This article puts forth a theory and history of the experiential moment of romance, traced from Homer’s Odyssey to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Differing from other forms of the moment that have been bequeathed by Western tradition—such as kairos, conversio, the Aristotelian pair peripeteia and anagnorisis, or the Romantic Augenblick—the experiential moment foregrounds experientiality within a self-enclosed and atelic temporality: a time that goes nowhere. Building on previous theories of epic and romance that see them as conflicting temporal forms, the first part (...) of the article demonstrates how the experiential moment in traditional romance always exists in tension with the temporality of the epic project of the collective. The second part proposes a new reading of Rousseau by showing how his three works, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Les Confessions, and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire not only continue this conflict into the modern period but also begin to reverse the old hierarchical relationship between epic and romance or the temporality of the collective and that of the experiencing individual in her individual consciousness. It is argued that Rousseau in his final work the Rêveries strives to liberate the experiential moment from epic temporality altogether and thereby lays the foundation for a wholly new way of approaching the moment in literary modernity. (shrink)

In this paper I explore health and illness through the lens of enactivism, which is understood and developed as a bodily-based worldly-engaged phenomenology. Various health theories – biomedical, ability-based, biopsychosocial – are introduced and scrutinized from the point of view of enactivism and phenomenology. Health is ultimately argued to consist in a central world-disclosing aspect of what is called existential feelings, experienced by way of transparency and ease in carrying out important life projects. Health, in such a phenomenologically enacted understanding, (...) is an important and in many cases necessary part of leading a good life. Illness, on the other hand, by such a phenomenological view, consist in finding oneself at mercy of unhomelike existential feelings, such as bodily pains, nausea, extreme unmotivated tiredness, depression, chronic anxiety and delusion, which make it harder and, in some cases, impossible to flourish. In illness suffering the lived body hurts, resists, or, in other ways, alienates the activities of the ill person. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to analyse the experience of embodiment in illness. Drawing upon Heidegger' sphenomenology and the suggestion that illness can be understood as unhomelike being-in-the-world, I try to show how the way we live our own bodies in illness is experienced precisely as unhomelike. The body is alien, yet, at the same time, myself. It involves biological processes beyond my control, but these processes still belong to me as lived by me. This a priori otherness of the (...) body presents itself in illness in an uncanny and merciless way. The unhomelike breakdown of our everyday being-in-the-world suffered in illness is explored through Heidegger's notion of the world being a “totality of relevance”, a pattern of meaning played out between different “tools”. The lived body is compared to a broken tool that alters and obstruct sour way of being “thrown” and “projecting” ourselves in the meaning patterns of the world through feelings,thoughts and actions. The similarities and differences between this unhomelikeness of illness and the specific unhomelikeness of authentic understanding,reached according to Heidegger in existential anxiety,are discussed. In order to illustrate how the lived body can present itself as “broken” and “other” to its owner, and in what way this unhomelike experience calls for help from health-care professionals, I make use of a clinical example of a severe and common disease: stroke. (shrink)

This book brings phenomenology, the main player in the continental tradition of philosophy, to bioethics. Medical science and emerging technologies are examined as endeavours that bring enormous possibilities in relieving human suffering but also great risks in transforming our fundamental life views.

We introduce generalized quantifiers, as defined in Tarskian semantics by Mostowski and Lindström, in logics whose semantics is based on teams instead of assignments, e.g., IF-logic and Dependence logic. Both the monotone and the non-monotone case is considered. It is argued that to handle quantifier scope dependencies of generalized quantifiers in a satisfying way the dependence atom in Dependence logic is not well suited and that the multivalued dependence atom is a better choice. This atom is in fact definably equivalent (...) to the independence atom recently introduced by Väänänen and Grädel. (shrink)

Objectification is a real problem in medicine that can lead to bad medical practice or, in the worst case, dehumanization of the patient. Nevertheless, objectification also plays a major and necessary role in medicine: the patient’s body should be viewed as a biological organism in order to find diseases and be able to cure them. Listening to the patient’s illness story should not be replaced, but, indeed, developed by the physical examination of his body searching for the causes of his (...) complaints. Whereas phenomenologists have so far mainly been identifying the back sides of objectification in medicine, in this paper the aim is to analyze differences between detrimental objectifications and objectifications that do not deprive the patient of his subjectivity but, rather, at least in some cases, may lead the patient to feel more at home with his body. (shrink)

Fredrik Svenaeus' book is a delight to read. Not only does he exhibit keen understanding of a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, but he manages to bring them together in an innovative manner that convincingly demonstrates how deeply these two significant fields can be and, in the end, must be mutually enlightening. Medicine, Svenaeus suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, (...) on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine. Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, Vanderbilt University. (shrink)

Debates about the legitimacy of embryonic stem-cell research have largely focused on the type of ethical value that should be accorded to the human embryo in␣vitro. In this paper, I try to show that, to broaden the scope of these debates, one needs to articulate an ontology that does not limit itself to biological accounts, but that instead focuses on the embryo’s place in a totality of relevance surrounding and guiding a human practice. Instead of attempting to substantiate the ethical (...) value of the embryo exclusively by pointing out that it has potentiality for personhood, one should examine the types of practices in which the embryo occurs and focus on the ends inherent to these practices. With this emphasis on context, it becomes apparent that the embryo’s ethical significance can only be understood by elucidating the attitudes that are established towards it in the course of specific activities. The distinction between fertilized embryos and cloned embryos proves to be important in this contextual analysis, since, from the point of view of practice, the two types of embryos appear to belong to different human practices: (assisted) procreation and medical research, respectively. In my arguments, I highlight the concepts of practice, technology, and nature, as they have been analyzed in the phenomenological tradition, particularly by Martin Heidegger. I come to the conclusion that therapeutic cloning should be allowed, provided that it turns out to be a project that benefits medical science in its aim to battle diseases. Important precautions have to be taken, however, in order to safeguard the practice of procreation from becoming perverted by the aims and attitudes of medical science when the two practices intersect. The threat in question needs to be taken seriously, since it concerns the structure and goal of practices which are central to our very self understanding as human beings. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thoughts on modern technology have received much attention in many disciplines and fields, but, with a few exceptions, the influence has been sparse in biomedical ethics. The reason for this might be that Heidegger’s position has been misinterpreted as being generally hostile towards modern science and technology, and the fact that Heidegger himself never subjected medical technologies to scrutiny but was concerned rather with industrial technology and information technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s philosophy of modern technology is introduced and (...) then brought to bear on medical technology. Its main relevance for biomedical ethics is found to be that the field needs to focus upon epistemological and ontological questions in the philosophy of medicine related to the structure and goal of medical practice. Heidegger’s philosophy can help us to see how the scientific attitude in medicine must always be balanced by and integrated into a phenomenological way of understanding the life-world concerns of patients. The difference between the scientific and the phenomenological method in medicine is articulated by Heidegger as two different ways of studying the human body: as biological organism and as lived body. Medicine needs to acknowledge the priority of the lived body in addressing health as a way of being-in-the-world and not as the absence of disease only. A critical development of Heidegger’s position can provide us with a criterion for distinguishing the uses of medical technologies that are compatible with such an endeavor from the technological projects that are not. (shrink)

This paper explores the process of aging from a phenomenological perspective. Supplementing the model of becoming old found in Simone de Beauvoir’s work with a phenomenology of human suffering and flourishing, it asks whether it is possible to lead a good life in the process of becoming old. Is it possible to flourish while experiencing bodily waning? Is it possible to flourish while experiencing the shrinking of one’s everyday world and the passing away of close others? Aging, at least in (...) its protracted phases, appears to become full of suffering rather than flourishing. What are the prospects of finding meaningful life projects despite old age? By making use of insight found in Heidegger and other phenomenologists the paper tries to develop a slightly different view on aging than the one found in Beauvoir, stressing the importance of embodied experiences and life choices, which not only depend upon societal oppression and being objectified by others, but also upon processes of nature and the possibilities of an intergenerational intersubjectivity. Resources for this project is found in the philosophy of affectivity developed by Heidegger and other phenomenologists of facticity, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

According to linguistic conventionalism, necessities are to be explained in terms of the conventionally adopted rules that govern the use of linguistic expressions. A number of influential arguments against this view concerns the ‘Truth-Contrast Thesis’. This is the claim that necessary truths are fundamentally different from contingent ones since they are not made true by ‘the facts’. Instead, they are supposed to be something like ‘true in virtue of meaning’. This thesis is widely held to be a core commitment of (...) the conventionalist position, and the view is frequently rejected on the grounds that this thesis is untenable. I argue that this line of reasoning is mistaken. While the thesis should be rejected, it is not, I argue, entailed by linguistic conventionalism – nor was it invariably accepted by the paradigmatic conventionalists. (shrink)

This article develops a phenomenology of suffering with an emphasis on matters relevant to medical practice and bioethics. An attempt is made to explain how suffering can involve many different things—bodily pains, inability to carry out everyday actions, and failure to realize core life values—and yet be a distinct phenomenon. Proceeding from and expanding upon analyses found in the works of Eric Cassell and Elaine Scarry, suffering is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her (...) in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about my embodiment, my engagements in the world together with others, and my core life values. Suffering is in essence a feeling , but as such, it has implications for and involves the person’s entire life: how she acts in the world, communicates with others, and understands and looks upon her priorities and goals in life. Suffering-moods are typically intense and painful in nature, but they may also display a rather subconscious quality in presenting things in the world and my life as a whole in an alienating way. In such situations, we are not focused directly upon the suffering-mood—as in the cases of pain and other bodily ailments—but rather, upon the things that the mood presents to us: not only our bodies, but also other things in the world that prevent us from having a good life and being the persons we want to be. Such suffering may in many cases be transformed or at least mitigated by a person’s identifying and changing her core life values and in such a manner reinterpreting her life story to become an easier and more rewarding one to live under the present circumstances. (shrink)

In discussions of Fitch’s paradox, it is usually assumed without further argument that knowledge is factive, that if a subject knows that p, then p is true. It is argued that this common assumption is not as well-founded as it should be, and that there in fact are certain reasons to be suspicious of the unrestricted version of the factiveness claim. There are two kinds of reason for this suspicion. One is that unrestricted factiveness leads to paradoxes and unexpected results, (...) the other is that the usual arguments for factiveness are not as compelling as is commonly thought. There may in fact be some kinds of contexts, where factiveness doesn’t hold for knowledge—the usual arguments for factiveness don’t suffice to support the claim that knowledge is unrestrictedly factive. Perhaps all that can be shown is that knowledge is at times factive, or that it is default factive, as it were: this doesn’t show that there can’t be counterexamples, however. Certain aspects of knowledge without unrestricted factiveness are examined briefly. (shrink)

In this theoretical and explorative essay, two issues are discussed, which are based on personal experiences of teaching ethics. The first is what educational purpose does it serve to challenge students as ethical subjects while teaching a class? This issue is mainly discussed through an analysis of Gert Biesta’s works. He argues that an essential purpose for teachers is to enable students to appear as subjects. For this to happen, the teacher must “interrupt” the students by presenting that which challenges (...) his or her basic ethical preconceptions, which in turn forces the student to choose as a subject. However, if the teacher gives priority to such interruptions, s/he risks a conflict with his or her students. That gives rise to the second issue raised in the essay, whether the teacher should express his or her ethical perspectives while teaching ethics. The issue is discussed by analyzing Bruno Latour’s political philosophy. He argues that conflict is an essential feature in any democratic society where everyone’s concerns are presented. For that reason, he argues for the need of public “diplomats,” whose function is to enable an endeavor for peace. As diplomats, both their ethical agency and ability to judge what is worth highlighting is recognized. Thus, the essay concludes that a diplomatic teacher is someone who has the judgement to decide whether his or her ethical perspectives should be highlighted while teaching a class, or if it would disrupt an endeavor for peace. (shrink)

The paper presents an account of suffering as a multi-level phenomenon based on concepts such as mood, being-in-the-world and core life value. This phenomenological account will better allow us to evaluate the hardships associated with dying and thereby assist health care professionals in helping persons to die in the best possible manner. Suffering consists not only in physical pain but in being unable to do basic things that are considered to bestow meaning on one’s life. The suffering can also be (...) related to no longer being able to be the person one wants to be in the eyes of others, to losing one’s dignity and identity. These three types of suffering become articulated by a narrative that holds together and bestows meaning on the whole life and identity of the dying person. In the encounter with the patient, the health-care professional attempts to understand the suffering-experience of the patient in an empathic and dialogic manner, in addition to exploring what has gone wrong in the patient’s body. Matters of physician assisted suicide and/or euthanasia—if it should be legalized and if so under which conditions—need to be addressed by understanding the different levels of human suffering and its positive counterpart, human flourishing, rather than stressing the respect for patient autonomy and no-harm principles, only. In this phenomenological analysis the notions of vulnerability and togetherness, ultimately connecting to the political-philosophical issues of how we live together and take care of each other in a community, need to be scrutinized. (shrink)

A large slice of contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to developing an account of health and illness that proceeds from the first-person perspective when attempting to understand the ill person in contrast and connection to the third-person perspective on his/her diseased body. A proof that this phenomenological account of health and illness, represented by philosophers, such as Drew Leder, Kay Toombs, Havi Carel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kevin Aho, and Fredrik Svenaeus, is becoming increasingly influential in philosophy of medicine (...) and medical ethics is the criticism of it that has been voiced in some recent studies. In this article, two such critical contributions, proceeding from radically different premises and backgrounds, are discussed: Jonathan Sholl’s naturalistic critique and Talia Welsh’s Nietzschean critique. The aim is to defend the phenomenological account and clear up misunderstandings about what it amounts to and what we should be able to expect from it. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the questions of how and to what extent new antidepressants (selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs) could possibly affect the self. I do this by way of a phenomenological approach, using the works of Martin Heidegger and Thomas Fuchs to analyze the roles of attunement and embodiment in normal and abnormal ways of being-in-the-world. The nature of depression and anxiety disorders — the diagnoses for which treatment with antidepressants is most commonly indicated — is also explored (...) by way of this phenomenological approach, as are the basic structures of self-being. Special attention is paid in the analysis to the moods of boredom, anxiety and grief, since they play fundamental roles in depression and anxiety disorders and since their intensity and frequency appear to be modulated by antidepressants. My conclusion is that the effect of these drugs on the self can be thought of in terms of changes in self-feeling, or, more precisely, self-vibration of embodiment. I present the idea of a spectrum of bodily resonance, which extends from the normal resonance of the lived body, in which the body is able to pick up a wide range of different moods; continuing over various kinds of sensitivities, preferences and idiosyncrasies, in which certain moods are favored over others; to cases that we unreservedly label pathologies, in which the body is severely out of tune, or even devoid of tune and thus useless as a tool of resonance. Different cultures and societies favor slightly differently attuned self-styles as paradigmatic of the normal and good life, and the popularity of the SSRIs can therefore be explained, not only by defects of embodiment, but also by the presence of certain cultural norms in our contemporary society. (shrink)

The relevance of the Aristotelian concept ofphronesis – practical wisdom – for medicine and medical ethics has been much debated during the last two decades. This paper attempts to show how Aristotle’s practical philosophy was of central importance toHans-Georg Gadamer and to the development of his philosophical hermeneutics, and how,accordingly, the concept of phronesiswill be central to a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine. If medical practice is conceived of as an interpretative meeting between doctor and patient with the aim of restoring (...) the health of the latter, then phronesis is the mark of the good physician, who through interpretation comes to know the best thing todo for this particular patient at this particular time. The potential fruitfulness of this hermeneutical appropriation of phronesis for the field of medical ethics is also discussed. The concept can be (and has been) used in critiques of the conceptualization of bioethics as the application of principle-based theory to clinical situations, since Aristotle’s point is exactly that problems of praxis cannot be approached in this way. It can also point theway for alternative forms of medical ethics, such as virtue ethics or a phenomenological andhermeneutical ethics. The latter alternative would have to address the phenomena of healthand the good life as issues for medical practice. It would also have to map out in detail the terrain of the medical meeting and the acts of interpretation through which phronesis is exercised. (shrink)

This article offers a new account of the moral substance of shame. Through careful reflection on the motives and intentional structure of shame, I defend the claim that shame is an egocentric and morally blind emotion. I argue that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our ability to sense how we appear to others. What makes shame egocentric is that in shame we are essentially concerned about our own social worth and pained by the (...) perception of our self as socially worthless. In itself, shame entails no morally pertinent concern about others or understanding of what is morally significant. I contrast shame with the possibility of relating to others—and to oneself—with love and care. Indeed, I propose that love is essential for moral understanding and motivation. The argument of the article unfolds through critical appraisals of the main strategies for defending the moral value of shame. First, against the claim that shame entails respect for others, I argue that shame's sensitivity to the opinions of others is motivated by egocentric self-concern. Second, against the view that shame over failures to live up to moral values is morally valuable, I argue that regardless of whether the values guiding our shame are moral or not, the perspective of shame is oblivious to their moral meaning. Third, against the claim that shame is crucial for self-understanding, I argue that the desire for affirmation that drives shame is a powerful source of self-deception. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to show with the aid of philosophers Edith Stein and Peter Goldie, how empathy and other social feelings are instantiated and developed in real life versus on the Internet. The examples of on-line communication show both how important the embodied aspects of empathy are and how empathy may be possible also in the cases of encountering personal stories rather than personal bodies. Since video meetings, social media, online gaming and other forms of interaction via digital (...) technologies are taking up an increasing part of our time, it is important to understand how such forms of social intercourse are different from in real life meetings and why they can accordingly foster not only new communal bonds but also hatred and misunderstanding. (shrink)

Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.

At first approach the use of the word “superstition” is such that it is impossible to apply the term strictly in the human sciences. Its connotation, that is its content, is particularly subjective and negative. And its extension, that is its area of application, is indefinite and makes of it a concept that can refer to just about anything.

In this article I aim at developing a phenomenology ofillness through a critical interpretation of the worksof Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. The phenomenonof ``Unheimlichkeit'' – uncanniness and unhomelikeness– is demonstrated not only to play a key role in thetheories of Freud and Heidegger, but also toconstitute the essence of the experience of illness.Two different modes of unhomelikeness – ``The minduncanny'' and ``The world uncanny'' – are in thisconnection explored as constitutive parts of thephenomenon of illness. The consequence I draw (...) fromthis analysis is that the mission of health careprofessionals must be not only to cure diseases, butactually, through devoting attention to thebeing-in-the-world of the patient, also to open uppossible paths back to homelikeness. This mission canonly be carried out if medicine acknowledges the basicimportance of the meaning-realm of the patient's life– his or her life-world characteristics. (shrink)

En este texto confluyen logradamente varios géneros literarios: es una autobiografía, porque ante nuestros ojos vemos transcurrir parte de la vida del autor; pero también es un testimonio histórico, porque aborda acontecimientos verídicamente ocurridos en el Chile que existió entre los años 1965 y 1973. Paralelamente, estamos en presencia de un texto político, que aborda la problemática de la lucha de clases y su expresión en cuanto a correlación de fuerzas sociales, políticas y, al menos esb..

With an overwhelming volume of studies on Venice's port architecture and coastal protection, the challenge remains to convey to lay readers how the science of hydraulics was applied. This article reports an experiment in creating a vivid narrative of the movement and effects of sand over a relatively short period of twelve years (1610-1622), which, in this case, started with the fifteen-year-old carcass of a shipwreck at risk of capsizing. I emulate how the erosion of sandbanks triggered by the stranded (...) wreck affected the subsequent silting of the canal. This, in turn, influenced the relationships between land and sea, access and obstruction, and arrivals and departures. Such a microhistory of sand offers a broad picture of the maritime know-how and technology that came into play. Finally, the essay reflects on microhistory's potential to explore port architecture’s technicalities. This approach yields an understanding of the exquisitely practical, in-depth details of the engineering response to significant, contemporary, normal, and catastrophic events. (shrink)

Non-actualist theories promise straightforward accounts of meaning, truth and reference of fictional discourse but are ostensibly saddled with a Selection Problem, that multiple possible candidates satisfy the role-descriptions associated with names used in fictions and no principled way to distinguish between them; yet if names are referential, there can only be one referent. The problem is often taken to be a serious—even decisive—obstacle for non-actualism, and the aim of this article is to show that the challenge can be met. I (...) suggest that storytellers and authors fix the referents of referential terms they use by arbitrary selecting referents through simple acts of stipulation, and then determine which of the worlds containing the relevant individuals serve as truth-makers for the story by adding properties to the characters. The resulting view of reference is consistent with reasonable, foundational requirements on reference, such as a causal-historical theory, and can moreover be used to support plausible theories of truth in fiction and facilitate elegant models of fiction as a type of discourse. (shrink)

The image of the Other, particularly in the Western World, expresses itself through a continuous flow of representations of fabulous peoples with strange physical appearance living in far-away places. In our day, the successors to the sirens, Cyclops, unípedes and cynecephala of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the Sirians, Saturnians, Selenites and Martians of the 17th through the 20th centuries.

Resumo: O artigo inicia-se com uma distinção entre poesia e filosofia, a partir do destaque da relação especial que a primeira mantém com a palavra. O enfoque desloca-se para o pensamento de Friedrich Nietzsche, argumentando haver, em seus escritos, a construção de uma filosofia nada convencional, em parte por conta do estatuto das ideias expostas, mas também e sobremaneira pela relação íntima com a arte poética, o que se faz evidente pela estilização do pensamento. A hipótese principal é de que (...) não se pode bem compreender a transgressão semântica operada por Nietzsche - sua famosa "transvaloração dos valores" - sem que se considere a transgressão estilística. Por fim, a linguagem aforismática utilizada por Nietzsche é apresentada como a sua "arte do estilo" por excelência.: This article begins by distinguishing poetry from philosophy on the basis of the special relationship that the former has with the written word. The focus then shifts to the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is argued that in his writings one finds the construction of an unconventional philosophy in part because of the ideas expounded by the author, but also and especially because of its intimate relationship with poetic art, evident in the stylization of thought. It is further argued that Nietzsche's semantic transgression - his famous "transvaluation of values" - can not be properly understood without stylistic transgression. Finally, Nietzsche's aphoristic language is presented as his "art of style" par excellence. (shrink)

Le rapprochement entre émancipation féminine et religion peut sembler incongru, car il est généralement admis que les convictions religieuses sont un obstacle au féminisme et à toute forme d'émancipation. Il apparaît toutefois que les idées religieuses de George Sand, issues de différents courants de pensée du romantisme, peuvent servir de point d'appui à l'émancipation féminine. Elles semblent en outre préfigurer certaines découvertes des sciences humaines, de la sociologie historique et de l'ethnologie notamment, qu'avait résumées Bachofen vers 1860 sous le vocable (...) " religions favorables au droit de la mère ". The parallel between emancipation of women and religion could seem incongruous since it is generally accepted that religious convictions are an obstacle to feminism or to any form of emancipation. It would appear however that George Sand's religious ideas, stemming from various thought trends in romanticism, could serve to support women's emancipation. Sand's ideas also prefigure certain discoveries of human sciences, notably historical sociology and ethnology, which Bachofen had summarised around 1860 under the expression " religions favourable to maternal right ". (shrink)

Sponges are important but often‐neglected organisms. The absence of classical animal traits (nerves, digestive tract, and muscles) makes sponges challenging for non‐specialists to work with and has delayed getting high quality genomic data compared to other invertebrates. Yet analyses of sponge genomes and transcriptomes currently available have radically changed our understanding of animal evolution. Sponges are of prime evolutionary importance as one of the best candidates to form the sister group of all other animals, and genomic data are essential to (...) understand the mechanisms that control animal evolution and diversity. Here we review the most significant outcomes of current genomic and transcriptomic analyses of sponges, and discuss limitations and future directions of sponge transcriptomic and genomic studies. (shrink)

This paper will explore the relationship between selfhood and depression, by focusing upon the lived body's capacity to 'resonate'with the world and thus open up an 'attuned' space of meaning. Persons will become differently tuned in different situations because they embody different patterns of resonance -- what is most often referred to as different temperaments -- but the self may also suffer from idiosyncrasies in mood profile that develop into deficiencies of resonance, making the person in question ill. In many (...) cases of depression one might describe this as a being out of tune in the sense of being oversensitive to the sad, anxious, and boring tune qualities of the world. This phenomenological model allows us to describe a spectrum of various normal sensitivities which might favour certain moods over others, but also to identify pathologies, like depression, in which the body is out of tune and makes the being-in-the-world overwhelmingly unhomelike. (shrink)

In Every Thing Must Go James Ladyman and Don Ross argue for a radical version of naturalistic metaphysics and propose that contemporary analytic metaphysics is detached from science and should be discontinued. The present article addresses the issues of whether science and metaphysics are separable, intuitions and understanding should be excluded from scientific theory, and Ontic Structural Realism satisfies the criteria of the radical version of naturalism advanced by Ladyman and Ross. The point underlying those topics is that successful scientific (...) research presupposes metaphysics, and that basic epistemic virtues common to metaphysics and science may allow us—as opposed to what Ladyman and Ross suggest—to increase our understanding of the world and to put constraints on allowable metaphysical theories. (shrink)

Les théories de l'Institution: essai d'ontologie juridique / Georges Renard Date de l'édition originale: 1930 Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF. HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande. Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui (...) jugés condamnables. Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'histoire des idées en France et sont susceptibles de présenter un intérêt scientifique ou historique. Le sens de notre démarche éditoriale consiste ainsi à permettre l'accès à ces oeuvres sans pour autant que nous en cautionnions en aucune façon le contenu. Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.fr. (shrink)

This article develops a phenomenological exploration of chronic pain from a first-person perspective that can serve to enrich the medical third-person perspective. The experience of chronic pain is found to be a feeling in which we become alienated from the workings of our own bodies. The bodily-based mood of alienation is extended, however, in penetrating the whole world of the chronic pain sufferer, making her entire life unhomelike. Furthermore, the pain mood not only opens up the world as having an (...) alien quality, it also makes the world more lonesome and poor by forcing the sufferer to attend to the workings of her own body. To suffer pain is to find oneself in a situation of passivity in relation to the hurtful experiences one is undergoing. In making the body and the world more unhomelike places to be in, pain also tends to rob a person of her language. Severe pain is hard to describe because it pushes the person towards the borderlines of imaginable experience and because it makes it hard to see any meaning and purpose in the situation one has been forced into. The analysis of chronic pain in the article is guided by the attempts made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger to understand the nature of human embodiment and existence, and also by descriptions of chronic pain found in the Swedish author Lars Gustafsson’s novel The Death of a Beekeeper. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to a thematic section on the phenomenology of empathy in medicine, attempting to provide an expose of the field. It also provides introductions to the individual articles of the thematic section.

ABSTRACTSome suggest that the duty of humanitarian intervention should be discharged by states that are historically responsible for the occurrence of violence. A fundamental problem with this suggestion is that historically responsible states might be ill-suited to intervene because they are unlikely to enjoy support from the local population. Cécile Fabre has suggested a way around that problem, arguing that responsible states ought to pay for humanitarian interventions even though they ought not to take part in the military operations. We (...) claim that Fabre’s idea is subject to two concerns. First, the duty to perform might not be appropriately transferrable from the historically responsible state to another state because it would allow the primary duty bearer to escape the worst costs of intervention. Second, an intervention might be as unlikely to generate local support when a historically responsible state pays for an intervention as when it performs it. These problems are enough to cast doubt on Fabr... (shrink)

In this paper I develop a phenomenology of falling ill by presenting, interpreting and developing the basic model we find in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. The three steps identified by Sartre in this process are analysed, developed further and brought to a five- step model: pre-reflective experience of discomfort, lived, bodily discomfort, suffered illness, disease pondering, and disease state. To fall ill is to fall victim to a gradual process of alienation, and with each step this alienating process is (...) taken to a new qualitative level. Consequently, the five steps of falling ill have not only a contingent chronological order but also a kind of logical order, in that they typically presuppose each other. I adopt Sartre's focus on embodiment as the core ground of the alienation process, but point out that the alienation of the body in illness is not only the experience of a psychic object, but an experience of the independent life of one's own body. This facticity of the body is the result neither of the gaze of the other person, nor of a reflection adopting the outer perspective of the other in an indirect way, but is a result of the very otherness of one's own body, which addresses and plagues us when we fall ill. I use examples of falling ill and being a patient to show how a phenomenology of falling ill can be helpful in educating health-care personnel about the ways of the lived body. (shrink)