The growing prevalence of obesity and related conditions such as Type II diabetes is held by many to be a major public health problem in developed countries, and increasingly in developing countries as well. If we wish to tackle this problem, it will be a major task. Individuals will have to change their consumption and exercise patterns, companies will have to improve the products they make and how they market them, nutrition experts and communities will have to redefine what is (...) acceptable and desirable in food practices and governments will have to lead and promote such societal-level changes in many different fields, including food policy, urban design, educational policies, agricultural subsidies and tax breaks, etc. This is all very difficult to achieve. In many people’s view, government action aiming at social change will be especially controversial and meet some resistance. New York …. (shrink)

Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century is the first book of its kind that offers a systematic overview of an often misrepresented period in Russia's philosophy. Focusing on philosophical ideas produced during the late 1950s – early 1990s, it reconstructs the development of genuine philosophical thought in the Soviet period and introduces those non-dogmatic Russian thinkers who saw in philosophy a means of reforming social and intellectual life. Covering such areas of philosophical inquiry as (...) philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, the history of philosophy, activity approach as well as communication and dialogue studies, the volume presents and thoroughly discusses central topics and concepts developed by Soviet thinkers in that particular fields. Written by a team of internationally recognized scholars from Russia and abroad, it examines the work of well-known Soviet philosophers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili) as well as those important figures (such as Vladimir Bibler, Alexander Zinoviev, Yury Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Genrich Batishchev, Sergey Rubinstein, and others) who have often been overlooked. By introducing and examining original philosophical ideas that evolved in the Soviet period, the book confirms that not all Soviet philosophy was dogmatic and tied to orthodox Marxism and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It shows Russian philosophical development of the Soviet period in a new light, as a philosophy defined by a genuine discourse of exploration and intellectual progress, rather than stagnation and dogmatism. In addition to providing the historical and cultural background that explains the development of the 20th-century Russian philosophy, the book also puts the discussed ideas and theories in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions showing their relevance to nowadays debates in Western philosophy. With short biographies of key thinkers, an extensive current bibliography and a detailed chronology of Soviet philosophy, this research resource provides a new understanding of the Soviet period and its intellectual legacy 100 years after the Russian Revolution. (shrink)

M. F. Burnyeat taught for 14 years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, then for 18 years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, 12 of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy were all written, and all but two published, before that decisive (...) change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subject-matter falls under four main headings: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern', which make up the first volume, with 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life' contained in this, the second volume. The title 'Explorations' well expresses Burnyeat's ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity. (shrink)

"M. F. Simone Roberts's A Poetics of Being-Two is animated by a lively and engaging voice, drawing readers in with a sense of serious purpose working (delightfully) in tandem with a sense of humor. Roberts's aesthetics and her close readings of Yves Bonnefoy, St-John Perse, and Jorie Graham clearly demonstrate the literary effectiveness of Irigarayan sexual difference as an analytic trope, even as they emphasize the philosophical and political possibilities sexual difference opens up for feminism, environmentalism, and all levels of (...) contemporary cultural critique and activism."—Gail M. Schwab, Hofstra University -/- In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray calls for a new poetics in the sense of both art and life. Rather than a critique from within philosophy, A Poetics of Being-Two tests Irigaray's ethics by extending it to other sites of cultural production. Where Irigaray's method finds stirrings and repressions of sexual difference in philosophy, this project explores that tension in poetics. Building from Irigaray's ethics, the book describes a poetics of being-two as concerns gendered subjectivity in literary poetics and then traces the on-going emergence of a poetics of being-two in the post-symbolist poetic tradition. Irigaray scholars will be interested in the sustained interpolation of Irigaray's ethical concepts as principles for a critical aesthetics and in their hermeneutic application in reading a literary tradition. Readers in comparative literature will find the first sustained feminist engagements with the major French poets Bonnefoy and Perse and an elucidation of their influence on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham. (shrink)

Fifteen concise, clearly written essays on the major concepts of Judaism, followed by a series of short "reflections" on such topics as True-Conscience, Conformity, and Hero-Worship. Rabbi Umen's viewpoint is patently that of Reform Judaism, and the more traditional positions receive short shrift at his hands. His chapters on the Jewish concepts of the Messiah and of Jesus are especially good and should prove of interest to Jew and non-Jew alike.--S. M. F.

A tough-minded, controversial autobiography by a disillusioned Viennese Catholic turned Hindu monk. Swami Agehananda Bharati is not the usual ethnophile. Indeed, his view that one must regard one's cultural heritage critically continues long after his conversion and provokes many an angry rebuke from his less questioning Hindu brothers. For Bharati, nothing is sacred a priori. Neither Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century Bengali saint, nor Swami Vivekananda, his best known disciple, nor, for that matter, the Mahatma himself escapes critical re-evaluation. Yet Bharati's knowledge (...) of the Sanskrit texts, his familiarity with half a dozen modern Indian languages, and his years of itinerant teaching on the Indian sub-continent make his voice one to be reckoned with on the topic of contemporary Hindu life. One can no doubt imagine a more sympathetic passage to India, but there could hardly be one more stimulating.--S. M. F. (shrink)

Since the arguments that Plato provides in the Republic for the thesis that the human soul consist of three parts (reason, spirit, appetite) are notoriously problematic, I propose other reasons for accepting tripartition: reasons that we too could endorse, or at least entertain with some sympathy. To wit, (a) the appetitive part of Plato's divided soul houses desires and tendencies we have because we are animal bodies programmed to survive (as individuals and as a species) in disequilibrium with a variegated, (...) often varying environment, (b) the spirited middle part houses status concerns that belong to us as social animals, while (c) what makes us rational animals is a faculty of reason, conceived in strikingly non-Humean terms, which determines what is best all things considered. Other psychic tendencies may then be explained in terms of the education and mutual interaction of the three parts we are 'programmed' for from birth. (shrink)

Upshot: Gibsonian and enactivist thinkers appear to diverge primarily with respect to the emphasis placed on the contributions of the organism to perception-action. Enactivists claim that a fundamental asymmetry in the organism-environment relationship should be credited for the existence of meaning in the world. Gibsonians counter that theory must reckon with both the asymmetry and symmetry between organism and environment as well as with the role of specificational information in underwriting their coordination.

Open peer commentary on the article “Going Beyond Theory: Constructivism and Empirical Phenomenology” by Urban Kordeš. Upshot: A constructivist epistemology might help us better understand what kind of knowledge expert introspection cannot deliver. Indeed, there are well-known trade-offs with regard to the insights that can be gained through introspection. If trivialization is to be avoided, then it should be assumed that, contrary to standard science, introspection just is not a declarative kind of knowledge.