continent. 1.4 (2011): 240—241. “Pirogenetico, Pirogenetico”, 2009 Installation composée de deux tables en métal et trois blocs d’obsidienne et leur moulages. © Coll.Centre Pompidou / Distr. RMN I'm not so sure that art is so ambiguous. I just think it's not linguistic. It's more full and complex than language— we can experience it but not explain it. —Jimmie Durham(1) Jimmie Duraham is an American artist of Cherokee descent. He’s a visual artist and a political activist for the American Indian Movement. (...) Pirogenetico pirogenetico (2009) was recently installed at the Centre Pompidou as part of their “New Presentation of the Contemporary Collections.” His work is replete with wild ideas shaped by a sage, unpretentious impulse and an automatic responsibility to history, particularly his own Cherokee history. Confident from instability, and free from pedagogical language, he strings form and words together that sharply pierce the atmosphere of ideology. Durham doesn’t follow a line and he doesn’t depend on the scaffold of language, but the work makes a remarkable point. Pirogenetico, pirogenetico is a collection of three obsidian rocks, cut and then cast as a double in German silver. Each threesome sits on its own low metal table, forming a diptych. The cut of the original follows the shattering nature of obsidian, which Durham undercuts and monumentalizes in the double. The derivative double and its mannered original: they are nearly too beautiful but still can’t deny the violence. If Durham’s irony, his edge, is obscured by the volume of his forms, it’s reactivated in a video on the adjacent wall where the obsidian cuts through a heart organ. Durham’s syntax is spare. He knows that language isn’t big enough to tell the story, reminding us, as Lacan stated, “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth... because saying it all is impossible: words fail.”(2) In place of language Durham uses an alternative accuracy that compounds history with the present, a mashup of material things, a collision of aesthetics that shakes down conventional wisdom, replacing it with searing poetry. NOTES (1) Heyokamagazine. “ Jimmie Durham: The Pursuit of Happiness .” (2) Lacan, Jacques. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment . Ed. Joan Copjec. Trans. Dennis Hollier, Rosalind Kraus, and Annette Michelson. (New York: Norton, 1990). p. 18. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how literary andphilosophical thinking can converge in experience of a literary work. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, in Truth, Fiction, and Literature,dispute this possibility, and this discussion responds to their view, withparticular attention to their account of thematic interpretation. Thematicinterpretation is presented here as involving thought about the reasonsbehind a work’s use of its content and other features. Those reasons havean implicit generality that allows us to move from literary specificity togeneral, philosophically significant (...) thought. Philosophy’s need for thekind of thinking supported by literature, exploring pa. (shrink)

Conversations in Metaphysics: Ever Ancient, Ever New introduces students to metaphysics through a set of contemporary readings based on classical metaphysical texts, thinkers, and concepts. It challenges readers to consider and seek possible answers to questions of metaphysics relative to human knowledge and the nature of reality. Organized historically, the readings endeavor to define and probe the concepts of metaphysics, existence, being, God, evil, and morality from antiquity to the present. The historical lens provides students with deeper context for the (...) contemporary readings and helps them establish a basic knowledge of metaphysics and its place within philosophical tradition. In later readings, students are invited to explore how metaphysics relates to religion, science, and technology in the modern world, as well as how metaphysics has shaped and continues to shape the reality of our universe. Rich with engaging material and endless opportunities for critical thought, Conversations in Metaphysics is an ideal ancillary text for courses in philosophy that call attention to metaphysics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control.

Catholic employers and employees have been under increasing attack in the last fifty years by a growing number of public policy encroachments in the workplace that are in direct conflict with their religious convictions. In some instances, these threats have been successfully parried. Others remain a source of serious conflict. This article will summarize highlights of the last fifty years of public policy and jurisprudence as they relate to the ability of Catholic institutions to practice and enforce non-negotiable Catholic moral (...) doctrines. (shrink)

This book draws on transpersonal anthropology and psychology in order to explore mild altered states of consciousness (ASCs) experienced in everyday life. While research into consciousness and particularly ASCs is growing, this book focuses on a neglected area: ‘everyday’ experiences of ASCs. Opening with an up-to-date overview of the development of the study of ASCs, the author presents an in-depth empirical exploration and mapping of mild ASCs. Dr Sheppard examines original research conducted in a range of religious and secular contexts (...) with participants who were engaged in activities including prayer, sport, nature conservation, music and musical instrument making, and TV viewing. The author takes a novel phenomenological approach to the analysis of ASCs, emphasising the subjective experience. The book explores the healing potential of such mild ASCs; the everyday fantasy reality of the interior landscape; and discusses the problem of validity, and belief in the study of ASCs. It will appeal to students and scholars of transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, social anthropology, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen propose to define constitutive essence in terms of ground-theoretic notions and some form of consequential essence. But we think that the Fine–Rosen proposal is a mistake. On the Fine–Rosen proposal, constitutive essence ends up including properties that, on the central notion of essence (what Fine calls ‘the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity’), are necessary but not essential. This is because consequential essence is (roughly) closed under logical consequence, (...) and the ability of logical consequence to add properties to an object’s consequential essence outstrips the ability of ground-theoretic notions, as used in the Fine–Rosen proposal, to take those properties out. The necessary-but-not-essential properties that, on the Fine–Rosen proposal, end up in constitutive essence include the sorts of necessary-but-not-essential properties that, others have noted, end up in consequential essence. (shrink)

Eileen C. Sweeney. gap between what faith believes and what reason understands, is also expressed in the attempt to think “that than which none greater can be thought.” For to think it is to reach God via a single, long extension of the mind ...

ABSTRACT In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political crises, especially in the United States. In a personal narrative that is both arch and absolutely serious, I reveal how a woman-empowering vision of a healthy global body politic can be (...) teased out of Hobbes's political thought and used to combat the fatalistic view of humanity's inevitable descent into a chaotic state of nature during times of crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Heidegger's history of hermeneutics discovered nothing more than a “diluted” understanding of hermeneutics in Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In contrast, Gadamer's and Ricoeur's histories of hermeneutics placed little or no emphasis on the premodern period, focusing instead on the rise of the “hermeneutic problem” in Schleiermacher's work and the development of that problematic in works by Dilthey and Heidegger. Ricoeur added Gadamer to that list, recognizing that Gadamer was instrumental in the way he had received and perceived the problem in question. (...) Charles R. Bambach argues that it was, in fact, Karl Barth's “crisis theology” that had inspired Heidegger's “destructive” alternative to the conventional view of historical research. He revealed that he had followed Hegel when writing his history of hermeneutics, noting that his decision to do so had consequences for the way he depicted the rise of hermeneutics; and the way his history of hermeneutics ended. (shrink)

Freud’s formal work on mourning would indicate that in order to be successful at it you must detach from your cathexis to the loved object; yet he said to the poet Hilda Doolittle that he remembered the last war year very well, as that year he lost his favourite daughter, Sophie, to the Spanish flu epidemic, but that, in fact, she was not lost. ‘“She is here”, he said, and he showed me a tiny locket he wore, fastened to his (...) watch chain’.The ‘blameless physician’ did not want to let go of Sophie and would have held a photograph in his hand many times every day as he checked the time, closed the locket, put it back into his pocket. This article investigates a social media site as that contemporary ‘pocket’ in which we might place a cherished photograph, thus the tension between the durational time of the artefact and the time-in-motion of the networked image. (shrink)

Prenatal alcohol exposure interferes with neurodevelopment. The brain is particularly susceptible to the adverse consequences of prenatal alcohol exposure, and numerous studies have documented changes to brain anatomy and function, as well as consequences for cognition, behavior, and mental health. Studies in typically developing individuals have shown that the brain undergoes dynamic developmental processes over an individual’s lifespan. Furthermore, magnetic resonance imaging studies in other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders have shown that their developmental trajectories differ from the typical pattern. Therefore, (...) to understand long-term clinical outcomes of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, it is necessary to investigate changes in neurodevelopmental trajectories in this population. Here we review studies that have used MRI to evaluate changes in brain structure and function over time via cross-sectional or longitudinal methods in individuals with PAE. Research demonstrates that individuals with PAE have atypical cortical and white matter microstructural developmental trajectories through childhood and adolescence. More research is needed to understand how factors such as sex and postnatal experiences may further mediate these trajectories. Furthermore, nothing is known about the trajectories beyond young adulthood. (shrink)

This essay concerns the authors’ translation of the debate between the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei in 1611–1612, published as On Sunspots by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. In offering an account of their experience as translators, and of the intellectual aims and unforeseen complications of this project, they have focused on two particular issues. The first is that of the asymmetrical linguistic environment of this epistolary exchange: Galileo’s Tuscan was accessible and congenial to his patron (...) and primary audience but not to his German rival, who was forced to rely on translations and to respond in the more cumbersome idiom of scholarly Latin. The second concern lay with the often problematic translation of the solar images themselves, central to this debate, from various media to print. Here they encountered both the subterfuges of the protagonists and the fiscal concerns, understandable and ultimately manageable, of their own publisher. (shrink)

Of those who have tried to establish the connection between hermeneutics and phenomenology, two stand out: Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur. In Being and Time, Heidegger famously declared that phenomenology is a hermeneutic, though not in the sense of an epistemological theory of interpretation. In From Text to Action, Ricoeur set out to show how it is possible for hermeneutics and phenomenology to have a relationship of “mutual belonging”. This chapter examines four programmatic statements on the relationship: two versions offered (...) by Heidegger in the 1920s and two versions offered by Ricoeur, one in the late 1960s and the other in the mid‐1980s. Attention is drawn both to the evolution of Heidegger's and Ricoeur's thinking on the subject and to the ways in which the various accounts differ from one another. (shrink)

Hartry Field’s epistemological challenge to the mathematical platonist is often cast as an improvement on Paul Benacerraf’s original epistemological challenge. I disagree. While Field’s challenge is more difficult for the platonist to address than Benacerraf’s, I argue that this is because Field’s version is a special case of what I call the ‘sociological challenge’. The sociological challenge applies equally to platonists and fictionalists, and addressing it requires a serious examination of mathematical practice. I argue that the non-sociological part of Field’s (...) challenge amounts to a minor reformulation of Benacerraf’s original challenge. So, I contend, Field’s challenge is not an improvement on Benacerraf’s. What is new to Field’s challenge is as much a problem for the fictionalist as it is for the platonist. (shrink)

This paper takes meals, rather than food itself, as its focus. Meals incorporate the project of nutrition into human life, but it is a contingent matter that we nourish ourselves in this way. This paper defends the importance of meals as meaning-makers and contrasts them with art in that regard. Meals and art represent interestingly different extremes with respect to how needs for meaning are met. Artworks ask for coordination of experience, understanding and appreciation: the meaning of art is to (...) be experienced. The meaning of meals is enacted and accumulates collectively, but need not be experienced. (shrink)

In this study, we argue that contemporary nursing care has been overtaken by new public management strategies aimed at curtailing budgets in the public hospital sector in Australia. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 15 nurses from one public acute hospital with supporting documentary evidence, we demonstrate what happens to nursing work when management imposesroundingas a risk reduction strategy. In the case study outlined rounding was introduced across all wards in response to missed care, which in turn arose as a result (...) of work intensification produced by efficiency, productivity, effectiveness and accountability demands. Rounding is a commercially sponsored practice consistent with new public management. Our study illustrates the impact that new public management strategies such as rounding have on how nurses work, both in terms of work intensity and in who controls their labour. (shrink)

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in American newspapers from 1800 to 1869. Wollstonecraft was portrayed to the American public as a philosopher of women's rights, a new model of femininity, and a pioneer of women's political activism. Although these iconic uses of Wollstonecraft were regularly negative, they grew more positive as the women's rights movement gained steam alongside the abolition movement.

The role of reading in educating a future writer is discussed through study of memoirs by writers including Janet Frame, James Baldwin, and Eudora Welty. The memoirs show reading books to have been a transformative way of melding forms of experience. The following features of childhood reading are examined: (1) the role of the physical book, (2) the cognitive-aesthetic-affective impact of letters, words and ‘voices’, (3) the partially unplanned and challenging path of children’s exposure to texts, and (4) absorption of (...) models that can be imitated and outgrown. The discussion links sympathetically to views in philosophy of education about the importance of content and beauty and of influences whose impact cannot be planned, measured or captured as generic skills. The autobiographical evidence considered here suggests that these influences can nonetheless be crucial to expanding learners’ horizons and stimulating their educational and artistic progress. (shrink)