Concept definitions applicable to human and non-human animals should be usable for both. Awareness is a state during which concepts of environment, self, and self in relation to environment result from complex brain analysis of sensory stimuli or constructs based on memory. There are several proposed categories of awareness. The widespread usage of the term conscious is 'not unconscious' so a conscious individual is an individual that has the capability to perceive and respond to sensory stimuli. It is confusing and (...) scientifically undesirable if conscious is also used to mean aware. Hence it is proposed that conscious should be used only as above. Fully functioning and adequately developed humans and members of many other animal species are sentient. Sentience means having the capacity, the level of awareness and cognitive ability, necessary to have feelings. The welfare of an individual is its state as regards its attempts to cope with its environment. This includes feelings, which are important coping mechanisms, and health. Since feelings involve awareness, there is overlap between welfare assessment and awareness assessment. Methods for assessing awareness, consciousness, sentience, and welfare and links to morality are briefly discussed. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn (...) investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

The claim that faith is creative of its objects resides primarily in the conviction that the richness of the life of faith demands that it shall be subject only to its own laws. Its very diversity of expression is indication that it should not be fettered or confined by a restrictive model that outlaws the marvellously unexpected quality of its explorations. Yet that metaphor itself suggests caution; for exploration is necessarily of a territory that the explorer does not bring into (...) being by his voyage or journey. His travels have their own richness; thus Shackleton's famous boat journey has its place in the records of human endurance. But travel assumes a ground to be traversed, and the journey of Ernest Shackleton and the men who sailed with him was not conjured out of nothing, but an achievement made necessary as response to a situation that was itself in no sense of the explorer's contriving. Yet of course we are impatient with the suggestion that it was a mere, largely passive reaction to natural emergency, and only marginally regarded as humanly creative. (shrink)

In _The Body in Late-Capitalist USA_, Donald M. Lowe explores the varied social practices that code and construct the body. Arguing that our bodily lives are shaped by a complex of daily and ongoing practices—how we work, what we buy and consume—Lowe contends that as a result of the commodification of these and other social practices in the late-twentieth century, what we often understand to be the needs of the body are in fact means for capital accumulation. Moving beyond (...) studies of representations and images of the body, Lowe focuses on the intersection of body practices, language, and the Social to describe concretely the reality of a lived body. His strongly synthetic work brings together Marxist critique, semiotics, Foucaultian discourse analysis, and systems and communications theory to examine those practices that construct the body under late capitalism: habits of work and consumption, the ways we give birth and raise children, socialization, mental and physical healing, reconstructions and contestations of sexuality and gender. Lowe draws upon a wide range of sources, including government and labor studies and statistics, diagnostic and statistical manuals on mental illness, computer manuals, self-help books, and guides to work-related stress disorders, to illustrate the transformation of the body into a nexus of exchange value in postmodern society. (shrink)

Drawing on convergent work in a broad range of disciplines, this article uses the tipping point paradigm to frame a new account of how early human ancestors may have first broken free from, as Bickerton calls it, the “prison of animal communication.” Under building pressure for an enhanced signaling system capable of supporting joint attentional-intentional activities, a cultural tradition of disambiguated indexical pointing (a finger point disambiguated by a facial expression, vocalization, or other gesture), combined with increasingly sophisticated mindreading circuitry (...) and prosocial tendencies, may have sparked the first in the series of biocultural explosions that led from a simple protolanguage to fully modern human language. This account successfully integrates at least ten other competing hypotheses, and is shown to pass nine important tests that have been proposed for language origin scenarios of its type. (shrink)