The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.

The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985 to 2018 and provide a bird’s-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual-violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions that exemplify the zeitgeist of primary prevention efforts at various points during this time period. We find a throughline in primary prevention interventions: They (...) aim to change attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge (i.e., ideas) to reduce sexual-violence perpetration and victimization. Our meta-analysis of these studies tests the efficacy of this approach directly and finds that although many interventions are successful at changing ideas, behavior change does not follow. There is little to no relationship between changing attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge and reducing victimization or perpetration. We also observe trends over time, including a shift from targeting a reduction in perpetration to targeting an increase in bystander intervention. We conclude by highlighting promising new strategies for measuring victimization and perpetration and calling for interventions that are informed by theories of behavior change and that center sexually violent behavior as the key outcome of interest. (shrink)

Michel Henry’s “Destruction ontologique” does not interpret itself. In the following interpretive essay, I will attempt to articulate its basic structure, to address its principal engagements, and, on this basis, to interpret its defining themes and positions. In the course of this attempt, I will comment also on the importance of this work in the context of Henry’s œuvre, and contemporary scholarship thereupon. One need not accept every assertion, or agree with every position, in this article to recognize (...) its importance. This importance is both greater, and different, than the reader may expect. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of “genetic diseases” with an infectious component and of “infectious diseases” with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s CaughtLyndsey Stonebridge (bio)(The firemen saw each other’s faces. They saw the water below a dirty yellow towards the fire; the wharves on that far side low and black, those on the bank they were leaving a pretty rose.... They sat very still, beneath the immensity. For, against it, warehouses, small towers, puny steeples seemed alive with sparks from (...) the mile high pandemonium of flame reflected in the quaking sky. This fan, a roaring red gold, pulsed rose at the outside edge, the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness, were for a space a trembling green.)—Henry Green, CaughtWar, she thought, is sex.—Henry Green, CaughtRoses are not generally thought to be objects of anxiety. They are objects of desire, or better, objects that arrest desire by their invitation to aesthetic contemplation, but only for the phobic could a rose be said to be an occasion for dread. Writing during World War II, the British writer Henry Green (“a trembling green”) suggests otherwise. In this description of the London Blitz from his 1943 novel, Caught, everything comes up roses. 1 First among literary clichés, roses lend themselves to this kind of figurative estrangement (by virtue of which, in literature, a rose is in fact only very rarely a rose), and Green is by no means the only British writer in World War II to note that the fire and the rose are one. 2 In Caught, however, Green’s roses wreath desire and dread together so tightly that the psychoanalytic cliché—war is sex—snaps back into the tautology that Freud perhaps always intended.The idea that war could be sex was, of course, the scandal of Freud’s theory of the traumatic neurosis during World War I. As is well known, only a desexualized version of psychoanalysis was admitted into the field hospitals and the officer’s convalescent homes that sprang up in upper-class houses all over Britain. One of these was Green’s childhood home, which, he later said, like many of the overprivileged, opened up its doors to the wounded and traumatized in a calculated act of class preservation. 3 One does not have to [End Page 25] think too hard to appreciate why, for some at least, it was preferable to see these torn and shocked bodies as seized by a dreadful—but after all perfectly understandable—fear in the face of war, rather than gripped with a less comprehensible anxiety that carried with it a dangerous and potentially lethal sexual charge.The temptation to unsex trauma theory is still with us today. It is not quite that something has been occluded in contemporary debate and that this something is sexuality. It is more accurate to say that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the agon of sexuality—and particularly of the drives—is right at the heart of trauma, and that this, especially in the recent alliance of psychoanalysis and history, causes a certain awkwardness. One of the strengths of contemporary trauma theory lies in its articulation of a nuanced and subtle historicity, read through both psychoanalysis and literature, which allows the humanities to reconnect with historical violence, without (supposedly) falling into the pitfalls of a naive historicism [see Caruth]. The awkwardness comes because sexual antagonism is both clearly historical (the violence is well documented) and structurally necessary to psychoanalytic theories of trauma. The two, the historical and the psychic, are clearly not analogues, but they remain stubbornly and infuriatingly intertwined. 4Faced with this theoretical tangle, two options present themselves. The first is to privilege historical trauma over sexual trauma. Psychoanalysis, hence, provides an account of the multiple difficulties of historical representation while escaping the age-old accusation of sexual determination. War, thus, is not (only) sex. For all its hermeneutic power, this new historiography runs the risk of producing a trauma theory without, paradoxically, a psychoanalysis (an Orphics without Eurydice). The second is to insist on the structural necessity of sexuality and, in particular, of sexual difference, not as the ahistorical referent that lurks beyond representation but, as Slavoj Zizek has... (shrink)

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory and classics. A proponent of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which he analysed in his classic work The Methods of Ethics , he later turned to the practical side of politics in this work, published in 1891. His aim was to have a 'rational discussion of political questions in modern states', and he offers (...) a thorough examination of Victorian politics, beginning with a discussion of political theory before moving on to more concrete matters such as property and law. The later chapters discuss the function of government through themes such as procedural matters, international affairs, war, political parties, and public participation, giving a comprehensive account of both ideas about and the functioning of late-nineteenth-century government. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Lectures: The metaphysics of Kant. The metaphysics of T.H. Green. The philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer.-- Essays: l. The sophists (two papers from the Journal of philology, 1872 and 1873) 2. Incoherence of empirical philosophy (from Mind, vol. VII, 0. 8., Oct. 1882) 3. A dialogue on time and common sense (from Mind, vol. III, n. s., Oct. 1894) 4. The philosophy of common sense (from Mind, vol. IV. n. s., April 1895) 5. Criteria of truth and error (from Mind, (...) vol. IX, n. s., Jan 1900) Appendix to the preceding essay. (shrink)

Introductory. - The passive fallacy. - The idols of the theatre. - Intellectualism. - Absolutism. - Subjectivism. - German idealism. - T.H. Green. - Mr. F.H. Bradley. - Professor Bosanquet.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shimmering Maya and Other EssaysPatrick HenryThe Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, by Catharine Savage Brosman; 149 pp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, $24.94.When the author was fifteen, she held the rank of “prospector” at Girl Scout Camp. Now, over forty years later, she is “digging down through the layers, sifting through the running stream of memory” (p. 14). Her art of prospecting affords the reader (...) a linear impression of a journey that begins with “The Shimmering Maya,” a recountal of a family move in August 1944 from Colorado to South Texas. “Desert Silvery Blue” describes life in Alpine, Texas, while “Leaving for Good” narrates her experience of displacement as she departs Alpine in 1951 to attend Rice Institute, known then as “the atheist school” (p. 37). From Alpine to Houston, she experiences the greening of America and the shock of Gulf Coast humidity, “a sensation of being hit in the face and smothered” (p. 42). At Rice, she finishes her degrees, travels to France, her intellectual home, and returns, in “Cherry Time”—“Yes, Virginia, there is a Virginia” (p. 52)—to describe her life in full bloom during this relatively short but intense period, spent in and around the state of Virginia, before her permanent move to New Orleans. Two essays conclude the volume even as they bend back toward its beginning. “Winter Light” narrates the life of her grandfather, Edward Hill, newspaperman, teacher, doctor, writer, and formidable learner whom she knew only in the winter of his life but whose light illuminated her being and “whose heir I feel, or wish, myself to be” (p. 130). “Turn My Face Out to the West” recounts a recent camping trip in New Mexico but, more profoundly, a return to the Western land of her youth. Like the Anasazi and Pueblo Indians, she too was born there and, reclaiming their heritage as partly hers, extols their solar-based science, courage, sense of community, independent spirit, and love and respect for the land.Brosman paints being, however, as well as becoming. Essays six through eleven focus more centrally than the others on her habitual self: her self-portrait as teacher, scholar, poet, traveler, and traditional woman. As a teacher of language, she offers “at once an end and a means” (p. 86) and, as literature teacher, not “entertainment chiefly but the pursuit of truth” (p. 88), undogmatically attempting to elicit self-awareness without imposing a single view. [End Page 136] A traditional woman who has never felt uncomfortable around men and doesn’t consider them her enemies, Brosman thinks Women’s Studies are “regressive” (p. 84), deplores language “barbarisms” such as “chairperson” and “herstory” (p. 75), and holds for a “nongendered intellectual patrimony of arts, letters, and science” (p. 84). While she admits that it’s a miracle that all marriages don’t simply fall apart, the differences between the sexes, she argues, constitute “the whole basis for attraction” (p. 70), and she prefers her cigar-smoking husband “to men who boast about their Hollandaise sauce” (p. 70). Not interested “in valorizing only the male principle” (p. 70), she seeks “vigor of mind” in all persons and considers herself a “feminist in the cupboard,” one who operates within the family but travels freely and enjoys a rich professional life. She links herself to her Aunt Margaret and other “closet feminists” (p. 100) in her family’s history who demonstrated self-reliance and a sense of their own value, and argues, against de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex, that female work for American women of the nineteenth century did indeed, like male work, go beyond biology “to remake the world through invention (production)” (p. 102).Brosman demands a metaphysical self-consciousness that recognizes unhappiness, anguish, and disorder but concomitantly posits the good life as the synthetic unity of the mind, body, and heart. This metaphysical consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical world—we are not only in the world but of it—and in a shared sense of place and a commitment to communal enterprises. Her thought is perhaps above all characterized throughout by a sense of “grace” and the “intimation of... (shrink)

The idea of self-reliance is important not only because it is often taken to be definitive of the ethics of democratic individualism, but because its greatest theorists have been uncommonly forthright about a problem that, though familiar to ordinary civic experience, frequently gets ignored: that self-reliant individuality is a basis for not fully supporting otherwise endorsed social justice causes. This article turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan who are unusual for so honestly reflecting upon (...) this problem and who, because of the differences in the way they conceptualize it, are instructive for civic ethics. I demonstrate that Emerson and Thoreau imbue their self-reliant withdrawal from social action with a self-satisfaction that is lacking for Dylan, who is much readier to acknowledge the moral costs of self-reliance. This acknowledgement does not invalidate self-reliance but alters its epistemological, ethical and political features, providing a variant of self-reliance more suitable to contemporary conditions. (shrink)

The majority of the philosophical attention on induction has been connected with universal conventions: “All crows are black,” “All emeralds are green,” “Every creature with kidneys is a creature with a heart,” and others. It has been observed that if it can be shown how and why such conventions can be given rational justification by our restrained observations of the world, the outcome will be simpler. It is felt that it is but a small step from here to quantitative laws (...) and only a little-longer jump to general theories. After achieving an understanding of general theories, we can go back, in a mopping-up approach, to handle such irrelevant trivia as statistical conventions. (shrink)

People talk about rats deserting a sinking ship, but they don't usually ask where the rats go. Perhaps this is only because the answer is so obvious: of course, most of the rats climb aboard the sounder ships, the ships that ride high in the water despite being laden with rich cargoes of cheese and grain and other things rats love, the ships that bring prosperity to ports like eighteenth-century Königsberg and firms such as Green & Motherby. By making the (...) insulting comparison - as I am in the course of doing – between us Kant scholars and a horde of noxious vermin, my more or less transparent aim is to mitigate, or at least to distract attention from, the collective immodesty of what I am saying about us. For my point is that, in the past half-century or so, Kant studies has become a very prosperous ship indeed. Its success has even been the chief thing that has buoyed all its sister ships in the fleet of modern philosophy, most of which are also doing very well. (shrink)

The history of the thesis of the guise of the good between Kant and Anscombe is not well understood. This article examines a notable disagreement over the thesis during this period, between Green and Sidgwick. It shows that Green accepts versions of the thesis concerning action and desire in one sense of 'desire', and that Sidgwick rejects the thesis concerning both action and desire. It then considers why Green accepts the thesis, and assesses Sidgwick's criticism of Green. Despite the appearance (...) of a mere clash of intuitions, an interesting rationale for the thesis can be found in Green’s theory of free will and moral responsibility, of which I defend a broadly compatibilist interpretation. (shrink)

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory, and classics. An active champion of higher education for women, he founded Cambridge's Newnham College in 1871. He attended Rugby School and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained his whole career. In 1859 he took up a lectureship in classics, and held this post for ten years. In 1869, he moved to a lectureship in moral philosophy, (...) the subject where he left his greatest mark. Published posthumously in 1902, this work is Sidgwick's expository critique of the leading schools of thought that had emerged to rival his philosophy of utilitarianism, which he had presented previously in his masterpiece The Methods of Ethics. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Renate Egger‐Wenzel, Ben Sira's GodPaul J. Achtemeier, Joel B. Green and Marianne Meye Thompson, Introducing the New Testament, Its Literature and TheologyI. Boxall, Revelation: Vision and Insight. An Introduction to the ApocalypseS. Moyise, Studies in the Book of RevelationG. R. Osborne, Revelation: The Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New TestamentN. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of GodGillian Clark and T. Rajak, Philosophy and Power in the Graeco‐Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam GriffinRichard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius of (...) Cyzicus and the Nicene RevolutionStephen T. Davies, Daniel Kendall S. J. and Gerald O'Collins, The Incarnation. An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of GodRichard Cross, The Metaphysics of the IncarnationHugh Connolly, SinAnthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian AtonementStanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural TheologySarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and GenderChristopher Cocksworth and Rosalind Brown, Being a Priest Today: Exploring priestly identityRandall Balmer, Encyclopedia of EvangelicalismKate Armstrong, Crisis and RepetitionAnthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial RomeGerhard Podskalsky, Von Photios zu Bessarion: Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter Theologie in Byzanz und deren bleibende BedeutungNicola Coldstream, Medieval ArchitectureW. J. Armstrong, J. A. W. Hellmann and W. Short, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, IIIEllen E. Kittell and Thomas F. Madden, Medieval and Renaissance VeniceTheodor Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles: Eine historisch‐systematische Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Theologie und PhilosophieAndrew Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000–1500Renate Blumenfeld‐Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren, The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious LiteratureBarry Collett, Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England, with an Edition of Richard Fox's Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517Marc R. Forster, The Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime 1648–1789Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France 1780–1804Catharine Edwards, Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945Bruce L. Kinzer, England's Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish QuestionJohn Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth CenturyPeter M. Chisnall, John Henry Cardinal Newman: A Man of Courage, Conflict and ConvictionVincent Ferrer Blehl, Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801–1845Kester Aspden, Fortress Church. The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics 1903–63David Alvarez, Spies In The Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue From Napoleon to the HolocaustPeter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American JesuitsRuby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues. (shrink)

This paper examines T. H. Green's and Henry Sidgwick's differing views of desireand the will, and connectedly, their differing views of an individual's good and freedom. It is argued that Sidgwick makes effective criticisms of Green, but that important elements in Green's idealist view of an individual's good and freedom survive the criticism and remain significant today. It is also suggested that Sidgwick's own account of an individual's good is unclear in an important way.

Most studies deny that Kritik der Urteilskraft played a significant role in the early reception of Kant’s philosophy in England. In this paper, I examine the notebooks, letters and lectures of several members of British medical and scientific institutions to tell a different story. Drawing from the writings of Thomas Beddoes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Henry Green and William Whewell, I identify a line of reception in which Kant’s critique of judgement’s power of reflection was used to establish the (...) consilience of the mind’s anticipation of systematic order and the organization of natural bodies. Each discovered in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft a shared principle for judgements of taste and scientific inquiry, made available through the mind’s affective response to the appearance of contingent order in nature. Their writings, I contend, evince a more sophisticated reception of Kant’s philosophy in England than has hitherto been recognized. (shrink)

As past president of both the History of Science Society and the American Society of Church History, Ronald L. Numbers is uniquely qualified to assess the historical relations between science and Christianity. In this collection of his most recent essays, he moves beyond the clichés of conflict and harmony to explore the tangled web of historical interactions involving scientific and religious beliefs. In his lead essay he offers an unprecedented overview of the history of science and Christianity from the perspective (...) of the ordinary people who filled the pews of churchesor loitered around outside. Unlike the elite scientists and theologians on whom most historians have focused, these vulgar Christians cared little about the discoveries of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. Instead, they worried about the causes of the diseases and disasters that directly affected their lives and about scientists preposterous attempts to trace human ancestry back to apes. Far from dismissing opinion-makers in the pulpit, Numbers closely looks at two the most influential Protestant theologians in nineteenth-century America: Charles Hodge and William Henry Green. Hodge, after decades of struggling to harmonize Gods two revelationsin nature and in the Biblein the end famously described Darwinism as atheism. Green, on the basis of his careful biblical studies, concluded that Ussher's chronology was unreliable, thus opening the door for Christian anthropologists to accommodate the subsequent discovery of human antiquity. In Science without God Numbers traces the millennia-long history of so-called methodological naturalism, the commitment to explaining the natural world without appeals to the supernatural. By the early nineteenth century this practice was becoming the defining characteristic of science; in the late twentieth century it became the central point of attack in the audacious attempt of intelligent designers to redefine science. Numbers ends his reassessment by arguing that although science has markedly changed the world we live in, it has contributed less to secularizing it than many have claimed. Taken together, these accessible and authoritative essays form a perfect introduction to Christian attitudes towards science since the 17th century. (shrink)

The customary assumption about dying is that one would rather not. The event of death itself should be postponed for as long as possible, and comfort may be gained from doctrines which promise a victory over it. We celebrate those who try to cheat it. The dying Henry James thought he was Napoleon, and there is something in that, over and above the pathos of a wandering mind, that exemplifies, however parodically, the mental set we expect to find and (...) what we relish in those who attempt to press their own strong case against the disintegrative flow of time and change. We assume that one should struggle against death, setting such a stamp on life that even if the body must die, something the mind has done may not. Attitudes that run counter to this stubbornness are thought defeatist or unwholesome. In his own decline, Charles Baudelaire, catching sight of himself in a mirror, bowed, thinking himself a stranger. That confusion is more chilling than Jams’ because it undermines the treasured integrity of the self: it shows that death is not an invader attacking suddenly from outside. We are in one sense always in its keeping. In this essay I shall argue that whatever revolt against death may catalyse the act of writing poetry, poems are intimately tied to death in ways that complicate and even undermine that revolt. Indeed, since the inception of Romanticism , a poem in order to be a poem has had to engage not only with the fact that in the midst of life we are in its negation, but also with death’s analogues: madness, trance, divisions and questionings of the self. The relationship between poetry and the disruption of the customary self may even be celebratory.But before investigating the relationship between poetry and death, we had better be sure that one can indeed die:At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true, and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What makes me disappear from the world cannot finds its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why no one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying.1No one can think to cheat death, but to contemplate death is to introduce into thought the epitome of doubt. The one thing I can never know in advance or know demonstrably, by my very nature and by its, is the actual instant of my own death. Conventionally, “I will go when my time comes”: the phrase gestures toward the privacy of each human death, and the Protestant tone of “my time”—part predestination, part ownership—barely hides the inaccessibility of death inside that privacy. There are two certainties in life. One is that death will come. The other is that no one can be sure of this. Perhaps no one has truly died yet. 1. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock , p. 95; all further references to this work, abbreviated SL, will be included in the text. Geoffrey Ward is lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is at present completing his first critical book, The Poetry of Estrangement. His published articles include essays on symbolism in John Ashbery, Conrad’s English, metaphor in Shelley’s longer poems, the novels of Henry Green, and Wyndham Lewis. He has also published five volumes of poetry, mot recently Not the Hand Itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PrefaceMary Jacobus (bio)Trauma theory, considered as a branch of psychoanalysis, focuses on the lasting effects on the psyche of events that—whether because of their devastating nature or because the psyche is unprepared or too immature to deal with them—cannot be integrated into the onward movement of patient’s lives. The trauma can never be undone; but perhaps the patient may be helped to live with, even mourn, its aftereffects. Some (...) approaches to trauma emphasize the event itself, along with the difficulty, and the need, to relive or re-present it. Some emphasize the structural nature of a trauma which may even be constitutive of subjectivity (castration anxiety, for instance, or primitive anxieties about separation and object loss). Still other approaches point to the meaning of the trauma to the individual, arguing that only by exploring the preexisting constellation of object relations can the significance of the trauma to that particular individual be understood. Trauma may plunge the survivor into never completed mourning, or replace an ordinary guilt with an unresolvable one. Whatever the different inflection of trauma theory, it derives its contours from psychoanalysis, past and present, and, in particular, from the impact on Freud and his successors of some of the most devastating and momentous historical events of modern times, including modern warfare, the Holocaust, and industrialization. But trauma theory also takes account of events that happen (both chronically and diachronically, so to speak) in the intimacy of the family and in the ambiguously interpersonal and social dimensions of sexuality, where events intersect with issues involving gender, power, and powerlessness as well as with preexisting psychic structures.The essays in this collection arise not only from the continuing engagement with trauma theory on the part of psychoanalysts in their clinical and therapeutic work with patients, but from the surge of interest in trauma theory viewed as a way to invest the study of literature with urgent concerns, at once topical and timeless, and to understand literariness itself. A number of essays included in this special issue focus on the notion of the archive, whether viewed as a form of record which remains in abeyance (Jonathan Elmer’s starting point for considering Jefferson’s encounter with the Native American past) or as the place of a misunderstanding, even destructiveness (the point of departure for Herman Rapaport’s reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever). Appropriately, this issue also includes a photo-essay by Laurie Sieverts Snyder, which represents not only a family archive but a collection of memories that inscribe a larger historical displacement and relocation. The intertwined evolution of trauma theory and war neurosis, and the consequent unsexing of trauma, can give rise to a post-Freudian inquiry into the writing of anxiety (such as we see in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s reading of the war novels of Henry Green, where war “is” sex). At the same time, we can glimpse how the belatedness of trauma not only gets recoded as suspension or “falling” but gives rise to a philosophic discourse of trauma (see Eleanor Kaufman’s reading of Perec’s W together with Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience). Given its centrality to contemporary literary-critical readings of trauma, it is not surprising that a number of essays should address Cathy Caruth’s work directly (many of the essays included here also do so indirectly). Her writing remains central to current literary and theoretical discussions of trauma, whether viewed as a phenomenology of trauma (as it is, for instance, by Eleanor Kaufman) or as a vantage point from which to define the modern predicament of mutually entangled histories, communities, and writings (this is how Petar Ramadanovic links Freud’s diasporic movement to the history of slavery and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). [End Page 3]The final section of this special issue returns trauma to the consulting room. Essays on pain (Mary Jacobus on the place of psychoanalysis “between” therapy and hermeneutics as represented by the writings of Wifred Bion) and melancholia (Angelika Rauch’s Kristevan essay on post-traumatic hermeneutics and problems in contemporary trauma therapy) pay particular attention to the question of interpretation in psychoanalysis. They also shift the discussion in the direction of contemporary post... (shrink)

Philosophers, Henri Bergson once observed, "seem to philosophize as if they were sealed in the privacy of their study and did not live on a planet surrounded by the vast organic world of animals, plants, insects, and protozoa." Providing a solid overview of ecological philosophy and original insights into this developing field, Minding Nature focuses on some of the most influential thinkers who, in fact, have emphasized our natural relations to the earth, our social creations, and each other. Combining philosophy, (...) ecology, and political theory, chapters thoroughly examine, critique, and build upon the ideas of such luminaries as Thomas Hobbes, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Barry Commoner, Rachel Carson, and Jurgen Habermas, among others. Each thinker considered has contributed significantly to both contemporary discussion and historical understanding of political, epistemological, or social aspects related to nature and, with several exceptions, stimulated constructive dialogue within progressive, democratic, and radical left circles. By challenging the notion that conservation is inherently politically conservative or that our oikos (home) must be rendered uniformly economic where ecology is concerned, they enable us to rethink the possibility of creating a more democratic and ecological society. (shrink)

In this article I explain why cognitive science (including some neuroscience) matters for normative ethics. First, I describe the dual-process theory of moral judgment and briefly summarize the evidence supporting it. Next I describe related experimental research examining influences on intuitive moral judgment. I then describe two ways in which research along these lines can have implications for ethics. I argue that a deeper understanding of moral psychology favors certain forms of consequentialism over other classes of normative moral theory. I (...) close with some brief remarks concerning the bright future of ethics as an interdisciplinary enterprise. (shrink)