The book is about three things. First, how Ancient thinkers perceived humans as like or unlike other animals; second about the justification for taking a humane attitude towards natural things; and third about how moral claims count as true, and how they can be discovered or acquired. Was Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls? The question cannot be settled without taking a moral stance. As we can either focus on continuity or (...) on discontinuities, how should natural science draw the boundaries? Moral agents act and react in a world that they see under a certain description, and there is no value free science that can settle what is the correct description. This book asks us to think about where moral justification could come from, and suggests that the supposed ‘moral status’ of the object cannot provide the answer. For the moral status of the object is a product of our own imagination, and once we see that, we also see that there remains the question where we ought to have the will to see it. Furthermore, since the perception of moral truth involves the development of imagination and will, the means to attain it will be better served by engagement with poetry and literature than with enquiries that seek to exclude the engagement of the imagination, or any appeal to the beauty of nature or the love of one's fellow creatures. (shrink)

In his recent book, English Poetry; A Critical Introduction , Mr. F. W. Bateson makes the observation that as romantic criticism is now dead it should receive “decent and final interment.” By “romantic” criticism he seems to have in mind either what he calls the Pure Sound theory of poetry, which would have us believe that meaning has nothing to do with poetry, that poetry makes nothing but an emotional or physiological impact upon us; or the suggestion theory which (...) argues that “a good poem should mean very little while suggesting a good deal.” Both of these, according to Mr. Bateson, attempt “to justify the exclusion of meaning from poetry.”. (shrink)

Few of the statements penned by philosophers have become as infamous as the “God is Dead!” of Friedrich Nietzsche. This study is not concerned with the reasons why this phrase is so popular. Instead, I would like to delve into the prehistory and partial genesis of the concept, something Nietzsche adopted from a previous tradition. Apart from known examples of theses on the death of God by Hegel, Schelling or Jean Paul, I will shed light on some of the (...) confusion surrounding the phrase deus est mortuus in Mediaeval Christian liturgical literature and mysticism, with roots reaching back to Neoplatonism. The goal of this study is to point out that this phrase about the death of God had no significant constitutive meaning for Nietzsche but was, instead, a relatively common literary and rhetorical topos among other culturally diagnostic expressive elements. Nietzsche used it as an illustrative shortcut when describing the intercultural processes of his time, with no ambition to originality, instead, with the clear intention of shaking up the (non)thought of the comfortable bureaucrats and legalistic petit bourgeois of Germany in the late 19th century. (shrink)

An inadequate grasp of the role of imagination has vitiated understanding of human cognition in western thinking. Extending a project initiated with George Lakoff in _Metaphors we Live By_ (1980), Mark Johnson's book _The Body in the Mind_ (1987) offers the claim that all thinking originates in bodily experience. A range of schemata formed during our early experience manipulating a physical world of surfaces, distances, and forces, lays the foundation of later, more abstract modes of thought. In presenting his argument, (...) Johnson lays special stress on the qualities and dynamics of the image schemata, the (generally unnoticed) metaphoricity of the transformations underlying abstract thought, and the new significance that should be attributed to the imagination, which is the general term Johnson wishes to claim for the mental processes he expounds. In this paper I draw attention to the importance of Johnson's insights for understanding literary response. In particular, I will show how a typical procedure of literary texts involves bringing to awareness image schemata of the kind that Johnson describes. At the same time, several problems in Johnson's account which limit its usefulness will also be examined: an undue reliance upon the spatial properties of schemata; a conflation of dead with live or poetic metaphors; and a neglect of other bodily influences on thought, especially kinaesthetic and affective aspects. These problems, for example, limit the usefulness of Johnson's attempt to build on Kant's theory of imagination. In comparison with Coleridge, who also attempted to build on Kant, Johnson is unable to overcome the formalism of Kant's theory. Coleridge's account of imagination, I will suggest, provides a better foundation for examining the bodily basis of meaning, while remaining compatible with Johnson's intentions and his more valuable insights. (shrink)

In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that shatters (...) the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death. Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 513-516 [Access article in PDF] Deborah Tarn Steiner. Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xviii + 360 pp. 28 black-and-white figures. Cloth, $39.50. The production of sculpture in metal, stone, and other materials was a craft that virtually disappeared from the Greek world for several centuries after the end of the Bronze (...) Age. Small, solid cast bronze figurines reappeared in the ninth century B.C.E., but it was not until the middle seventh century that the first large-scale stone statues of women and men were created. From that point on, freestanding and architectural sculpture played a central role in Greek society and its artistic expression. While the stylistic evolution of Greek sculpture has been traced many times, in this provocative and ambitious book, Deborah Steiner sets out to examine, from a literary standpoint, "how archaic and classical Greek poets, philosophers, dramatists, and historians introduce statues as cognitive and hermeneutic devices in their texts" (xi). The investigation leads her to analyze what the statues "looked like, how they functioned," and "what they were credited with doing." The resulting book "aims to tell two stories, one about objects, the other about texts, and to show how each proves crucial to the other." The examination is somewhat lopsided, since the intellectual use of the visual material is given far greater emphasis than the statues themselves.The book is divided into five lengthy chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter, "Replacement and Replication," focuses on the physical resemblance of statues to people but not their inner natures. Chapter 2, "Inside and Out," examines, instead, the ways that a statue's exterior can relate more or less exactly to its inner truth. Chapter 3, "The Quick and the Dead," suggests that statues, by their very inertia, closely resemble the dead and therefore mediate in our imagination between the two states. Statues as erotic (or anti-erotic) art objects form the subject of chapter 4, "For Love of a Statue." The fifth and final chapter, "The Image in the Text," returns to the literary relation of sculpture to the production of memory: the similarity between victory odes and victors' statues, funerary epigrams and monuments, and the creation and regulation (on both the social and political levels) of honorary statuary and decrees. The retrospective epilogue is followed by twenty-eight black-and-white illustrations: Most of them depict well-known pieces of sculpture, but there are also several photographs of vase paintings and one of a drachma.In all the chapters, Steiner continually draws attention to the multivalent aspects of statues. The Greeks developed and applied a large and nuanced vocabulary to describe different types of image that embody differences only [End Page 513] poorly translated by our term, "statue": agalma, eidolon, eikon, kolossos, xoanon, and sema. Most of these have provoked extended discussion among modern scholars. The functions that statues played are even more diverse: they could serve as replacements for the absent or deceased individual, as votive offerings, as cult images, as commemorative monuments, as apotropaic devices, as protective symbols, as minatory agents, and occasionally as deadly entities (some statues could madden their viewer and even kill those who abused them or their creators by toppling over). They were also focusing devices that could evoke a wide range of emotional responses, from pity to lust. As exempla they served to instruct, and some could speak with their own voices, sometimes comically (e.g., the herms in Attic comedy) or poignantly through the words inscribed on their bases (e.g., the famous lines of Phrasikleia, the dead maiden who will never be a bride). The repeated use of the first person by funerary figures is particularly evocative. The inscriptions on other figures (like the very early Mantiklos Apollo statuette) make it clear that images could serve as bargaining chips with the gods for past services rendered or debts owed for the future.Other statues defy simple categorization—the Athena Parthenos, for example... (shrink)

The persistence, and international expansion, of food banks as a non-governmental response to households experiencing food insecurity has been decried as an indicator of unacceptable levels of poverty in the countries in which they operate. In 1998, Poppendieck published a book, Sweet charity: emergency food and the end of entitlement, which has endured as an influential critique of food banks. Sweet charity‘s food bank critique is succinctly synthesized as encompassing seven deadly “ins” (1) inaccessibility, (2) inadequacy, (3) inappropriateness, (4) indignity, (...) (5) inefficiency, (6) insufficiency, and (7) instability. The purpose of this paper is to examine if and how the contemporary food bank critique differs from Sweet charity’s “ins” as a strategy for the formulation of synthesizing arguments for policy advocacy. We used critical interpretive synthesis methodology to identify relationships within and/or between existing critiques in the peer-reviewed literature as a means to create “‘synthetic constructs’ (new constructs generated through synthesis)” of circulating critiques. We analyzed 33 articles on food banks published since Sweet charity, with the “ins” as a starting point for coding. We found that the list of original “ins” related primarily to food bank operations has been consolidated over time. We found additional “ins” that extend the food bank critique beyond operations (ineffectiveness, inequality, institutionalization, invalidation of entitlements, invisibility). No synthetic construct emerged linking the critique of operational challenges facing food banks with one that suggests that food banks may be perpetuating inequity, posing a challenge for mutually supportive policy advocacy. (shrink)

For the first time, this book reconstructs the fascinating story of a series of anonymous "dialogues of the dead" published in Germany in the early eighteenth century. The texts stage fictional debates between some of the most famous thinkers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Thomasius and Bekker. The dialogues were originally published as cheap prints and very few copies now survive; until today the links between these texts and the very existence of this (...) textual corpus have remained unknown. Starting from the little reliable information available, Riccarda Suitner conducts an exciting investigation of the authors, production, illustrations, circulation and plagiarism of these texts in the intellectual world of the early eighteenth century, proposing a new image of the German Enlightenment. The German edition of this book was awarded the prestigious Geisteswissenschaften international prize. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 289-298 [Access article in PDF] Theory Is Dead— Like a Zombie Brian Boyd University of Auckland Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral; ix & 725 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. $72.50 cloth, $29.50 paper. Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, by (...) Richard Levin; 309 pp. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. $49.50. Are we "after Theory"? And if so, then where are we? Seven years after Post-Theory (1996) came Reading After Theory (2002) and then After Theory (2003).1 Students inducted into the mysteries of Theory by an aging professoriate can no longer feel the zeal their teachers themselves have mostly long since lost. Theory's own leaders point out its failings.2 Like Queen Anne, Theory is surely dead. Or is it?In 1982 Jonathan Culler argued that post-structuralist literary theory should be called just Theory and that Theorists should play the "central role" in intellectual life (TE, pp. 26, 215). What now sounds hubristic seemed heady in the expansionist days of Theory's empire. But less than two decades later it could be pointed out in print that "everyone knows that if you want to locate the laughingstock on your local campus these days, your best bet is to stop by the English department" (TE, p. 315).So was theory dead by this point, five years after the start of the Bad Writing Contest and three years after the Sokal hoax? Not at all. The year of the "laughingstock" remark, David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare After [End Page 289] Theory (1999) claimed that we are "after theory" "not because theory's claims have been shown to be intellectually bankrupt but because its claims have been accepted as both useful and productive." A reviewer could demur: "As formulated the claim may be overstated—it sometimes seems that Shakespeare studies is insufficiently theorized."3But that was seven years ago. Surely things are different now, ten years after the Sokal hoax? Yes and no. After Reading After Theory and After Theory, a literature professor at the top of his field, Louis Menand, can (1) bemoan the sickness of the humanities and (2) deplore the culture of conformity in their Theorized students, and at the same time still (3) offer thanks that Theory "rescued" literature departments from "the literary" and (4) urge that despite their unhealthy state the Theorized humanities should resolve not "to retrench" but "to colonize."4So again, are we after Theory or not, and where are we, if we are? Are reports of the death of Theory exaggerated? Or is Theory dead in a special way, one of the Undead, a zombie or a vampire?There have been many blows driven through the heart of Theory in the last thirty years, but if Theory is at least dying now it is not because of blows from outside but only from its own terminal internal tedium. It has "always already" been immune to criticism because it refused to listen to critical arguments, treating them as so much unfriendly fire, proof of the enemy's perfidy, all the more reason to close ranks.I described Menand as at the top of his field because he belongs to the Harvard English Department, is a star essayist for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and was speaking to the 2004 MLA convention. There he wished some young Turks would stand up to challenge his generation, and tell them "You got it all wrong." But critics have been doing this cogently for decades. His generation has paid only enough heed to dismiss such criticism as proof that reactionary forces needed to be resolutely resisted.And the potential young Turks are simply too scared to speak up. Among all the many indictments of Theory collected in Theory's Empire, one of the most chilling indices of the betrayal of intellectual freedom and honesty in the Theorized humanities comes from a junior faculty... (shrink)

This essay investigates the way in which dying and dead bodies resist poetic incorporation and the way in which such bodies can be fugitively attested to through fictive prose. It examines Heidegger's treatment of dead and dying bodies from Being and Time to his later work on poetry and language, and it offers as a counterpoint another mode of addressing these bodies found in the fiction of Poe. It also shows how even the poetry of Trakl, heralded by (...) Heidegger as an exemplar of poetic address, can be fruitfully understood in prosaic terms, terms which more faithfully reveal both the content of his poetry itself as well as the true nature of the wounds of dying life. (shrink)

This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. This, I argue, (...) underlines the aporia that Proust contends with in writing a subjectivity of mourning and death. Death in literature dissects the arresting spectral quality of literature itself – the disability to irrevocably absent its transversal representations, or the interminable coming-back of its ghosts. In composing a literary mourning, Proust dies into a work in which the separation of signatories blurs into an indistinguishable synecdoche. As such, the article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness. (shrink)

_The Dead Mother_ brings together original essays in honour of André Green. Written by distinguished psychoanalysts, the collection develops the theme of his most famous paper of the same title, and describes the value of the dead mother to other areas of clinical interest: psychic reality, borderline phenomena, passions and identification. The concept of the 'dead mother' describes a clinical phenomenon, sometimes difficult to identify, but always present in a substantial number of patients. It describes a process (...) by which the image of a living and loving mother is transformed into a distant figure; a toneless, practically inanimate, dead parent. In reality, the mother remains alive, but she has psychically 'died' for the child. This produces a depression in the child, who carries these feelings within him into adult life, as the experience of the loss of the mother's love is followed by the loss of meaning in life. Nothing makes sense any more for the child, but life seems to continue under the appearance of normality. _The Dead Mother_ is a valuable contribution to literature on psychoanalytic and psychotheraputic approaches to grief, loss and depression. (shrink)

Empirical research on public opinion has tended to misjudge the normative rationales for modern democracy. Although it is often presumed that citizens' policy preferences are the opinions of interest to democratic theorists, and that democracy requires a highly informed citizenry, neither of these premises represents a dominant position in mainstream democratic theory. Besides incorrect assumptions about major tenets of democratic theory, empirical research on civic engagement is running into dead ends that will require normative analysis to overcome. Bringing political (...) philosophy back in to the study of public opinion can not only remedy shortcomings in the empirical literature, but can also underscore how relevant that literature is for a wide range of problems in democratic practice. (shrink)

The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated the fluidity of biblical and early Jewish texts in antiquity. How did early Jewish scribes understand the nature of their pluriform literature? How should modern textual critics deal with these fluid texts? Centered on the Serekh ha-Yaḥad - or Community Rule - from Qumran as a test case, this volume tracks the development of its textual tradition in multiple trajectories, and suggests that it was not understood as a single, unified composition even in (...) antiquity. Attending to material, textual, and literary factors, the book argues that ancient claims for textual identity ought to be given priority in discussions among textual critics about the ontology of biblical books. (shrink)

The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this practice began forty years ago. I argue that, first, declaring death by neurological criteria is both unreliable (...) and unjustified but further, the ethical principles which themselves justify the dead donor rule are better served by abandoning that rule and instead allowing individuals who have suffered severe and irreversible brain damage to become organ donors, even though they are not yet dead and even though the removal of their organs would be the proximal cause of death. (shrink)

We argue that the dead donor rule, which states that multiple vital organs should only be taken from dead patients, is justified neither in principle nor in practice. We use a thought experiment and a guiding assumption in the literature about the justification of moral principles to undermine the theoretical justification for the rule. We then offer two real world analogues to this thought experiment, voluntary active euthanasia and capital punishment, and argue that the moral permissibility of terminating (...) any patient through the removal of vital organs cannot turn on whether or not the practice violates the dead donor rule.Next, we consider practical justifications for the dead donor rule. Specifically, we consider whether there are compelling reasons to promulgate the rule even though its corresponding moral principle is not theoretically justified. We argue that there are no such reasons. In fact, we argue that promulgating the rule may actually decrease public trust in organ procurement procedures and medical institutions generally – even in states that do not permit capital punishment or voluntary active euthanasia.Finally, we examine our case against the dead donor rule in the light of common arguments for it. We find that these arguments are often misplaced – they do not support the dead donor rule. Instead, they support the quite different rule that patients should not be killed for their vital organs. (shrink)

_Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex_ examines the progressive construction of the notion of paternal function and its central relevance in psychoanalysis. The distinction between the _murdered father _and the _dead father_ is seen as providing a paradigm for the understanding of different types of psychopathologies, as well as works of literature, anthropology and historical events. New concepts are introduced, such as "_a father is being beaten_", and a distinction between the _descriptive après coup_ and the _dynamic (...) après coup_ that provides a model for a psychoanalytic understanding of temporality. The book includes a reflection on how the concepts of the _death instinct_ and the _negative_, in their connection with that which is at the limits of representability, are an aid to an understanding of Auschwitz, a moment of rupture in European culture that the author characterizes as " the murder of the dead father". Perelberg’s book is an important clinical and intellectual marker, and will be required reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as students in all these disciplines. (shrink)

Much discourse on low-carbon transition envisages progressive social change towards environmentally sustainable and more equitable societies. Yet much of this literature pays inadequate attention to the key question of (productive, relational) power. How do energy infrastructures and socio-technical systems interact with, construct, enable and constrain political regimes, and vice versa? Conceiving low-carbon energy transitions through a power lens, the paper explores a case study of huge, but overlooked, significance: the paradox of the ‘phenomenal’ resurgence of coal in an era of (...) low-carbon innovation. Through exposition of the strong connections between coal-based socio-technical systems and a political regime of classical liberalism, illustrated in two eras, we trace an emerging constellation of energy and political regimes connecting ‘clean coal’ with a ‘liberalism 2.0’ centred on a rising China. This affords a critique of the low-carbon society emergent from these developments – a society more reminiscent of coal's previous Dickensian heyday than the progressive visions of much ‘low-carbon transition’ literature. (shrink)

In postwar Western culture, the myth of Antigone has been the subject of noted literary, literary-critical, dramatic, philosophical, and philological treatments, not least due to the strong influence of one of the key plays of the twentieth century, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. The rich discussion of the myth has often dealt with its most famous formulation, Sophocles’ Antigone, but has paid less attention to the broader ancient context; the epic sources (the Iliad, Odyssey, Thebaid, and Oedipodea); the other tragic versions (Aeschylus’s (...) Seven Against Thebes and his lost Eleusinians; Euripides’s Suppliants, Phoenician Women, and Antigone, of which only a few short fragments have been preserved); and the responses of late antiquity. This paper analyses the basic features of this nearly thousand-year-long ancient tradition and shows how they connect in surprising ways – sometimes even more directly than Sophoclean tragedy does – with the main issues in some unique contemporary traditions of its reception (especially the Slovenian, Polish and Argentine ones): the question of burying the wartime (or postwar) dead and the ideal of reconciliation. (shrink)

This dissertation is an effort to describe the effects of Postmodern thought in a variety of narrative forms, including novels, film, and computer games. Using Brian McHale's description of the focal point of Modernist narratives as being epistemological and Postmodernist narratives as being concerned primarily with ontological issues, I trace the possible meaning of the changing understanding of these concepts in the twentieth century. In addition, I interrogate the ramifications of the Postmodern resolution to the crisis of epistemology presented through (...) the work of Modernist writers to test whether or not the Postmodern idea of "claiming worlds" is, indeed, a reasonable or viable resolution to this crisis. ;It is my contention that a changing sense of the relationship between the definitions of epistemology and ontology in traditional literary narrative has been affected by and has affected the narratives of less traditionally "literary" media. In order to show that this change has occurred, I use a number of texts to serve as examples, first, of the conception of epistemology as presented in Modernist works like James Joyce's "The Dead" and Edith Wharton's A Son At the Front and then of the conception of ontology as presented in Postmodernist work like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I then examine more popular narrative forms to examine how Postmodernism's focus on what I term an "epistemologically derived ontology" has crept into the general culture. My specific examples in these cases are Norman Spinrad's cyberpunk novel Little Heroes , the film The Matrix, and a number of video games, particularly online games. ;My final conclusions are exemplified by the film Memento, which contains many of the Postmodern tenets I propose are typical of mainstream Postmodern works and which also serves as a basis for revealing some of my ethical concerns about the ramifications of this shift in understanding of the aforementioned philosophical categories. (shrink)

Open Access: Appreciating the relationship of the living to our dead is an aspect of human life that seems to be neglected in philosophy. I argue that living individuals can have ongoing, non-imaginary, valuable relationships with deceased loved ones. This is important to establish because arguments for such relationships better generate claims in applied ethics about our conduct with respect to our dead. In the first half of the paper I advance the narrower claim that psychological literature affirmative (...) of “imaginal relationships” with the dead is relevant to philosophical literature on metaphysical arguments for the dead as relata. The relevance of those psychological insights to philosophers’ metaphysical insights matters for understanding the value of relationships with deceased loved ones. In the second half of the paper I advance the wider claim that the importance of one’s most dearly held relationships with living individuals is best explained in terms of imaginal content, as well; in other words, some interpersonal relationships between the living are personally important because of their imaginal content. Once we appreciate this, it is clearer why recognizably real, imaginally informed relationships with the living are not necessarily cut off on the day someone dies, and permit the possibilities for ethical activities including forgiving the dead, honoring the dead, and carrying out their wishes after they are gone. (shrink)

This essay considers Richard Calder’s Dead trilogy as an important contribution to the argument concerning how pornography’s pernicious effects might be mitigated or disrupted. Paying close attention to the way that Calder uses the rhetoric of fiction to challenge pornographic stereotypes that have achieved hegemonic status, the essay argues that Calder’s trilogy provides an important link between debates about pornography and contemporary philosophical discussions of alterity and community. Finally, it argues that, for Calder, sexuality is implicitly predicated on a (...) reconceptualization of social relations in general – a reconceptualization achieved through the exhaustion of that decadent shadow of the Enlightenment, pornography. (shrink)

Grasping. Avarice. Covetousness. Miserliness. Insatiable cupidity. Overreaching ambition. Desire spun out of control. The deadly sin of Greed goes by many names, appears in many guises, and wreaks havoc on individuals and nations alike. In this lively and generous book, Phyllis A. Tickle argues that Greed is "the Matriarch of the Deadly Clan," the ultimate source of Pride, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, and Anger. She shows that the major faiths, from Hinduism and Taoism to Buddhism and Christianity regard Greed as (...) the greatest calamity humans can indulge in, engendering further sins and eviscerating all virtues. As the Sikh holy book Adi Granth asks: "Where there is greed, what love can there be?" Tickle takes a long view of Greed, from St. Paul to the present, focusing particularly on changing imaginative representations of Greed in Western literature and art. Looking at such works as the Psychomachia, or "Soul Battle" of the fifth-century poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the paintings of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch, the 1987 film Wall Street, and the contemporary Italian artist Mario Donizetti, Tickle shows how our perceptions have evolved from the medieval understanding of Greed as a spiritual enemy to a nineteenth-century sociological construct to an early twentieth-century psychological deficiency, and finally to a new view, powerfully articulated in Donizetti's mystical paintings, of Greed as both tragic and beautiful. Engaging, witty, brilliantly insightful, Greed explores the full range of this deadly sin's subtle, chameleon-like qualities, and the enormous destructive power it wields, evidenced all too clearly in the world today. (shrink)

The feasibility of posthumous reproduction when the surviving partner is female has brought to light many ethical, moral, social, and legal issues. This review aims to summarize these issues and to assist clinicians who may be faced with such requests. A question list, used for health technologies assessment, was utilized in a question-answer approach as the review methodology. Of the 1,208 publications identified through a comprehensive literature search in biomedical, psychological, and ethical databases, 31 articles included arguments related to one (...) or more questions from the predefined question set. Key stakeholders identified include the deceased, the requesting party, the resultant child, the physician, and society. Key ethical issues relevant to posthumous reproduction include the four traditional pillars of medical ethics—autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice—as well as the stakeholders’ rights and sociocultural attitudes. The ethical framework formulated by these issues has been incorporated in a clinical ethics decision-making tool that could prove useful to clinicians and decision makers. (shrink)

In this essay I will examine the development of the notion of transcendence in Blanchot's early critical writings. Doing so indicates the radical way that Blanchot reconfigures this central ontological and theological term by way of his readings of the literary use of language. In turn this exposes the essential relation between finitude and literature, something which the second part of the essay will examine by way of Heidegger's study of the myth of Er.

In browsing the contents of this book, my first thought was, “Well, sure, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Or, more cryptically to those in earshot, I uttered, “Well, sure, once you've made it through Ulysses everything can sound like Joyce.” But the joy and mental workout of All Future Plunges come not from nitpicking particular Joycean tropes or images but rather from considering Joyce as a cultural phenomenon for all who followed to engage with, immerse themselves in, (...) and speak to. His works anchor Vergara's five case studies in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Russian literature (Olesha, Nabokov, Bitov, Sokolov, and Shishkin). Joyce is deployed as a source of intertexts and influences and as the lens through which the Russian works are read. Vergara includes “points of contact” for each author to show knowledge of Joyce as well as the context in which Joyce was being read and discussed in Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet literary spheres. The framing work on intertextuality is significant in its own right and leads to compelling notions of how literary influences can be detected and discussed. Behind it all looms the bespectacled presence of Joyce (gazing out from the book's cover in pop-art primary colors) with his Oedipal tensions, modern epic style, bawdy language, and sonorous prose. But essentially what Vergara's book gives us is a glimpse of creative and smart people reading the work of another creative smart person.Vladimir Nabokov, an outspoken devotee of Joyce, had a peculiar rationale for not believing in heaven. He wrote that even if, in the afterlife, he found himself in paradise surrounded by all of his dead loved ones, he would not be able to shake the gnawing doubt that at any point these beloved phantoms might pull off their masks and reveal themselves to be demons. After reading All Future Plunges, a similar fear may grip the reader of modernist literature—that the many varied and nuanced references we find in these works may one day all prove to be simply myriad instantiations of Joyce in disguise. But even when that happens, I suppose we may still think to call it heaven. (shrink)

The temple schematics in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), that is, New Jerusalem and Temple Scroll, has often been comparatively examined with the sanctuary structures in the Hebrew Bible (HB) (Ezk 40–48 and Num 2). Typically, in scholarship, the irreconcilable differences between all accounts (regarding the size, shape, name-gate ordering, etc.) is underscored, thus rendering a literary conundrum. This article argues that New Jerusalem and Temple Scroll drew from both Ezekiel 40–48 and Numbers 2 in different ways, purporting the (...) sect(s)’s theologies and ideologies which accords, further, with the life setting of the Qumran communities; the influence of Numbers in the DSS is underscored. These aspects include (1) the eastern orientation of sacred structures and the compound at Khirbet Qumran, (2) the precise locale of the communities at the Dead Sea vis-à-vis Ezekiel 47 and (3) the desert encampment configuration together with its militaristic overtones in Numbers, which corresponds to the DSS sect(s)’s apocalyptic expectations as indicated in the War Scroll. Consequently, the Qumran sect(s) truly saw itself as an alternative priesthood of the forthcoming restored temple of God, even as in the interim they functioned as an alternative sanctuary (4QFlor; 4QMMT; 1QS). The import of Numbers upon the DSS sect(s)’s temple ideologies and priestly theologies is, therefore, equivalent to that of Ezekiel. Contribution: This article traces theological themes of temple and priestly ideologies between and among the Qumran literature and Hebrew Scriptures; both the respective library or canon and methodological approach are core to the historical thought’s aim and scope of HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies. (shrink)

The “Mysteries” of Qumran: Mystery, Secrecy, and Esotericism in the Dead Sea Scrolls. By Samuel I. Thomas. Early Judaism and Its Literature, vol. 25. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009. Pp. xvii + 311. $39.95.

In the fall of 2021 a news story reported of a successful experimental xenotransplant of a genetically engineered pig kidney in to the circulatory system of a research subject who was dead by neurological criteria. Although not a first of its kind, this case raises the issue of the ethics of research on those declared brain dead. Such possibilities have been discussed in the published literature since 1974, when Willard Gaylin expressed concern over human dignity when he imagined (...) hospital wards filled with “neomorts” used for education, teaching, research, and manufacturing. In this essay, the author explores the nuances of whether such subjects are considered alive, dead, or something in between. Notions of consent/ permission and risk/benefit are determined by this categorization. After discussing the 2005 Consensus Panel Guidelines on Research with the Recently Dead, the essay concludes with the need for a liminal state between living and dead that respects human dignity but also recognizes the utilitarian value of such experiments to protect fully alive humans. Having not just guidelines but oversight structures such as the University of Pittsburgh’s Committee for Oversight of Research Involving the Dead (CORID) and regulations are necessary if such work is to become more common. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore Rorty’s recommendation to shift from a philosophical to a literary culture by addressing this theme through a philosophical-educational lens and in reference to the question of what kind of education we need in order to foster democratic ethos. In this perspective, I will establish a comparison/contrast between Rorty’s idea of sentimental education and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children understood as two (alternative?) ways of recontextualizing Dewey’s heritage. After discussing Rorty’s understanding of a need for (...) an end (instead of a “Deweyan” recovery) of philosophy starting from his dialogue with Castoriadis and by reconstructing his appeal to a poeticized culture, I will present Lipman’s case for education for philosophical inquiry in order to cultivate a democratic ethos in primary and secondary schools. I will contrast it with Rorty’s education as socialization and, contextually, I will illustrate their different stances towards Hirsch’s cultural literacy and his core curriculum approach to civic education. Finally, after problematizing Rorty’s views on the use of literature for a democratic culture, I will indicate the need to combine the Rortyan and Lipmanian thrusts and will claim that an aspect of the novel-driven education advocated by Rorty maintains a constitutive Socratic-inquiring dimension. (shrink)

The vital status of patients who are a part of controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is widely debated in bioethical literature. Opponents to currently applied cDCD protocols argue that they violate the dead donor rule, while proponents of the protocols advocate compatibility. In this article, we argue that both parties often misinterpret the moral implications of the dead donor rule. The rule as such does not require an assessment of a donor’s vital status, we contend, but rather (...) an assessment of whether procurement of organs in cDCD cause the death of the donor or not. We then argue that commonly practiced cDCD protocols do not violate the dead donor rule, since the donation does not trigger or cause the death of the donors. (shrink)

Representationalism—the view that scientific modeling is best understood in representational terms—is the received view in contemporary philosophy of science. Contributions to this literature have focused on a number of puzzles concerning the nature of representation and the epistemic role of misrepresentation, without considering whether these puzzles are the product of an inadequate analytical framework. The goal of this paper is to suggest that this possibility should be taken seriously. The argument has two parts, employing the “can’t have” and “don’t need” (...) tactics drawn from philosophy of mind. On the one hand, I propose that representationalism doesn’t work: different ways to flesh out representationalism create a tension between its ontological and epistemological components and thereby undermine the view. On the other hand, I propose that representationalism is not needed in the first place—a position I articulate based on a pragmatic stance on the success of scientific research and on the feasibility of alternative philosophical frameworks. I conclude that representationalism is untenable and unnecessary, a philosophical dead end. A new way of thinking is called for if we are to make progress in our understanding of scientific modeling. (shrink)

Part one. Homesickness, borderlines, and contraband -- The architectonics of subjectivity -- The poetics of subjectivity -- The shattered mirror of modernity -- Part two. The exilic constellation -- Introduction -- The dead end of omniscience : reading Bakhtin with Bergson -- In the beginning was the body : reading Bakhtin with Merleau-Ponty -- From dialogics to trialogics : reading Bakhtin with Lévinas -- Coda : a home away from home.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005) 1-23 [Access article in PDF] Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach Brian Boyd University of Auckland Many now feel that the "theory" that has dominated academic literary studies over the last thirty years or so is dead, and that it is time for a return to texts.1 But many more outside literary studies—in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, and religion—have (...) recently come to recognize that the deep past that shaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past. Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than a solely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinism nor limitation to the status quo, I want to argue for a bio-cultural or evolutionary approach to literature, first in very general terms, and then through a few aspects of a single familiar example, Hamlet.2 Such an approach, I suggest, can offer both a more comprehensive theory of literature and a closer investigation of literary texts. I Traditional views of literature tended to see it as reflecting nature, especially human nature, all the way from Plato's discomfort with, or Aristotle's admiration for, mimesis to Shakespeare's or Stendhal's images of art as holding the mirror up to nature. Common-sense traditional views of art and literature have easily shaded into transcendental views, widespread because religious beliefs have been so pervasive and because both artists and their patrons in state or church benefit by nurturing a sense of awe at art's putatively divine origins and power.In the twentieth century, first in sociology, anthropology, and even [End Page 1] psychology, then by the 1960s in the combination of these with Saussurean linguistics that produced structuralism and its aftershocks, and therefore impacted on literature, there has been a rejection of human nature as a given and a stress on human nature as the product only of culture and convention. "Theory," or what the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism more pointedly calls cultural critique, rightly critiques traditional common-sense and transcendental views of art, pointing out that the nature, human nature, or supernature that art or literature was supposed to reflect was merely what was assumed of these things from within a local cultural perspective.3 Roland Barthes, for example, criticized "the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature."4 Modern Theory also rejects the individual as another bourgeois or capitalist or Western notion, as when Fredric Jameson echoed Barthes's Death of the Author by announcing the Death of the Subject.5 Criticism since the 1960s "has denied, on theoretical grounds, the relevance of the single historically definable author."6However, as many have lately realized, there are problematic ethical consequences of both the denial of human nature and the denial of the individual. After such denials, on what basis do we then claim equal rights for all humans, and on what basis do we assign responsibility for particular actions?7 If there is no "single historically definable author," does that mean that someone penning a racist screed cannot be held accountable?A critique of unquestioned Western assumptions about human nature was needed, but the post-1960s critique was shortsighted: it has not looked nearly far enough. While structuralism and its more or less rebellious offspring were continuing the lineage of early twentieth-century social sciences, the natural sciences were moving in the opposite direction, towards the first comprehensive scientific attempt to understand human nature in the context of evolution and human, animal, and artificial cognition and behavior.In the humanities there has of late been widespread skepticism about science. Some postmodernists have what they deem "a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims." But, as Daniel Dennett comments, "this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naïveté, made possible only by... ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power."8 Science does not generate only true answers: ideas proposed within it can of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 364-367 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Hamlet in Purgatory Hamlet in Purgatory, by Stephen Greenblatt; xii & 322 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, $29.95. Hamlet in Purgatory is both more and less than literary criticism of Shakespeare's most haunting and most critically belabored play. Greenblatt has captured an evolving culture of belief which informs the play and goes far beyond source studies (...) or the history of ideas. He assays to show how the Medieval doctrine of Purgatory and the rejection of it by Protestant Reformers shaped the structure of Hamlet and the world of Hamlet's spiritual agony.Central to the argument is the notion that the rejection of Purgatory, and ritual practices associated with the doctrine, threatened to disrupt community and sever the relations between the living and the dead. Thus, the senior Hamlet's plea to "Remember me" takes precedence over his injunction to revenge; traditional preoccupations of Hamlet criticism become secondary to the concern for spiritual community which Reformation doctrine threatened. The exegesis is scholarly and the prose is engaging, yet the book suffers from the new historicist tendency to become absorbed more with context than with criticism and to assume too readily the relevance of the context to the criticism. Put another way, Greenblatt, like other new historicists, is not always rigorous in his inferences.Greenblatt warns that his book "requires a certain hermeneutical patience, a willingness to suspend direct literary analysis, in order to examine more thoroughly what has been treated as mere background for the canonical work of art" (p. 5). Although the book culminates in a description of the migration of discarded religious ritual into the theater, and a thoughtful commentary on Hamlet, Greenblatt cautions that "... for the book to work properly, the reader should understand literary analysis, and specifically the analysis of Hamlet, to be suspended in another sense as well, that is, distributed in tiny, almost invisible particles throughout my account" (p. 5). Amen. The caveats are essential for anyone who might expect an "interpretation" of Hamlet. Rather, Greenblatt has evoked the conflict of enduring beliefs and Reformist critiques which animated Shakespeare's imagination and Hamlet's suffering.Hermeneutical patience certainly is demanded of the reader, because more than half of the book presents commentaries on the doctrine of Purgatory from the late Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. Greenblatt begins with Simon Fish's 1529 "Supplication for the Beggars," (p. 15) an anti-purgatorial (and anti-clerical) tract addressed to Henry VIII. Fish argued that the doctrine of Purgatory is at the heart of ecclesiastical corruption and is a danger to the state, because the fear that the doctrine can generate enables the clergy to extort enormous wealth in the form of "suffrages," donations for trentals, anniversary Masses, and other perpetual penitential memorials on behalf of the dead. Fish's argument is double: its theological burden is that Purgatory is a non-scriptural superstition; its rhetoric is that it is an abuse of the [End Page 364] poor and a danger to the economic solvency of the kingdom. Fish invokes both doctrinal error and political danger; this is thus an excellent tract to begin the elucidation of the complexity of Reformist objections to Purgatory in sixteenth-century England. Greenblatt adds that other Reformers saw Purgatory as a poetic creation, a fable, and therefore a vain imagining. John Donne's "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" is cited to show that post-Catholic divines believed that purgation must be completed in this life.According to Greenblatt, an unintended consequence for the laity of the rejection of Purgatory is the creation of a radical divide between the living and the dead. If we pray for the dead, they are not as absent from us as if they had passed on to the timeless worlds of Heaven or Hell. Even if Purgatory is expensive or fabulous, its loss destroys a community with the dead that involved a reciprocal and continuing relationship, whereby the living can aid the dead towards Heaven and saved souls can eventually become intercessors in Heaven for the living... (shrink)

Dieses Buch rekonstruiert erstmals die faszinierende Geschichte einer Reihe fiktiver Totengespräche, die zwischen 1729 und 1734 - anonym oder unter Pseudonym und sämtlich als Flugschriften veröffentlicht - in Deutschland erschienenen sind. Die Protagonisten dieser Gespräche gehören zu den berühmtesten Denkern der Frühaufklärung (u. a. Chr. Thomasius, A. H. Francke, J. Fr. Budde, N. H. Gundling) und Philosophen des 17. Jahrhunderts (Descartes, Leibniz, Bekker). In den fünf Jahren, in denen die Dialoge erschienen, lösten sie auf verschiedenen Feldern (philosophischen, theologischen, ökonomischen, persönlichen) (...) scharfe Kontroversen aus. Die Wechselbeziehungen zwischen allen Texten und häufig sogar ihre Existenz waren bisher jedoch völlig unbekannt. Die Arbeit weist die Zuordnung der untersuchten Dialoge zu einem einzigen, einheitlichen Korpus von Totengesprächen nach, rekonstruiert ihre Genese, interpretiert die in den Gesprächen inszenierten Kontroversen, widerlegt die - lange angenommene - Verfasserschaft des sächsischen Journalisten David Fassmann und versucht, dem Umfeld der Autoren anonymer philosophischer Flugschriften auf die Spur zu kommen. Die Integration von gewöhnlich getrennten Forschungsfeldern (clandestine Literatur, Anonymität, Flugpublizistik, philosophischer Dialog) und die Aufmerksamkeit für Kreise, die sich am Rande des universitären Establishments befanden, eröffnen neue Perspektiven auf die Debatten und Strömungen der deutschen Frühaufklärung. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ronald Shusterman IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM I One recent trend in criticism, starting notably widi die work of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels,1 has suggested diat literary theory is either useless, harmful, or bodi. This pragmatist line ofargument can be seen to go hand in hand widi contemporary attacks on the distinction between "high" and "low" art, claiming that a rap text deserves die same attention or esteem (...) as a poem by Eliot. My purposes here are predetermined by die polemical nature of this debate. I shall endeavor to show diat tiieory is useful and diat diere is a valid distinction between low and high. I intend to do so, somewhat negatively, notby giving examples—diough diis would be easy enough— but rather by underlining die contradictions inherent in some of these arguments. I shall also deal widi anodier debate, which may at first appear unrelated, concerning die limits of interpretation. I diink it can be noted that the criteria of judgment involved in distinguishing between high and low are connected to die criteria of interpretation which, though diey do not close die open work, do permit the identification of misreadings. If judgment involves refined analysis, then theory is necessary as an instrument of refinement. If misreadings exist, dien absolute interpretive relativism cannot be justified. One might expect me to begin by defining "literary tiieory," but one of my main points is that such a definition is futile. The dieoretical endeavor is myriad. The term theory can be fruitfully used to designate a wide continuum of discourses about literature diat range from pure explication to pure philosophy. I see no need to find a common denominator diat would bring togedier under a single description narratology, stylistics, deconstructionist criticism, and so on. Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 242-252 Ronald Shusterman243 Indeed, in dieir original attack on literary theory, Knapp and Michaels were careful to set aside the more "empirical" approaches such as narratology as not relevant to their criticisms (p. 11). Their basic complaint has to do widi theories of interpretation, and they conclude:... theory is nothing else but the attempt to escape practice... theory is notjust another name for practice. It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end. (p. 30) The point seems to be that criticism, as a practice, can and must be undertaken widiout die interference of a supposed realm of independent principles or axioms. That was ten years ago. Joel Weinsheimer has recently defended similar conclusions in an article entitled "Suppose Theory Is Dead."2 He invokes Gadamer to argue diat "understanding can and does succeed even widiout die imprimatur of theoretical self-consciousness" (p. 252). Weinsheimer refuses what he sees as the "first principle of the first theorist of literature: that only theory counts as knowledge" (p. 263). This, of course, echoes pragmatist philosophy's new emphasis on praxis as a valid form of knowledge: The kind of knowledge involved in acting or story-telling or teaching or practical criticism is practical knowledge, and if it cannot satisfactorily explain orjustify from principles what it practices, that is not its fault but its nature—even its particular significance.... Literature is to be practiced, is the practice of it, its own practice, and in this light at least theory is merely the self-defeating attempt to abstract literature from its presentations, from the concrete practice diat is itself. (Weinsheimer, p. 263) To those who would argue that any practice presupposes theoretical principles, Weinsheimer retorts that such presuppositions need not be considered as tiieory: "Interpretation supposes a form of life, perhaps, but a form of life is not a theory" (p. 255). I admit to being somewhat confused when he writes that practical criticism "involves tacit knowledge, certainly, but such knowledge is not necessarily dieoretical" (p. 255). I do not think diat what we do when 244Philosophy and Literature reading critically can be assimilated to what we do when, say, riding a bicycle... (shrink)

The idea of a ?dialogue with the dead? strikes us by turns as both impossible and intriguing. Yet, what can be really meant by it is far from clear. This essay attempts to explore this idea in the work of novelist W. G. Sebald. It examines the scope and the meaning of such an interchange in his works and connects this theme to his wider explorations of ?creaturely life.? It also links this particular dimension of Sebald's notion of ?creaturely? (...) or ?bare? life with some of the other major treatments of the same theme in recent literature and philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 405-414 [Access article in PDF] Nihilism in Seamus Heaney Irene Gilsenan Nordin I WISH TO BEGIN WITH THE WORDS of Nietzsche's madman as he makes his famous appearance, running into the crowded marketplace in the bright morning with his lit lantern in his hand, crying out his proclamation of the death of God: "'Where has God gone?' he [cries]. 'I shall tell you. We (...) have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers.'" He calls out in despair to the bemused and indifferent crowd his rhetorical questions: How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? 1These words of the madman express the abyss of despair experienced on the realization that God is dead, the state of desolation which articulates what Nietzsche himself understood to be the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment. But these words of despair sum up more than that; they sum up the underlying problems of Nietzsche's age, and indeed our age: the basic mistrust of all previously held systems of value; the collapse of all ordering principle; and the erosion of the authority of tradition. In other words, reason has revealed the inadequacy of tradition, and has itself lost the ability to provide us with [End Page 405] any reliable means of evaluation—since any such evaluation must be based on the very principles which are themselves under attack.This stark realization of the absence of all sense of meaning in values previously held to be true leads to the condition that Nietzsche calls "nihilism," (Latin nihil, "nothing"), the condition that he considered to be the central problem of Modernity. This condition, Nietzsche believed, is brought about by the realization of three factors: first, the loss of faith in what he calls a "'meaning' in all events," a loss which contributes to an experience of aimlessness; second, the realization that there is no inherent pattern to the world or to history that can lend universal coherence; and third, the loss of faith in the existence of a stable world of being which can be evaluated according to steadfast, enduring principles. The rejection of these three categories, which Nietzsche terms "aim," "unity," and "being," leads to an experience of a world that appears "valueless," in other words, the experience of nihilism. 2Nietzsche, whose thought was considered by Heidegger to be the "final thought of Western metaphysics," 3 is seen as a heralding voice of postmodernism. 4 In this respect, Nietzsche's "death of God" can be seen to be about the death of modernist philosophical presuppositions, the death of the logocentric metaphysics of presence. But, parallel with the notion of crisis that Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God expresses and the ensuing critique of "metanarratives" which his thought has helped to give rise to, 5 Nietzsche's declaration of crisis can also be seen as a statement of faith. His interpretation of the problems of our age, while on the one hand "negatively" proclaiming the death of God and denying the possibility of shared meaning—or in Lyotard's terms "the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable" (p. 81), can, on the other hand, be viewed in a more "positive" light. The term "nihilism" itself, as Nietzsche has shown us, is ambiguous, comprising both the concepts of what he termed "active nihilism" and "passive nihilism," which involves a complex interplay between the dual forces of affirmation and negation (WP, p. 22).As the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, points out, the most general distinction between these forces can be seen in terms of "strength of spirit," where nihilism is considered as both "a sign (Zeichen) of the strengthened power... (shrink)

The drama “Ressurection of the dead people”, written by the famous Orthodox hierarch saint Georgiy (Konys’kyj), presents the well-known monument of the old Ukrainian didactic literature. Even nowadays its impressive religious and ethical basis demands attention, popularization and further exploration.The aim of the article is pointing out the central moral and theological ideas of this work and making analysis of them.Georgiy (Konys’kyj’s) drama is connected with the biblical texts (with the evangelic parables of the Wheat and the Tares, of (...) the Sower and of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in particular). This connection is regular and strong enough. At the same time, the author uses some corresponding ethical senses, elements of subject line and images more or less creatively. As a result, his literary work can be interpreted as a perceptibly original one.As well as the Holy Writ and the Sacred Tradition of Church, the drama “Resurrection of the dead people” underlines the value of the different Christian virtues. Among them we find the diligence, the mercy, the making of peace, the gratefulness, the relying upon God’s Providence, the patience, the humility, the understanding of the eternal values priority, etc. Being a preacher of virtues, Ukrainian dramatist preaches down the numerous vices and sins. According to his ethical position, our struggle against the evil should be as righteous and legal as it possible.In spite of some loss of conformity to the moral theology in one episode, on the whole the drama by Georgiy (Konys’kyj) must be regarded as a successful artistic embodiment of the important ideas of the Christian ethics. (shrink)

The discovery at Zincirli of an inscribed stele belonging to Katumuwa, servant of Panamuwa, touches upon several longstanding issues concerning the meaning of the word nbš. Although the inscription was dedicated during the lifetime of Katumuwa, the continued provision of his “nbš that is in this stele” raises questions regarding not only the term’s nuance within a postmortem context, but also the nature of feeding the dead. These issues can be addressed by carefully examining the manner by which the (...) term’s abstract and substantive forms relate to concepts of identity. The analysis of Katumuwa’s stele along with a new interpretation of Hos. 9:4 will show that nbš/נֶפֶשׁ is a ritually centered object that marks identity. In other words, postmortem identity is reified in the nbš /נֶפֶשׁ through ritual actions that include feeding the dead. This interpretation sheds new light on the substantive meaning of nbš/נֶפֶשׁ in inscriptions and in biblical literature, where the term signifies either a stele or a corpse. (shrink)

Past anatomical dissection practice has received recent attention in the humanities and social science literature, especially in a number of popular format books. In these works, past ethically dubious dissection practices are again revisited, including stealing the dead for dissection. There are extremely simple, yet very important, lessons to be had in these analyses, including: do not exploit the dead and treat the dead with dignity, respect, and reverence. In this paper, we highlight that these principles apply (...) not just to anatomists but to all parties concerned with bodies for dissection, including journalists and authors from the humanities writing on anatomical dissection whether in the historical or modern-day context. Not too infrequently these same authors/publishers resort to sensationalist language in titles, text, and/or promotion blurbs in a bid to grab attention and sell books. These actions, yet again, exploit dissection subjects for commercial purposes. The use of insensitive and sensationalist language that is designed to shock, fails to set good precedent for young impressionable students and paints an entirely backward picture of modern-day anatomy for intending or existing donors and their families. We suggest that all who participate in anatomical endeavours should strive to do so with reverence toward the dead, including armchair journalists and humanities authors who, just like their hands-on anatomical colleagues, should employ dignified, sensitive, and respectful language that is not sensationalist. (shrink)