest in the traditional humanities other than philosophy waxed and waned. In the earlier years, religion and theology predominated. Beginning in the 1970s, philosophy took a dominant role. In the last two decades, other disciplines, like law, literature, and the social sciences, have exerted more and more influence (McNeur 1963; Pellegrino 1997; Barker 1987).I make no pretense here of writing any part of the formal “history” of bioethics. Works of this nature are beginning to appear (Rothman 1991; Jonsen 1998 ; Dell’Oro and Viafora 1996). Thomas McElhinney and I are preparing our own account of the work and influence of the Institute on Human Values in Medicine, one of the influential programs of the Society for Health and Human Values (Pellegrino and McElhinney, n.d.). Space limitations as well as prudence preclude any attempt to do justice to all the events, institutions, and people who have made the field of bioethics what it is today. I apologize for these omissions, for any unintentional lapses of... (shrink)

PATHOS is not the same thing as suffering, though, of course, it is bound up with suffering, just as it is bound up with contingency and loneliness. We suffer when somebody dies whom we loved, but pathos makes its appearance only when we turn up a letter and find in it some characteristic turn of expression, brave and cheerful perhaps in face of pain or disappointment, or an old jacket, or a pipe, or things arranged in a certain way in (...) a bedroom or kitchen. Not that pathos has to wait on death: the boy in John McGahern’s novel The Dark sits by the fire at night after his father has gone to bed, and his mood of enmity and disgust is disturbed and broken by the sight of the heavy country shoes his father had thrown carelessly aside—he meets pathos for the first time, and is deeply changed by it, even though the external father-son relationship seems to remain unchanged.…What has happened in this case is that the boy’s personality has been extended in the direction of manhood; suffering was nothing new to him but this was something new, a new dimension, new horizons of the spirit. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Momma taught us to keep a clean house. Dust the wood furniture every two weeks. Clean the bathrooms once a week. Wipe down the baseboards once a season (Those damn baseboards. I still got bruises on my knees from scrubbing those things). Sweep away the cobwebs—and pray that those spiders are either dead or delirious (Livin in the country don’t mean you like bugs, especially the ones with too many legs ). Didn’t matter that the house was full of stuff: Great-Grandma’s heirloom dresser, that weird Mammy salt shaker and matching Uncle Tom pepper grinder (Where the hell did Momma get those P.O.S.’s?), the outdated drapes from Belks, Dad’s favorite wooden TV tray, and that uuuuugly love seat that some crazy uncle thought was a glorious find from the Salvation Army (Momma tried to make it pretty with some pillows, but no amount of love could help that seat). Spring Cleaning meant pullin all that furniture away from the walls and holdin your breath to see what time collected in the crevices. Then you gotta be careful not to breathe out too heavy cause the dust would go flying fore you got a chance to catch it. If you didn’t, you’d quickly find out if you’re allergic to dust. Quarter cup of lemon Lysol in a bucket of steaming water and an old wash rag. Maybe two. A dust towel and citrus-scent Pledge. Me and my brothers would fight over who cleaned what. Somehow the twins always got the easy stuff: vacuuming or moving dirt around with the feather-duster. Finishing in enough time to fly down the street on their bikes with the neighborhood kids. Older sister never got off that easy. Each of my stubby fingers morphed into plump, lemon-fresh golden raisins by the time that whole damn house was done. I would finish just in time to sit with Nadine on the porch, counting the seconds til the sun turned off and the fireflies fluttered on. The craziest thing: despite all that cleaning, the house still smelled like Momma’s cookin. That Old House. Might have been some of Grandma’s and Great-Grandma’s cookin mixed in there too. Pork chops. Ham hock soaked in collards. Pinto beans and mustard greens. Corn bread and my Auntie’s famous macaroni and cheese. Didn’t matter if the oven was cold and the valve of the gas stove had been shut for days. A stranger woulda thought someone’d been slavin away in that kitchen for a week straight. No Sweet Citrus & Zest Fabreze back then. Lysol would mask the odors for a little while. Not long enough to overpower the 50 years of goodness marinated in buttermilk, kneaded with lard, and fried in Crisco that’d been embedded in the wallpaper and window treatments. All that grime—dead skin, hair follicles, Carolina clay, carpet lint, yippee-little-dog fur—was evidence of life. We were a socially-awkward newly-minted teenager, two rowdy twin boys, a multi-tasking mother, and a road-warrior father. Eventually a strangely-feline Yorkie was added to the mix. And don’t forget about the stray distant relative stopping by unannounced. No corner of that damn house was unmarked. Hand-sewn pillows in the living room that we were forbidden to breathe on somehow had tiny burnt orange paw prints on them (sneaky little dog). It drove Momma crazy. And tore up my fingernails. They still won’t grow back right. Wipe all that shit off just for it to build up again. But that house was inherited and fully paid for. No reason to move. I did move. I was ready to move on. Move up. Move out. Over that small town. Into the big city. Here the streets take on the smells of Momma’s house. Plus piss, shit, and unbathed skin. A hot day means everything cooks and stews in its own juices, making the stench 10x more intense. The apartment is another story. 11 floors up. Big, east-facing windows. Great view of the skyline dotted with some green foliage. And the great lake. Immaculate. Odorless. Not even a trace of tobacco from the previous tenant’s bad habits. No lingering scent of lemon Lysol. No street stench seeping through the window panes. No stray cat hairs. Or dog fur. Not a speck of dust. Futon. Throw pillows. Photos. Knickknacks. Bowls of fresh citrus. Cursedly-assembled desk set from IKEA. Yet the void is too big to fill. Too clean. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:230 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nneka D. Dennie The State and Future of Black Women’s Studies: The Black Women’s Studies Association and the National Women’s Studies Association in Conversation On February 25, 2021, the Black Women’s Studies Association (BWSA) and National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) partnered for one of NWSA’s Kitchen Table Talks—a new initiative spearheaded by NWSA President Kaye Wise (...) Whitehead to foster dialogue between NWSA and other organizations. The event, titled “Space Making: State/Future of Black Women’s Studies,” featured three panelists and was moderated by Whitehead. The featured speakers were Stephanie Andrea Allen (BWSA conference chair), Jacinta R. Saffold (BWSA co-founder and treasurer), and Erica L. Williams (member of the NWSA Governing Council). Allen is a Black lesbian writer and publisher whose scholarship examines how lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that invisibilize Black lesbians; she is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University. Saffold is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Orleans who researches twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature, hip hop studies, and digital humanities. Williams is an associate professor of anthropology at Spelman College, whose work has examined sex tourism and Black feminist activism in Brazil. Together, Whitehead, Allen, Saffold, and Williams explored their hopes for Black Women’s Studies and illuminated the challenges and joys of advancing the field. News and Views 231 The collaboration between BWSA and NWSA is a testament to how far Black Women’s Studies has come over the past fifty years and a promise of where it may continue to go in the future. NWSA was founded in 1977 and has since served as a hub for researchers, educators, and practitioners who interrogate questions of women and gender in their work. For decades, NWSA has been central to the nationwide US institutionalization of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. By contrast, BWSA is a young organization that is continuing to grow. In 2018, Saffold and I co-founded BWSA in order to provide a community for scholars working in the field of Black Women’s Studies. BWSA is the only professional association specifically designed to bring scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation about research that centers Black women. We launched BWSA with the goal of ensuring that future generations of scholars can readily access networks and mentorship from researchers who encounter a common question: when your work is simultaneously “too Black” and “too woman” for your field, department, or institution, what do you do? Drawing inspiration from well-established organizations in which we frequently participated, such as NWSA, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), Saffold and I sought to build a space that cultivated a Black feminist ethic of care for both the research and the researchers. In that spirit, BWSA provides resources to help scholars do their best work, including a mentorship program, a virtual writing community, a calls-for-papers list for publications, and article as well as graduate student paper prizes. It was an honor to join an organization as trusted and respected as NWSA for a dialogue about our shared visions for Black Women’s Studies. Three key themes emerged from the panelists’ conversation with each other. They repeatedly returned to the importance of making financial commitments to Black Women’s Studies, creating conditions to support Black women’s intellectual labor, and practicing self-care. Speakers explored the interplay between the responsibilities that institutions, communities, and individuals have to Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist scholars. They observed that in order for departments and universities to foster interdisciplinary work on Black women, they need to move beyond paying lip service to the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion matter; there needs to be permanent funding for work on race, 232 News and Views gender, class, and sexuality. Panelists also emphasized that Black women being in community with each other and supporting one another have always been central to... (shrink)

There is a moment in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that brought tears to my eyes. Henrietta Lacks is the woman whose cervical tumor gave rise to a cell line—brand named HeLa—that became quite useful in many important lines of biomedical research. When the book’s author, Rebecca Skloot, tracks down Lacks’s descendents in a Baltimore ghetto, they are not doing well. Zakariyya, the youngest of her children, has had the toughest life. He was born after his mother’s cancer was (...) already widespread, and she died shortly after his birth. He has drifted in and out of the military and in and out of jail. A moody and violent man, he once killed a man over a girl by stabbing him in the chest with a kitchen knife. Skloot .. (shrink)

Michigan is a critical agricultural state, and small family farms are a crucial component of the state’s food sector. This paper examines how the race/ethnicity of the family farm owners/operators is related to farm characteristics, financing, and impacts of the pandemic. It compares 75 farms owned/operated solely by Whites and 15 with People of Color owners/operators. The essay examines how farmers finance their farm operations and the challenges they face doing so. The article also explores how the Coronavirus-19 pandemic affected (...) farming operations, the financial viability of farms, and how farmers responded to the challenges posed by the pandemic. The study found that People of Color farm owners/operators were younger than White farm owners/operators. The People of Color farm owners/operators tended to manage smaller farms for shorter periods than White farm owners/operators. Though two-thirds of the Farmers of Color owned their farms, they were more financially vulnerable than White farm owners/operators. The farmers studied had difficulty obtaining loans to finance their farms. Farmers reported increasing requests from people for food assistance during the pandemic. Farmers responded to the pandemic by participating in government programs such as the Farm to Families Food Box Program that purchased their produce. It allowed farmers to supply emergency food assistance programs with products from their farms. The products went to families receiving food assistance from soup kitchens, food banks, and other community-based nonprofits. (shrink)

In this article, it is often pointed out to a more specific area by using the term Ṣūfi art on the basis of the aforementioned understanding. Thus, an analytic approach is adopted along with the usage of deductive method, and a layer of meaning is tried to be established through criticism and analysis. Firstly, a basic framework was constructed by mentioning the origins of Ṣūfi art. Then the attention was drawn to the sacredness included in Ṣūfi art in terms of (...) its historical frame and ontological structure. It is asserted that Ṣūfi art is based on four basic arguments: beauty, creativity, transcendence, and imagination. Ṣūfis considered art as an activity of beauty and the expressive power of it. Relying on the basic motive that Allah is the Greatest Artist, the Ṣūfis believe that the beauty of their art is a manifestation of Divine Names. They saw art as an expression of manifestation and unveiling. The Ṣūfis, who deemed the world in terms of Divine Beauty (Jamāl), witnessed the manifestations of the Divine Attribute of Beauty in all things; as a result of this witnessing, the masterpieces of Islamic art came into existence. It is the sapiental and the gnostic outlook that underlies this success of the Ṣūfi orders (tariqa) in Islamic history. In Ṣūfism, the perfection (kamāl) presupposes the beauty (jamāl); and each beauty presupposes also the perfection. Therefore, it is not possible to distinguish beauty from perfection in the Ṣūfi art. The sense of loving the beauty is so strong for them that they have tried to reflect the perfect beauty they witness in their works of art, to give an external presence to the phenomenon of beauty and to make the spiritual reality visible that is innate within their beings. Ṣūfism is in a sense an effort to seek beauty. It has been an endless longing to seek, search and witness The All Beauty, that is God Himself. The effort to search for Divine Beauty is sometimes revealed by tune, and sometimes by harmonious words or by a single line. Then, they turn into music, poetry, calligraphy and illumination. According to the maxim stating “There is a path from heart to heart”, these works were transmitted from one generation to another, ensuring the continuity of this Divine tune. Despite the fact that Ṣūfi works make no pretensions to be art as such, they were widely accepted, influenced the masses and gained appreciation in that they were created by people with a sincere heart, intimate sentiments and a deep world of contemplation. The second stage of the gnostic dimension in Islamic arts has been tried to be expounded through the ultimate goal of Ṣūfi art. In Ṣūfi tradition, the aesthetics and sensitivity of art attract attention at every opportunity, but the Ṣūfis did not consider art as their main aim. For them, art denotes only a means. Ṣūfis, who appeal to the eyes, ears and mind with the artistic forms, endeavoured to permeate to the hearts with the spiritual atmosphere provided. With their performances, exuberance and success in different branches of fine arts, they mobilized the aesthetic sentiments in each person's nature and ensured that the human pleasure become accorded with the divine pleasure. Focusing on the sapiential and gnostic dimension of Islamic arts, the basic principles of Ṣūfi art are emphasized as the third stage. It is also suggested that these principles also have a religious content are marked with religious style, have a strong sense of sacredness, possess generality and the peculiarity, have symbolic and representative aspects, are based on symbolism and have traditional characteristics, their style of expression is based on revelation, and are not intended to provoke carnal desires. As to the fourth remarkable factor within the sapiential and gnostic dimension of Islamic art, the Ṣūfi worldview behind the mentioned artistic works is given. As to the fifth remarkable factor in the gnostic dimension of Islamic arts, the thought behind the world of art sustained in the dervish lodges (tekke) is discussed. These dervish lodges were emphasized as the most important places where the beautiful word, beautiful sound and beautiful line converge and these lodges were evaluated as the kitchen where the fine arts were prepared and as the boiler where the arts are cooked. It is due to these features that each of the dervish lodges in Ottoman Empire became a kind of education and fine arts centre. In these lodges, many musicians, composers, poets, illuminators, bookbinders, carvers, engravers and marbling masters were trained. While the dervishes in the dervish lodges exhibited their own unique works of art, they also carried out the requirements of their spiritual trainings (sayru sulūk). (shrink)

The Archaic deposit of the North Rampart at Amathus, VII. Other Cypriote wares and Levantine imports After two previous studies, concerning specific categories in the deposit (kitchen wares, and vases of the ‘ Amathus style’), this article treats all the other ceramic categories of Cypriote production, as well as the Levantine imports. It draws up the repertoire and thus proposes a synthesis of the Amathusian production of Late Archaic times. The abundant material collected from up against the North Rampart (...) of the Lower Town of Amathus has to be compared with the contemporary deposits of the cave of the sanctuary of Aphrodite and of the cemeteries : this assemblage, of appreciably different composition, stresses the importance of feasting in the palace at the end of the Archaic period. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:240 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Mary Anna Evans Mary Anna Evans Personal Continuum The scent of gasoline is neither attractive nor repulsive. It falls somewhere on the continuum between. It is medicinal, but without the acrid bitterness of medicine. It draws children like a drug, but only when their parents aren’t hovering to warn of danger. Adults know about fire and poisoning and long-range carcinogenic (...) doom. Children only know that the odor around gas pumps smells naughty and fun, until their lips open and the flavor of petroleum turns their stomachs. Why do some things smell so much better than they taste? Gasoline, unlike honey, draws humans but not flies. Sarah was not thinking of fire, poisoning, or doom when she fitted the long metal nozzle into the mouth of her car’s fuel tank. She was trying not to think at all, though the customary thoughts slipped in. None of them were about gasoline. The pump’s air pollution control system was working well but not perfectly, so it took a moment for the odor to reach her nose. Her body roused and snarled at her. The baby. What are you thinking? If you breathe those fumes, what will they do to the baby? A moment passed while her body checked itself, remembering what it already knew. There was no baby. Where is the baby? Mary Anna Evans 241 The frantic voice didn’t echo between her ears. It had nothing to do with her brain at all. It was more than thought. It came from a place deeper than thought, and it wasn’t hers. Her body said things she didn’t want to say, and it needed things she didn’t need. Her body wanted things that were not good for her. Again, Where is the baby? And then, the darker question. What did you do? “Nothing,” she said aloud, since there was no one to hear. I didn’t do anything but bleed. I’m still bleeding. She resisted the instinct to clap her hands over her ears to shut out the voice that couldn’t be shut out. Her defiant hold on the nozzle kept her upright. She listened to the rhythmic throb of the pump. Refusing to turn her face from the gasoline’s stench, she opened her mouth and let the fumes seep in. * * * “Hello, sweetheart,” Frederick said as he came in the door. His peck on the cheek didn’t linger, so Sarah knew there would be no more expressions of affection that day. He had read in a self-help book that it was important for couples to use terms of endearment as a form of bonding. Physical displays of affection were important, too, or so said the self-affirmed relationship expert who wrote the book. In public, displays of affection affirmed the pair bond. In private, even a quick smooch forced men and women to secrete an attachment chemical called oxy-whatever. Oh, hell. She was a chemist. She knew what oxytocin was. She was just mystified by the notion of reading a book to find out how to get some. He turned away and went into the kitchen to fetch the marinating chicken. He always grilled when it was his night to cook. She had come to wonder whether modern men were drawn to cook with fire by an ageold hunter instinct, or whether they were attracted to an activity that put a well-insulated exterior wall between them and the women who remained inside to toss the salads. All across America, every warm summer night, lonely women toss salads and hope for romance. His head poked in the back door. “I bought slivered almonds and croutons.” 242 Mary Anna Evans Her “Thanks for remembering, sweetheart,” bounced off the closing door. Shit. She could have spared herself that soulless term of endearment. Leaving the lettuce in the refrigerator, she thrust her soapy hands under warm running water, because even thinking the word “shit” made the idea of handling raw food appalling. Her body, which had forgotten again that she’d lost the baby, approved of her caution. She guarded her thoughts against disturbing its... (shrink)

As it happened, I became acquainted with E.V. Il'enkov quite late, in the mid- or even the late 1960s. It was only a bit more than ten years before his death that I began to feel at home in his house, was able to visit without calling ahead, and was able to call him by his first name and the familiar "you"—that is, like many, many of not only his true friends but also like-minded thinkers, who became his close acquaintances, (...) most of whom justly considered themselves his pupils … The door would open wide, and Olia, Professor K.I. Salimova, Eval'd's wife and most devoted friend, not at all surprised by the unexpected guest and seemingly even quite happy at his arrival , would try first to draw him into the kitchen and feed him … which she more often than not succeeded in doing. I am not talking about myself: there were always many guests, and this is precisely how they arrived at the Il'enkovs' apartment. Recently, a critic in Literaturnaia gazeta recalled those whom he met in Eval'd's apartment in the 1960s: "This was a tight circle of like-minded thinkers," wrote the critic. "But some of them are no longer with us, while most are far away, beyond our borders." Obviously, he had not been in the house often or had forgotten things over the distance of years. There was no "circle," nor could there have been one—not with this host, not with his lifestyle and way of relating to people. I met a good hundred fine and various people in Eval'd's home: I.N. Korzhavin, V. Davydov, A. Meshcheriakov, S. Vinogradova, N. Dubinin, V. Zinchenko, A. Zinov'ev, Iu. Kamiakin, and … indeed, five pages would not be enough to list the quite famous and the not-quite-so-famous, simply ordinary people with no claim to fame. Nazym Khikmet, A.N. Leont'ev, and B.M. Kedrov were friends of the house … Ever new faces, figures, and words come to mind. I cannot forgive myself: once Eval'd Vasil'evich wanted to take me along to Iurii Liubimov's to read his play Neither God nor Tsar nor Hero … [Ni bog, ni tsar' i ni geroi], but I had some other business, something so important that I do not even remember now what it was, and it is probably not worth remembering. But most likely I was too timid to appear uninvited at the house of a person burning with creativity. The same thing happened with Galich … Eval'd liked especially his song about Zoshchenko. He did not sing it; he narrated it, but in such a way that tears always came to one's eyes. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article focuses on the 1954 short story “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which predicted that frozen meals and microwave cooking would ensure global cooperation and reduce domestic labor, “emancipating” women and inspiring new technologies. This frozen fantasy both reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs and challenges their essential arguments, particularly when examined alongside Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and medieval Cockaigne stories of abundant food and feasting. “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” also describes the culinary transformations in the United (...) States in subsequent decades, making it a remarkably prescient utopian text, and its vision of the future was largely (though not completely) realized by the end of the twentieth century. Because frozen meals and kitchen conveniences have proliferated since its publication, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” no longer seems utopian. Instead, American kitchens, and eaters, now view Williams’s futuristic vision as commonplace and expected. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prepping for the Day You Hope Never Arrives:Facing RecurrenceTerra TrevorMy 14–year–old son was eight years past diagnosis of a brain tumor. Gone were the pristine sick days when his white hooded sweatshirt stayed spotlessly clean for weeks at a time. Each time he left a muddy footprint on the kitchen floor I rejoiced; it felt so good to have a healthy kid again. However, my son was a (...) survivor of an anaplastic ependymoma, grade IV, brain tumor, and although I wanted to be out of the woods, I knew we were not. I’d climbed out of the space where medical problems were fi led in my mind, yet I kept the door open because statics showed that the type of brain tumor he had, frequently recurred.Still, I was determined to keep our lives as ordinary as possible. But for a brain tumor family this meant staying connected to sources of support. Parent programs, patient and sibling support groups [End Page 27] and camps, and we remained connected to hospital resources. Most of all we needed to have fun as a family, and we attended the cancer survivor picnics and parties our hospital hosted, where the doctors served as volunteers, grilling hamburgers and dishing up ice cream for the guest of honor patients.My husband and I felt confident that as long as we worked as a team with our doctors and stayed connected to resources offered, we would find a way to meet any challenges that might surface.In the end ultimately what saved us was this mosaic of support provided to us over the years from a multitude of good people and organizations offering help when we needed it most. And I had the opportunity to learn to accept help, which it turns out, is far harder than offering to help.Shortly after my son Jay celebrated his 8th year as a brain tumor survivor, I watched him open the medicine cabinet and reach for the bottle of Advil, for the second time in a row that day. “Do you have a headache again?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders, then hiccupped hard, and ducked his head in the toilet and threw up. Tears welled in his eyes. I sank into the deep, silent panic that made me calm.Our primary care physician called in an authorization for an MRI. Jay hid his fear behind a mask of quiet strength. It was ten days before his fifteenth birthday.While we waited for the MRI appointment, that week Jay was elected student of the month, and he got a lead part in the school play. My idyll of family hood continued until the MRI confirmed my worst fear—the tumor was back, and this time its fingers spread into the brainstem.We had to decide on a plan of treatment. Surgery was scheduled. When Jay was admitted to the hospital and I requested that he be placed in the pediatric ward, an environment he was familiar with, they agreed. Although Jay was a teenager, the recurrence caused him to revert emotionally back to a younger age. It was as if he was seven–years–old again, reliving his first brain tumor experience, and he kept his childhood security item—a small teddy bear with him, tucked under the hospital covers, like he had with the first diagnosis.Luck held. With surgery most of the tumor was resected and symptoms disappeared. Three days later, on Thanksgiving, he was feeling well enough to be excited about the Thanksgiving dinner our hospital provided us. A table and chairs were brought in, along with a feast of good food. The nurses gave Jay lavish attention, they laughed at the corny jokes he told, and made us feel like special company.Within a week Jay was out of the hospital, recovering well. But what to do about the remaining brain tumor slivers that were inoperable? He had already received his lifetime dose of whole brain radiation, and chemotherapy available offered little hope of curing a recurrent tumor. But there was a small chance that stereotactic radiation might stall tumor growth. We set up a consultation.We had... (shrink)

In The Quantum Self, Danah Zohar argues that the insights of modem physics can illuminate our understanding of everyday life -- our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large. Guiding us through the strange and fascinating workings of the subatomic realm to create a new model of human consciousness, the author addresses enduring philosophical questions. Does the new physics provide a basis by which our consciousness might continue beyond death? How does the material world (for instance, (...) ugly inner cities) impinge upon our sense of self? Is there a subatomic wellspring from which our creativity, our empathy with others, and our feelings of unity with the inanimate world originate?Most important, Zohar shows how the vitality of the new physics combats the alienation and fragmentation of twentieth-century life, and replaces it with a model of reality in which the universe itself may possess a type of consciousness, of which human consciousness is one expression. (shrink)

This is a chapter of a collective volume of Rawls's and Harsanyi's theories of distributive justice. It focuses on Harsanyi's important Social Aggregation Theorem and technically reconstructs it as a theorem in welfarist social choice.

At the beginning of his influential De Nominum Analogia, Thomas de Vio Cajetan mentions three mistaken positions on analogy. He does not attach names to these positions, but each one was held by distinguished Thomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, their proponents were responding to the same set of challenges from John Duns Scotus that set the agenda for the De Nominum Analogia. In this paper, I would like to do something that Cajetan did not do, and that (...) is, directly consider the merits of the first position in his list of mistaken accounts of analogy; namely, the position that analogy is constituted by disjunction. More specifically, this paper investigates the polemical use for which Hervaeus Natalis deployed analogy of disjunction; the reply of John Duns Scotus; and the implications of this back and forth for understanding the Thomist-Scotist dispute over the concept of being. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a defence of aesthetic education in terms of aesthetic experience, claiming that aesthetic experience and art appreciation is a vital component of a flourishing life. Given schools have an important role to play in helping prepare young people for their adult lives, it is crucial they should consider how best to equip students with the means to achieve a flourishing life. It is on these grounds I defend arts education as compulsory across the curriculum. In (...) order to adopt this position, I firstly critically engage with two competing defences of including the arts on the curriculum on the basis of firstly, the role art has to play in supporting self-expression, and secondly, a defence of the arts in relation to their role in supporting moral improvement. After explaining why these arguments fail to do the work required to defend aesthetic education as thoroughly as is needed, I turn to the defence based on aesthetic experience because it allows for a defence of the arts to be made on the basis of art’s distinctive value. (shrink)

We outline a class of term-languages for epistemic grounding inspired by Prawitz’s theory of grounds. We show how denotation functions can be defined over these languages, relating terms to proof-objects built up of constructive functions. We discuss certain properties that the languages may enjoy both individually and with respect to their expansions. Finally, we provide a ground-theoretic version of Prawitz’s completeness conjecture, and adapt to our framework a refutation of this conjecture due to Piecha and Schroeder-Heister.

It is almost universally believed that in quantum theory the two following statements hold: all transformations are achieved by a unitary interaction followed by a von-Neumann measurement; all mixed states are marginals of pure entangled states. I name this doctrine the dogma of purification ontology. The source of the dogma is the original von Neumann axiomatisation of the theory, which largely relies on the Schrődinger equation as a postulate, which holds in a nonrelativistic context, and whose operator version holds only (...) in free quantum field theory, but no longer in the interacting theory. In the present paper I prove that both ontologies of unitarity and state-purity are unfalsifiable, even in principle, and therefore axiomatically spurious. I propose instead a minimal four-postulate axiomatisation: associate a Hilbert space \ to each system \; compose two systems by the tensor product rule \; associate a transformation from system \ to \ to a quantum operation, i.e. to a completely positive trace-non-increasing map between the trace-class operators of \ and \; evaluate all joint probabilities through that of a special type of quantum operation: the state preparation. I then conclude that quantum paradoxes—such as the Schroedinger-cat’s, and, most relevantly, the information paradox—are originated only by the dogma of purification ontology, and they are no longer paradoxes of the theory in the minimal formulation. For the same reason, most interpretations of the theory interpret the same dogma, not the strict theory stripped of the spurious postulates. (shrink)

T. 1. Metodologicheskie osnovanii︠a︡ i modeli, Bogopoznanie i nauchnoe znanie -- t. 2. Chislo. Garmonii︠a︡. Metafizika Sveta -- t. 3. Svet bogoslovskie osnovanii︠a︡ kreatologi.

Chronic pain patients often miss receiving acknowledgement for the multidimensional struggles they face with their specific conditions. People suffering from chronic pain experience a type ofinvisibilitythat is also borne by other chronically ill people and their respective medical conditions. However, chronic pain patients face both passive and active exclusion from social participation in activities like family interactions or workplace inclusion. Although such aspects are discussed in the debates lead by the bio-psycho-social model of pain, there seems to be a lack (...) of a distinct interest in assessing more specifically the social aspects regarding chronic pain. As a result, the social aspects have yet to be taken into a more thorough theoretical consideration of chronic pain and to be practically implemented to help affected patients. By addressing chronic pain patients’ struggle for recognition, this paper attempts to shed light on some of these social aspects. We base this attempt on a theoretical framework that combines patients’ statements with an adaptation of Axel Honneth’s social-philosophical work onrecognition. Thus, this paper tries to make a suggestion on how the bio-psycho-social model of pain can live up to its name by helping to address more adequately some of the more neglected aspects in chronic pain patients’ suffering than has been possible to date. (shrink)

Human aesthetic experiences are pervasive; they are triggered by faces, art, natural scenery, foods, ideas, theories, and decision-making situations, among many sources, and seem to be a distinctive trait of our species. Our moral sense, understood as our capacity to judge events, actions, or people as good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, also seems to be an exclusively human endowment (Ayala 2010). As part of the scientific efforts to characterize the biological foundations of our human uniqueness, recently there has been (...) interest in the brain’s underpinnings of aesthetic reactions to art on the one hand, and in the neural correlates of moral judgment and decision-making on the other (Greene and Paxton .. (shrink)

This article is a continuation of Part I, which looked at the relationship between Confucianism and Daoism by first introducing general approaches, before moving on to (1) perspectives on names and actualities; (2) cultivation, learning, the natural; and (3) conceptions of the person. Continuing with the theme‐based comparison of Confucianism and Daoism by looking specifically at the Lunyu 論語 (Analects of Confucius), Daodejing 道德經 (Classic of the Way and Virtuosity) or Laozi 老子 (Book of Master Lao), and the Zhuangzi 莊子 (...) (Book of Master Zhuang), this article looks at (1) politics, nonaction (wuwei 無為), and virtuosity (de 德); (2) morality, virtues, and human nature (xing 性); and finally (3) Dao 道, or “the way.” It references Part I, and while it can be read independently, it is best taken as a continuation of Part I. The conclusion included herein summarizes both Part II and Part I. (shrink)

We propose a kernel method for using combinations of features across example pairs in learning pairwise classifiers. Pairwise classifiers, which identify whether two examples belong to the same class or not, are important components in duplicate detection, entity matching, and other clustering applications. Existing methods for learning pairwise classifiers from labeled training data are based on string edit distance or common features between two examples. However, if two examples from the same class have few common features, these methods have difficulties (...) in finding these pairs and achieving high recall. One typical example is to check whether two abbreviated author names in different citations refer to the same person or not. Since similarities between examples from the same class become close to zero, classifiers fail to distinguish positive pairs from negative pairs. One approach to avoiding the problem of zero similarities is using conjunctions of different features across examples, but implementing this idea straightforwardly makes the computational cost prohibitive for practical problems. Using a kernel on pair instances, our method can use feature conjunctions across examples without actually doing feature mappings, which are computationally expensive. The kernel is a tensor product of two inner products on the original feature space. The corresponding feature mapping generates conjunctions of features only across the two different examples while that of the conventional polynomial kernel also generates conjunctions of features from the same example, which are irrelevant to pairwise classification and cause deterioration of accuracy. Our experiments on the author matching problem show that this method can give a precision 4 to 8 times higher than that of previous methods at medium recall levels. (shrink)