The global seafood industry is a vital source of food, income, livelihoods, and culture. Seafood demand is steadily rising due to growth in the global human population, affluence, and per capita consumption. Seafood supply is also growing, despite declining wild fish stocks, with phenomenal advances in aquaculture, that is, the cultivation of aquatic organisms. Aquaculture supplied 42 % of the world’s fish in 2012 and is forecast to eclipse capture fisheries production by 2030. The balance between these two seafood production (...) systems has profound implications for global food security, income distribution, and ecological sustainability. Here, a qualitative analysis of the ethics and sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture is presented. An innovative practical ethics approach is introduced which adapts the ethical matrix, a conceptual tool for analyzing the wellbeing, autonomy, and justice of different interest groups, and Rapfish, a rapid appraisal technique used to evaluate the sustainability of fisheries along six performance modalities, including ethics. Using case studies of global large- and small-scale capture fisheries and generalized carnivorous and omnivorous aquaculture systems, I show that human institutions and social actors interact in complex governance processes to influence seafood ethics and sustainability. (shrink)

The impacts of early fishing on aquatic ecosystems were minimal, as primitive technologies were used to harvest fish primarily for food. As fishing technology grew more sophisticated and human populations dispersed and expanded, local economies transitioned from subsistence to barter and trade. Expanded trade networks and mercantilization led to surplus catches becoming tradable commodities. Today, global export fish commodities, including fresh, frozen, cured, and canned fish, are valued at over US$ 100 billion, but commoditization loses the ecological imperative, with overfishing (...) the result. To sustain global fisheries, human and ecosystem relationships with living fish need to be valued, as fish landed for both food and profit. Toward this end, we propose two decommoditization strategies: (a) valuing cultural property, the intergenerational relationships of people to places, in environmental policy and (b) instituting social subsidies that reward or enable local communities to cooperate in sustaining aquatic living resources, such as with marine protected areas. (shrink)

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has led to a deep and multidimensional crisis across all sectors of society. As countries contemplate their mobility and social-distancing policy restrictions, we have a unique opportunity to re-imagine the deliberative frameworks and value priorities in our food systems. Pre-pandemic food systems at global, national, regional and local scales already needed revision to chart a common vision for sustainable and ethical food futures. Re-orientation is also needed by the relevant sciences, traditionally siloed in their disciplines (...) and without adequate attention paid to how the food system problem is variously framed by diverse stakeholders according to their values. From the transdisciplinary perspective of food ethics, we argue that a post-pandemic scheme focused on bottom-up, regional, cross-sectoral and non-partisan deliberation may provide the re-orientation and benchmarks needed for not only more sustainable, but also more ethical food futures. (shrink)

A prefrontal control system that is less mature than the limbic reward system in adolescence is thought to impede self-regulatory abilities, which could contribute to poor dietary choices and obesity. We, therefore, aimed to examine whether structural morphology of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are associated with dietary decisions and obesity in children and adolescents. Seventy-one individuals between the ages of 8–22 years participated in this study; each participant completed a computer-based food choice task and a T1- and T2-weighted (...) structural brain scans. Two indices of obesity were assessed, including age- and sex-specific body mass index and waist-to-height ratio. The behavioral task included rating 60 food stimuli for tastiness, healthiness, and liking. Based on each participant’s self-ratings, 100 binary food choices were then made utilizing a computer mouse. Dietary “self-control” was calculated as the proportion of trials where the individual chose the healthier food item over the total number of trials. Cortical thickness and amygdala subnuclei volumes were quantified using FreeSurfer 6.0 and CIT168 atlas, respectively. We found that WHtR was negatively associated with the thickness of bilateral superior frontal, left superior temporal, right insula, and right inferior temporal regions. We also found WHtR to be positively associated with the volume of the central nucleus region of the amygdala, after adjusting for the hemisphere, age, sex, and intracranial volumes. A similar data pattern was observed when BMIz was used. Moreover, we found that across all participants, thinner right superior frontal cortex and larger left CEN volumes predicted lower dietary self-control. These results suggest that differential development of the PFC and amygdala relate to obesity and dietary self-control. Further longitudinal studies are merited to determine causal relationships among altered PFC to amygdala neural circuitry, dietary self-control, and obesity. (shrink)

Research on the use of the Song of Songs in spiritual direction is rare; yet, the Song of Songs (or Canticle of Canticles) is a highly conducive case as it provides in nuce the poetics, lyrics, erotics, and aesthetics of human and divine love which is found nowhere else in Scripture. This article draws on these unique features, integrates the biblical and the experiential, and offers a poetics-praxis paradigm for use in contemporary spiritual praxis. With the poem’s metaphorical vineyard (a (...) figurative term for the beloved herself) serving as hermeneutical key, the beloved’s experience of love is interpreted through a multifaceted reading that is intrinsic to the poem, namely: eros [yearning]; mythos [searching]; mustikos [finding]; and kosmos [birthing]. In following the inner dynamism and dramatic tensions across the eight chapters of the Song, the fourfold reading traces the beloved’s transformation from a neglected vineyard (Can 1:6) to a generative vineyard (Can 8:12). The article concludes that transformation in love is a journey from depletion (the giving away of self) towards deification (the giving of self in love), and suggests tending one’s own vineyard as a living testament to divine love and a living sacrament in the world. (shrink)

Background Residual dried blood spots (rDBS) from newborn screening programmes represent a valuable resource for medical research, from basic sciences, through clinical to public health. In Hong Kong, there is no legislation for biobanking. Parents’ view on the retention and use of residual newborn blood samples could be cultural-specific and is important to consider for biobanking of rDBS. Objective To study the views and concerns on long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening programmes among Hong Kong Chinese (...) parents. Methods A mixed-method approach was used to study the views and concerns on long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening programmes among Hong Kong Chinese parents of children 0–3 years or expecting parents through focus groups (8 groups; 33 participants) and a survey (n = 1012, 85% mothers) designed with insights obtained from the focus groups. We used framework analysis to summarise the themes as supportive factors, concerns and critical arguments for retention and secondary use of rDBS from focus group discussion. We used multiple logistic regression to assess factors associated with support for retention and secondary use of rDBS in the survey. Results Both in focus groups and survey, majority of parents were not aware of the potential secondary use of rDBS. Overall secondary use of rDBS in medical research was well accepted by a large proportion of Hong Kong parents, even if all potential future research could not be specified in a broad consent. However parents were concerned about potential risks of biobanking rDBS including leaking of data and mis-use of genetic information. Parents wanted to be asked for permission before rDBS are stored and mainly did not accept an “opt-out” approach. The survey showed that parents born in mainland China, compared to Hong Kong born parents, had lower awareness of newborn screening but higher support in biobanking rDBS. Higher education was associated with support in rDBS biobanking only among fathers. Conclusion Long-term storage and secondary use of rDBS from newborn screening for biomedical research and a broad consent for biobanking of rDBS are generally acceptable to Hong Kong parents given their autonomy is respected and their privacy is protected, highlighting the importance of an accountable governance and a transparent access policy for rDBS biobanks. (shrink)

Este artigo confronta a identidade americana monoculturalista e postula uma identidade multicultural e multirracial, moldada pela história da imigração. Além disso, ele disseca o sonho americano sob a lente de imigrantes WASPs e não-WASPs, particularmente em meados do século XIX. Ao correlacionar a dualidade cultural e a dupla consciência por meio de WASPs, imigrantes, nativistas e culturalistas afro-americanos, o artigo afirma uma identidade cultural americana maleável e em evolução, constantemente moldada por ondas sucessivas de imigrantes.

This article introduces a special electronic collection of many of the key works published by the late British sociologist John Urry (1946–2016) in the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society. It serves both to commemorate and to continue Urry’s profound contributions as a social theorist, as a network builder, and as a public intellectual who changed the face of British, and indeed global, social science. The selections range from 1982 to 2014, including articles and introductions to collections, (...) both sole-authored and collaborative pieces, all of which are put into context here in relation to his wider body of work. By gathering this portion of his work in one place we seek to make it easily accessible, as well as marking the signal importance of his impact on contemporary social theory. (shrink)

We consider to what extent the fundamental question of spacetime singularities is relevant for the philosophical debate about the nature of spacetime. After reviewing some basic aspects of the spacetime singularities within general relativity, we argue that the well known difficulty to localize them in a meaningful way may challenge the received metaphysical view of spacetime as a set of points possessing some intrinsic properties together with some spatiotemporal relations. Considering the algebraic formulation of general relativity, we argue that the (...) spacetime singularities highlight the philosophically misleading dependence on the standard geometric representation of spacetime. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland; e-mail: vincent.lam@unil.ch. (shrink)

Quantities like mass and temperature are properties that come in degrees. And those degrees (e.g. 5 kg) are properties that are called the magnitudes of the quantities. Some philosophers (e.g., Byrne 2003; Byrne & Hilbert 2003; Schroer 2010) talk about magnitudes of phenomenal qualities as if some of our phenomenal qualities are quantities. The goal of this essay is to explore the anti-physicalist implication of this apparently innocent way of conceptualizing phenomenal quantities. I will first argue for a metaphysical thesis (...) about the nature of magnitudes based on Yablo’s proportionality requirement of causation. Then, I will show that, if some phenomenal qualities are indeed quantities, there can be no demonstrative concepts about some of our phenomenal feelings. That presents a significant restriction on the way physicalists can account for the epistemic gap between the phenomenal and the physical. I’ll illustrate the restriction by showing how that rules out a popular physicalist response to the Knowledge Argument. (shrink)

Working memory is the system responsible for maintaining and manipulating information, in the face of ongoing distraction. In turn, WM span is perceived to be an individual-differences construct reflecting the limited capacity of this system. Recently, however, there has been some evidence to suggest that WM capacity can increase through training, raising the possibility that training can functionally alter the neural structures supporting WM. To address the hypothesis that the neural substrates underlying WM are targeted by training, we conducted a (...) meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of WM training using Activation Likelihood Estimation. Our results demonstrate that WM training is associated exclusively with decreases in blood oxygenation level-dependent responses in clusters within the fronto-parietal system that underlie WM, including the bilateral inferior parietal lobule, middle and superior frontal gyri, and medial frontal gyrus bordering on the cingulate gyrus. We discuss the various psychological and physiological mechanisms that could be responsible for the observed reductions in the BOLD signal in relation to WM training, and consider their implications for the construct of WM span as a limited resource. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a critique of taxonomic pluralism, namely the view that there are multiple correct ways to classify entities into natural kinds within a given scientific domain. I argue that taxonomic pluralism, as an anti-essentialist position, fails to provide a realist alternative to taxonomic monism, i.e., the view that there is only one correct way to classify entities into natural kinds within a given scientific domain. To establish my argument, I first explain why the naturalist approach to (...) natural kinds adopted by pluralists requires them to give up the mind-independence criterion of reality presupposed by monists. Next, I survey two types of pluralist account. I argue that, while the modest pluralist account is not pluralistic enough, the radical pluralist account fails to come up with an alternative criterion of reality that is robust enough to differentiate its position from anti-realism about natural kinds. I conclude by drawing out the implications of my critique for the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate about natural kinds. (shrink)

Maxwell et al. [Maxwell, J. P., Masters, R. S. W., Kerr, E., & Weedon, E. . The implicit benefit of learning without errors. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54A, 1049–1068. The implicit benefit of learning without errors. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54A, 1049–1068] suggested that, following unsuccessful movements, the learner forms hypotheses about the probable causes of the error and the required movement adjustments necessary for its elimination. Hypothesis testing is an explicit process that places demands on (...) cognitive resources. Demands on cognitive resources can be identified by measuring probe reaction times and movement times. Lengthened PRT and movement times reflects increased cognitive demands. Thus, PRT and movement times should be longer following errors, relative to successful, movements. This hypothesis was tested using a motor skill . Furthermore, the association between error processing and the preparation and execution phases of movement was examined. The data confirmed that cognitive demand is greater for trials following an error, relative to trials without an error. This effect was apparent throughout learning and in both the preparatory and execution phases of the movement. Cognitive effort also appeared to be higher during movement preparation, relative to movement execution. (shrink)

Large-scale and discontinuous rapid transitions in the climate and Earth systems constitute one of the most concerning, yet in many ways one of the least understood aspects of climate change. On the one hand, because of their potential huge impacts on human and ecological systems, it is argued that climate tipping points and their interactions (potentially leading to cascading effects) help “to define that we are in a climate emergency.” On the other hand, it is largely acknowledged that making quantitative (...) (e.g., probabilistic) statements about abrupt climate changes and tipping points is extremely challenging. Some form of tension thus emerges from these two sides of abrupt climate changes and underlies the development of the very notion of climate tipping point. This tension finds its roots in the many epistemic and methodological issues that arise in the context of abrupt climate changes and tipping points. This contribution aims to provide an overview of these issues in a philosophy of science perspective; the expectation is that such a conceptual perspective can help to improve our understanding of the specific challenges related to abrupt climate changes and tipping points. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue against the claim that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation. To accomplish this aim, I shall first briefly discuss the motivation behind agent causation. Second, I shall highlight the differences between agent causation and event causation. Third, I shall begin briefly with the weaker claim held by Timothy O’Connor and Randolph Clarke that there is no good reason to believe that event causation is more fundamental than agent causation. Fourth, I (...) shall discuss the stronger claim held by E. J. Lowe that agent causation is more fundamental than event causation, and raise objections against the various arguments Lowe advances for the stronger claim. To the extent that my objections against Lowe’s stronger claim succeed, they raise questions for O’Connor’s and Clarke’s weaker claim. (shrink)

Review: J. E. Wolff. The metaphysics of quantity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 240 pp, $72.00 HB.

Background: Advocacy is an important role of psychiatric nurses because their patients are ethically, socially, and legally vulnerable. This study of Japanese expert psychiatric nurses’ judgments of interventions for patient advocacy will show effective strategies for ethical nursing practice and their relationship with Japanese culture. Objectives: This article explores Japanese psychiatric nurses’ decision to intervene as a patient advocate and examine their ethical, cultural, and social implications. Research design: Using semi-structured interviews verbatim, themes of the problems that required interventions were (...) inductively summarized by a qualitative analysis and their contexts and nursing judgments were examined. Participants and research context: The participants were 21 nurses with 5 or more years of experience in psychiatric nursing. Ethical considerations: The research was approved by Institutional Review Board of research site and study facilities. The participants gave written informed consent. Findings: Analysis of 45 cases showed that nurses decided to intervene when (a) surrounding people’s opinions impeded patients’ safety, (b) healthcare professionals’ policies impeded patients’ decision-making, (c) own violent behaviors impeded treatment and welfare services for patients, (d) own or families’ low acceptance of illness impeded patients’ self-actualization, (e) inappropriate treatment or care impeded patients’ liberty, and (f) their families abused patients’ property. Discussion: To solve conflicts between patients and their surrounding people, the nurses sought reconciliation between them, which is in accordance with Japanese cultural norms respecting harmony. When necessary, however, they protected patients’ rights against cultural norms. Therefore, their judgments cannot be explained by cultural norms alone. Conclusion: The findings indicate that the nurses’ judgments were based on respect for patients’ rights apart from cultural norms, and they first sought solutions fitting the cultural norms before other solutions. This seems to be an ethical, effective strategy if advocates know the culture in depth. (shrink)

Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash “After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!” – Friedrich Nietzsche[1] INTRODUCTION Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead!”[2] but lamented that his contemporaries remained living in the (...) shadow of God. For Nietzsche, the morality of his time was still based in the Christian tradition, even though faith in God was waning. Bioethics lives under a similar shadow: the shadow of Enlightenment Era-rationalism. Bioethics curricula focus on principles derived from Kantian deontology and utilitarianism. The allure of maintaining a moral framework that provides a rational method that can be handily applied to any situation remains strong. The principlist approach advanced by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress is taught to nearly all medical students in the United States,[3] and is essentially the canonical ethical framework of bioethics. In this model, the principle of autonomy is Kantian in nature, and the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence are utilitarian in nature.[4] Moreover, the presented framework is an approach that, when applied rationally to any healthcare scenario, will yield an outcome “considered moral.”[5] This reflects a faulty conception of philosophy that plagues much of bioethics, wherein the only contribution of philosophy pertinent to bioethics is moral philosophy elucidated by European thinkers in the Enlightenment Era. The landscape of moral philosophy has evolved significantly from the 18th century. However, the bioethical world has not kept up with the philosophical world, remaining instead in the shadow of antiquated moral thinking. Also lacking in bioethics are other disciplines of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, existentialism, and aesthetics, which are often given no consideration at all. The inclusion of both modern moral philosophy and other philosophical fields is necessary if bioethics is to survive its transition into modernity. l. The Shadow of Enlightenment Enlightenment Era philosophers such as Immanuel Kant argued that one need only employ reason to obtain knowledge; emotion bore no relevance when determining ethical behavior. Kant’s moral theories thus privileged a duty to act according to moral imperatives over feelings. Other Enlightenment Era philosophers such as John Locke developed systems that attempted to quantify human goods and human ills. This quantification potentially reduces human welfare and suffering to utility. Today, in the world of philosophy, such a “neutral analysis,” as Cora Diamond noted, is “dead or moribund.”[6] Bernard Williams remarked that such moral philosophy is “empty and boring,”[7] and G. E. M. Anscombe stated that it “no longer generally survives.”[8] And yet, just as the atheists in Nietzsche’s world dwelt in the moral code of a dead God, bioethicists still pursue a unified moral system that takes an input, applies some moral rules, and generates a moral outcome, like the four principles approach that Beauchamp and Childress laid out.[9] Some detractors of principlism take issue with their approach for not being unified enough and want to replace it with a procedural framework that is even more systematic and complicated. They argue that the resulting moral framework would be a “comprehensive decision procedure for arriving at answers”[10] that retains the “impartiality that is an essential part of morality.”[11] The shadow of rationalist morality has caused bioethical decision making to become detached and rigid when bioethics should concern itself with the humans whose lives it affects. A rational, divorced-from-emotion way of thinking ultimately fails to yield satisfactory results when decisions are made by and for emotional beings. Dr. Paul Farmer, among others, championed the idea that bioethics should be de-philosophized, as philosophy, cold and calculated, fails to adequately respond to the realities of those worst off.[12] Instead, Dr. Farmer emphasized the inclusion of the social sciences, like sociology and anthropology, in bioethics. Undoubtedly, Dr. Farmer was on the right track; bioethics should certainly engage directly with the people whom its decisions involve. If the narrow band of moral philosophy currently found in bioethics – that of stringent rationalism – were all that philosophy had to offer, I, too, would advocate for a de-philosophization. Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that to attempt to capture the complexity of moral thinking in a manner that employs reason alone and casts aside emotion is a “hopeless task,” like reconstructing a sharp image “from a blurred one.”[13] Unfortunately, bioethics is mired in the remnants of this hopeless task. To Dr. Farmer, the dominant moral framework was too restrictive and was unresponsive to the social and humanitarian needs of those whom bioethics is meant to help. As such, he wished to free bioethics from the shadow of a morality derived from rationalist thinkers. ll. Beyond Rationalism Like Nietzsche, who tried to resolve Europe’s post-religion vacuum by providing his society with a new way to live, Dr. Farmer wanted to replace the rationalist philosophy upon which bioethics was built with a “resocialization” of the field.[14] I agree with Dr. Farmer’s call for resocialization, as well as his denouncement of philosophy as it exists in bioethics. Evaluating risks and benefits along a predetermined array of moral principles is far too rigid and impersonal to guide what are often the most important decisions one will make. For Dr. Farmer, the most needed change was restoring the social element of bioethics. However, in advocating for this resocialization, Dr. Farmer casts philosophy as the antithesis of social science, noting that “few would regard philosophy … as a socializing discipline.”[15] I disagree. Rationalist moral philosophy may be lacking in socializing force, but there are other fields of philosophy that are responsive to our social reality. Rather than de-philosophizing bioethics, it makes more sense to replace the antisocial philosophies predominant in bioethics with prosocial philosophies better suited to it. Of course, the contribution of philosophy to bioethics is more than moral theories from the Enlightenment Era. There are more recent philosophical contributions from outside the field of moral philosophy that have roused bioethical interest. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, et al., argue for philosophy’s continued place in bioethics, citing Derek Parfit’s “non-identity problem,” which altered the landscape of reproductive ethics, and David Chalmers’ contributions to philosophy of consciousness, which have implications for the moral status of brain organoids.[16] Still, these are narrow applications of philosophy to highly specialized areas of bioethics, which not all bioethicists are inclined to delve into. Philosophy in bioethics should not be confined to niche applications in specialist fields but should influence all bioethical thought. Fortunately, there remains untapped a wealth of philosophical disciplines that pertains to exactly this. Philosophy of language investigates the nature of meaning and understanding in communication, which is a necessary social action. Successfully deciphering and conveying moral values in discourse is a bioethicist’s bread and butter, as is resolving disagreements and reaching agreements. Indeed, it is often the case that miscommunication lies at the root of an impasse between a doctor and a patient. An understanding of the nature of the disagreement would help resolve the conflict, as different types of disagreements require different interventions for resolution. For instance, a “substantive disagreement,”[17] in which two parties use the same terms in the same ways and have a fundamental disagreement on which outcome is more desirable, can be resolved only if one party yields to the other. On the other hand, a “merely verbal dispute,”[18] in which two parties use the same terms to represent entirely different concepts and values, requires standardization of terminological usage for its resolution. As such, no one can overstate the moral importance of successful communication in bioethics, and an exploration of language itself would prove invaluable to a bioethicist’s training. Existentialism is another subset of philosophy that acknowledges the social nature of human existence, noting that one’s being in the universe is concomitant with the existence of others sharing the same universe.[19] Thus, there is the recognition that whatever existence is, it is not complete without the existence of others. With this as a starting point, existentialists examined how to live meaningfully with others in this world. Since ethics crucially involves others, it is no surprise that existentialists pondered how to live moral lives. Existentialist conceptions of morality did not revolve around acting in accordance with a set of rules, but rather, recognized individual freedom in choosing how to act and emphasized acting authentically. In this vein, bioethicists should commit to doing what is right rather than committing to applying a set of principles. Existentialism, while part of the broader bioethics literature, is less common throughout bioethics curricula and deserves more prominence. Martin Heidegger, for instance, emphasized the difference between two types of thinking: “calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking.” Heidegger characterizes calculative thinking as a computation, wherein from some given starting conditions “definite results”[20] are determined, and contrasts this with meditative thinking, which he describes as “thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”[21] Heidegger was critical of the pervasiveness of calculative thinking, seeing it as the “ground of thoughtlessness,”[22] in which we only relate to the world in a meaningless, mechanical way. This is the emphasized type of thinking in rationalist conceptions of morality popular in bioethics; from a set of starting conditions, a series of rules are applied, and a moral outcome is calculated. Such a technique, however, discounts the personal meaning individuals place on the aspects of their lives relevant to their decision making, as well as the meaning in committing to doing what is right. Under calculative thinking, such a commitment is reduced to rote rule-following. A turn to meditative thinking would ensure that bioethical decisions comport with living meaningful lives. Even aesthetics, a discipline devoted to examining beauty and taste,[23] has a place in bioethics. Just as the viewing of a painting, the listening of a song, or the reading of a book elicits an effective response, hearing a patient’s story leaves an emotional imprint. The recounting of a traumatic moment imparts sadness, and a joyous occasion begets joy in the listener as well. As acknowledged in the field of everyday aesthetics, these aesthetic experiences often spur us to act:[24] The unsightly appearance of a polluted riverbank drives us to remove the trash; the presence of sorrow in one’s life drives us to ameliorate it. To be mindful of aesthetic experiences and allow them to affect us emotionally is paramount to the motivation of a bioethicist to serve the patient, not out of an obligation to a job description, but out of a desire to truly avail the patient of their anguish. For example, the new field of narrative medicine utilizes critical reading and literary techniques to train clinicians and bioethicists in emotional understanding and listening skills that stress the social aspects of medicine beyond rational analysis and decision making. CONCLUSION Dr. Farmer is absolutely correct; bioethics is in dire need of resocialization. It should not be the case that the justification for a moral action is essentially that “the rules say so,” or that simply by teaching such rules to medical students, the very act of making bioethical decisions that diverge from those determined by principles can be seen as an act of “bad faith … hubris or, worse, malpractice.”[25] As bioethicists are coming to realize, the rationalist philosophical traditions that bioethics was founded upon are past their expiry, and the time for change is now. Indeed, as Dr. Farmer urges, “socializing disciplines” like anthropology, history, political economy, and sociology are necessary to humanize the field of bioethics.[26] So too, however, can philosophy be a socializing discipline, if we know where to look. Bioethics should evolve. Its new goal should be to focus on meaningful human relationships, and to phase out rigid, impersonal modes of moral thinking. The limited sampling of unsatisfying moral theories from hundreds of years ago leaves many bioethics students cold, and it is easy to see why bioethicists are ready to part ways with philosophy. I believe this is a move in the wrong direction; there is a place for philosophy in the future of bioethics. Just as bioethics needs a resocialization, it is also needs of a re-philosophization. These enrichments complement one another. There is more to bioethics than mechanically determining the right course of action in a healthcare setting. Bioethics engages with the most ancient of philosophical questions: questions of what makes human existence meaningful, what makes us who we are, how we want to relate to others, how and why we feel, what our place in the world is, how we can communicate what we think, and why our moral intuitions are so compelling. We would be remiss if we did not begin to investigate additional contributions to morality from a wider range of philosophies that try to provide answers to such questions, as they offer a richness to moral thinking that cannot be gleaned from traditional bioethical approaches alone. - [1] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 109. [2] Nietzsche, 120. [3] Daniel C O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver Transplantation,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 47, no. 1 : 97, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhab039. [4] K. D. Clouser and B. Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15, no. 2 : 219–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/15.2.219. [5] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 97. [6] Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 : 168, https://doi.org/10.2307/468998. [7] Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Canto ed, xvii. [8] G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 : 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100037943. [9] Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed, 13. [10] Clouser and Gert, 233. [11] Clouser and Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” 235. [12] Paul Farmer and Nicole Gastineau Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics: A View from Below,” Developing World Bioethics 4, no. 1 : 17–41, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-8731.2004.00065.x. [13] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. Joachim Schulte, trans. P. M. S. Hacker, 4th edition, 40. [14] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. [15] Farmer and Campos, 20. [16] Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby et al., “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today,” The American Journal of Bioethics: AJOB, June 30, 2021, 3–5, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1940355. [17] Brendan Balcerak Jackson, “Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness,” Erkenntnis 79, no. S1 : 31–54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9444-5. [18] C. S. I. Jenkins, “Merely Verbal Disputes,” Erkenntnis 79, no. 1 : 11–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9443-6. [19] Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/existentialism/; Anita Avramides, “Other Minds,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/other-minds/. [20] Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, Harper Torchbooks, 46. [21] Heidegger, 46. [22] Heidegger, 45. [23] Nick Zangwill, “Aesthetic Judgment,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/aesthetic-judgment/. [24] Yuriko Saito, “Aesthetics of the Everyday,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/aesthetics-of-everyday/. [25] O’Brien, “Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced,” 112. [26] Farmer and Campos, “Rethinking Medical Ethics,” 20. (shrink)

Reputation is a key component in social interactions of group-living animals and appears to play a role in the establishment of cooperation. Animals can form a reputation of an individual by directly interacting with them or by observing them interact with a third party, i.e., eavesdropping. Elephants are an interesting taxon in which to investigate eavesdropping as they are highly cooperative, large-brained, long-lived terrestrial mammals with a complex social organisation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether captive Asian (...) elephants could form reputations of humans through indirect and/or direct experience in two different paradigms: a cooperative string-pulling task and a scenario requiring begging. Fourteen captive Asian elephants in Thailand participated in an experimental procedure that consisted of three parts: baseline, observation, and testing. In the observation phase, the subject saw a conspecific interact with two people—one cooperative/generous and one non-cooperative/selfish. The observer could then choose which person to approach in the test phase. The elephants were tested in a second session 2–5 days later. We found no support for the hypothesis that elephants can form reputations of humans through indirect or direct experience, but these results may be due to challenges with experimental design rather than a lack of capacity. We discuss how the results may be due to a potential lack of ecological validity in this study and the difficulty of assessing motivation and attentiveness in elephants. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of designing future experiments that account for the elephants' use of multimodal sensory information in their decision-making. (shrink)

Objective:Fear of Cancer Recurrence (FCR), Health Anxiety (HA), worry, and uncertainty in illness are psychological concerns commonly faced by cancer patients. In survivorship research, these similar, yet different constructs are frequently used interchangeably and multiple instruments are used in to measure them. The lack of clear and consistent conceptualization and measurement can lead to diverse or contradictory interpretations. The purpose of this scoping review was to review, compare, and analyze the current conceptualization and measurements used for FCR, HA, worry, and (...) uncertainty in the breast cancer survivorship literature to improve research and practice.Inclusion Criteria:We considered quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies of breast cancer survivors that examined FCR, HA, worry, or uncertainty in illness as a main topic and included a definition or assessment of the constructs.Methods and Analysis:The six-staged framework was used to guide the scoping review process. Searches of PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO databases were conducted. The principle-based qualitative analysis and simultaneous content analysis procedures were employed to synthesize and map the findings.Findings:After duplicate removal, the search revealed 3,299 articles, of which 82 studies met the inclusion criteria. Several critical attributes overlapped the four constructs, for example, all were triggered by internal somatic and external cues. However, several unique attributes were found (e.g., a sense of loss of security in the body is observed only among survivors experiencing FCR). Overall, findings showed that FCR and uncertainty in illness are more likely to be triggered by cancer-specific factors, while worry and HA have more trait-like in terms of characteristics, theoretical features, and correlates. We found that the measures used to assess each construct were on par with their intended constructs. Eighteen approaches were used to measure FCR, 15 for HA, 8 for worry, and 4 for uncertainty.Conclusion:While consensus on the conceptualization and measurement of the four constructs has not yet been reached, this scoping review identifies key similarities and differences to aid in their selection and measurement. Considering the observed overlap between the four studied constructs, further research delineating the unique attributes for each construct is warranted. (shrink)

In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma--including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies--Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what (...) constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant's proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage. - from the publisher. (shrink)

The focus of the paper is a discussion around one of the versions of scientific realism – ontic structural realism, which has gained popularity due to the development of quantum field theory. According to OSR, individual objects do not exist as ontological primitives. The ontology of objects and their properties is replaced by the ontology of structures and relations. The paper discusses the arguments of the proponents of OSR, describing it as the only way to preserve scientific realism in general (...) relativity and in quantum physics, which are reduced to mathematical structures with different symmetries. Five possible variants of the ontological relationship between structures and objects are analyzed in detail. Particular attention is paid to the eliminative and non-eliminative versions of OSR. If the former in principle excludes any existence of objects, then in the latter, objects receive their secondary existence due to relations, and their identity is reduced to nodes in the structures of relations. The main objections to OSR and the answers of its proponents are analyzed. It is shown that references to quantum physics are both its strengths and weaknesses of OSR, since they often superficially refer to the formalism of the theory, not accepting one or another of its interpretation. The paper argues the thesis that the extreme eliminative OSR, despite all its advantages, has several serious limitations. The best way out of the situation may be the development of the non-eliminative versions of OSR. In conclusion, it provides a critical analysis of one of these versions – moderate OSR of M. Esfeld and V. Lam, who believe that structures should have causal properties, something resembling a disposition. (shrink)

Self learning book for beginner on Buddhist debate and dialectic.

Octavia E. Butler was notoriously skeptical of utopian science fiction, and though she desired very much to write it, she found herself unable to do so "because I don't believe imperfect humans can form a perfect society."1 In interviews and in practice through her fiction Butler rejected the possibility of an ideal society and instead found her way to what Jim Miller has called "a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past."2 This is to say that, as a (...) black woman science-fiction writer who had witnessed the pains of systemic racism, patriarchy, and oppressive violence against the communities to which she belonged, and who was particularly affected by the Religious Right–backed racist and classist... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ippolito Desideri S.J.: Opere e BibliografiaFrancis V. TisoIppolito Desideri S.J.: Opere e Bibliografia. By Enzo Gualterio Bargiacchi. Roma: Institutum Historicum S.I., 2007. 303 pp.One of the great lacunae in the history of Buddhist-Christian relations has been a lack of attention to the work of missionaries who reported on Buddhist belief and practice in various parts of East and South Asia. As a result, the important work [End Page (...) 166] of the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) has not received the attention it deserves. There had been centuries of missionary contact with the Buddhists of Sri Lanka, Japan, and China, but it was not until the mission of Desideri to Tibet (1716–1721) that the connection between the Buddhism of Southeast Asia and that of China and Japan could be established on the basis of Desideri’s study of Tibetan historiographical materials.Desideri was the first European to become fluent in Tibetan, the first to understand Buddhist Mahayana scholasticism, the first to grasp the meaning of Vajrayana ritual and practice, the first to describe the political situation of Tibet, the first to engage in serious debate with Tibetan lamas, and the first to write extensively on Catholic Christianity in Tibetan. Desideri left a body of works in Tibetan that have been translated into Italian by Giuseppe Toscano, SX, and published by IsMEO during the 1980s. Yet Desideri’s greatest achievement, the translation into Latin of Je Tsong Kapa’s Lam Rim Chen Mo, seems to have been lost. Moreover, the great intellectual and spiritual accomplishments of this Jesuit missionary were not much appreciated in his own lifetime, in part because of the political situation of the Society of Jesus at that time. As a result, although the overall facts of Desideri’s life were never completely forgotten, his writings lay hidden in the Jesuit Archives at Rome at precisely the time when those engaging in contact with Asian religions would have benefited from his insights.The author of this summary of the works of Ippolito Desideri and of the entire corpus of materials related to his oeuvre, Enzo Gualtiero Bargiacchi, is convinced that even today the works of this eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary have something to offer. I would agree with Bargiacchi, because I am equally convinced that the Desiderian project is in many ways a better model for interreligious dialogue between Christians and Buddhists than any of the more recent models that have been proposed and implemented since the Second Vatican Council. Recent essays by Trent Pomplun and Michael Sweet in Buddhist-Christian Studies (vol. 26, 2006) have shown that exchanges between missionaries and Buddhists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were more profound and more fruitful than we are inclined to believe on the basis of superficial histories of the period. It seems that, with the suppression of the Jesuits (1773–1815), a certain retrenchment in the Catholic theology of grace operating outside the confines of the Church set in, muting the vibrant speculations of theologians seeking to make theological sense of the reports of missionaries such as Desideri.Desideri’s approach to the Buddhism of Tibet continues to challenge our own approach to interreligious dialogue. In the first place, Desideri underwent extensive linguistic, spiritual, and theological training as a young Italian Jesuit. He seems to have had unusual physical stamina and mental acuity, particularly for the study of languages. He learned Tibetan in about four months and immediately began writing a treatise, the Tho rangs, explaining Christianity to the Tibetan literati. As his Tibetan improved, he composed other, more sophisticated works in which he took up the topics on which Buddhists and Catholic Christians could agree (the contingency of the created world, the moral law) and on which they disagree (the law of karmic retribution, [End Page 167] emptiness, reincarnation, soteriology). Desideri sought to take seriously the philosophical positions of the lamas, with whom he lived and engaged in debate. He adapted his presentation of Christianity to the linguistic requirements of Tibet, and he did not hesitate to acknowledge the excellence he found in the moral character and intellectual refinement of the Tibetans. Finally, one detects a respect... (shrink)

Idealized mo dels of receptive elds (RFs) can be used as building blocks for the creation of p owerful distributed computation systems. The present rep ort concentrates on inv estigating the utility of collections of RFs in representing 3D objects under changing viewing conditions. The main requirement in this task is that the pattern of activity of RFs vary as little as p ossible when the object and the camera move relative to each other. I propose a method for representing (...) objects by RF activities, based on the observation that, in the case of rotation around a xed axis, dierences of activities of RFs that are prop erly situated with resp ect to that axis remain inv ariant. Results of computational exp eriments suggest that a representation scheme based on this algorithm for the choice of stable pairs of RFs would p erform consistently b etter than a scheme inv olving random sets of RFs. The proposed scheme may be useful under object or camera rotation, b oth for ideal Lam b ertian objects, and for real-world objects such as human faces. (shrink)

There is perhaps no greater constant in religious intuition and experience than the presence of light. In spiritual traditions East and West, light is not only ubiquitous but something that assumes strikingly similar forms in altogether different historical and cultural settings. This study examines light as an aspect of religiously valued experiences and its entailments for mystical theology, philosophy, politics, and religious art. The essays in this volume make an important contribution to religious studies by proposing that it is misleading (...) to conceive of religious experience in terms of an irreconcilable dichotomy between universality and cultural construction. An esteemed group of contributors, representing the study of Asian and Western religious traditions from a range of disciplinary perspectives, suggests that attention to various forms of divine radiance shows that there is indeed a range of principles that, if not universal, are nevertheless very widely occurring and amenable to fruitful comparative inquiry. What results is a work of enormous scope, demonstrating compelling cross-connections that will be of value to scholars of comparative religions, mysticism, and the relationship between art and the sacred. Contributors: * Catherine B. Asher * Raoul Birnbaum * Sarah Iles Johnston * Matthew T. Kapstein * Andrew Louth * Paul E. Muller-Ortega * Elliot R. Wolfson * Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan * Hossein Ziai. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:36 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Sonny Nordmarken Queering Gendering: Trans Epistemologies and the Disruption and Production of Gender Accomplishment Practices Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Beginning in the 1960s, scholars began to theorize gender as (...) a contextually specific process rather than a universal category reflecting an essential pre-discursive sex. Two interrelated traditions developed: a discursive approach, which theorized gender as performative, and an interactionist approach, which investigated the interactional achievement of gender. For Judith Butler, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”1 Gender is therefore performative : it is a series of effects produced through the repetition and citation of stylized acts, which are named via and thus produced through discourse ; discourse also produces the defining limits of subjects.2 Candace West and Don Zimmerman theorized gender as a “routine, methodical, 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), xv. 2. Butler, Gender Trouble; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Sonny Nordmarken 37 and recurring accomplishment” produced in social interaction.3 They observed how, in the relational process of “doing gender,” social actors display gender, presenting an appearance to others, who attribute gender by interpreting this appearance. In this article, I investigate how actors interactionally challenge and construct discursive structures in order to contribute to scholarship that analyzes the role language plays in such interactions.4 Following Sandy Stone, who suggests that transsexuals are not a class, nor a third gender, but a genre, “a set of embodied texts,” who, through their interpretation, might potentially disrupt dichotomous sexuality and gender categories, I examine the spaces in which the discursive and the interactional merge to investigate how gender minorities, as simultaneous subjects, texts, social actors, and cultural workers, queer hegemonic gender practices.5 I argue that members of trans linguistic communities and gender nonconforming individuals queer the normative gender process in two ways: by productively linguistically communicating third-person gender pronouns and by disruptively inhibiting gender’s hegemonic attribution. Lal Zimman has made parallel observations, explaining linguistic gender self-determination practices as a new cultural phenomenon, focusing on terminology for types of gendered persons, grammatical gender forms (i.e., pronouns), and lexical items that relate to embodied sex.6 My analysis builds on Zimman’s observations using sociological, performance 3. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 126. 4. For example, see Mimi Schippers, “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony,” Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 85–102. 5. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 296. The term “gender minorities ” encompasses individuals identifying with gender identity terms other than those they were assigned and individuals with gender nonconforming appearance. 6. See Lal Zimman, “Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language,” Journal of Language and Discrimination 1, no. 1 (2017): 84–105; Lal Zimman, “Trans People’s Linguistic Self-Determination and the Dialogic Nature of Identity,” in Representing Trans: Linguistic, Legal, and Everyday Perspectives, ed. Evan Hazenberg and Miriam Meyerhoff (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2017). 38 Sonny Nordmarken studies and performativity frameworks to theorize these practices. By approximating new gender pronoun-attribution norms that bring a trans queer paradigm to life in interactions and by disregarding their perceptions of each other’s bodies, actors accomplish gender pronouns linguistically, override hegemonic gender attribution norms, and reorganize gender accountability. These practices institutionalize a new interpretive frame and accountability structure through which social actors create and recognize a variety of gender expressions, identities, and pronouns, reworking performativity to produce gender minorities as subjects. I argue that this gendering-queering is a form of disidentificatory gender accomplishment. In addition, I... (shrink)

Quomodo versus lyrici legendi sint, plerumque inter metricos constat, licet de origine singulorum versuum vel colorum dubia moveantur; at ne illud quidem confirmari potest in genere illo peculiari, quo multae strophae Pindari et Bacchylidis et nonnullae poétarum scenicorum compositae sunt. Quod in talibus versibus maxime conspicuum est, hoc est, quod metra τоû σоυ et διπλασíоυ γéνоυς; in eis coniunguntur vel coniungi videntur, ita, ut ambitus utriusque partis aut par aut non multum maior minorve sit. lam antiqui metrici parum compertum habebant, (...) qua ratione eiusmodi versus explicarent. Cum maior pars ceterorum versuum lyricorum etiam post Alexandri aetatem in usu essent et doctrina grammaticorum hanc quoque materiam complecteretur, pauca versuum illorum vestigia remanebant, postquam chori lyrici et dramatici conticuerunt. Habemus quidem Meliambos Cercidae eodem genere carmina pangere conati, quo clarissimi illi veteres, sed eos perlegentes statim sentimus artem intermortuam non ab isto Megalopolitano nova vita donatam esse; nihil enim frigidius cogitari potest, quam si quis oda pindarica recitata ad Cercidae versus se convertat eosque alta voce pronuntiare conetur. Metrici graeci et romani praeter paucos versus eosque singillatim genus nostrum non tractant nee quisquam ex eorum numero de genere toto disseruit. Horatium et suamet ipsum arte prae ceteris excellentem et doctrina metrica haud mediocriter imbutum non aliter ac nos huius aevi philologos nescire, quomodo carmina pindarica ab ipso poeta componerentur, ex Oda notissima patet, in qua Pindarum quisquis studet aemulari frustra in re desperata desudare perhibetur. Ad universam lyricorum graecorum artem pertinent, quae a Cicerone in Oratore affirmantur, qui tamen clausulis orationis numerosae operam dans rem metricam non neglexit: sed in versibus res est apertior, quamquam etiam a modis quibusdam cantu remoto soluta esse videatur oratio, maximeque id in optima quoque eorum poëtarum, qui λυρικоí a graecis nominantur, quos, cum cantu spoliaveris, nuda paene remanet oratio. Causam hanc vel maximam esse puto in nullo alio carmina pangendi genere musicam, saltationem, metrum tam arte cohaesisse; cum poësis non iam pars habebatur υθμιξου, quod φθγγοδ, σχμα, συλλαβ definiebant, ut Aristoxeni terminis utar , via stabilita ambitum singulorum versuum ac colorum statuere conarentur et indoloem pedum metricorum conicendo indicarent. (shrink)

[vol. non numéroté] Notice. 1952. v. 1. Livres petit alif, grand alif ba' gim. 2. éd. 1967. v. 2. Livres dal, he zay, hha', tta' 2. éd. 1967. v. 3. Livres ya' et lam, et index alphabétiques des 3 volumes. 1948.

Türk ve İslam tarihinin kırılma noktalarından birisi 1040 yılında Selçuklular ile Gazneliler arasında cereyan eden Dandanakan Savaşı’dır. Savaşın ardından Selçuklular hızlı bir yükselişle özellikle Sünnî İslam coğrafyasında etkin ve belirleyici güç haline gelmiştir. Göçebe kültürden gelen ve bir oba hüviyetinde iken çok kısa bir sürede önlenemez bir şekilde hâkimiyet alanını Türkistan coğrafyasından Anadolu içlerine kadar genişleten Büyük Selçuklu Devleti, kurumsal olarak da olgunlaşmaya başlamıştır. Bu noktada hem merkezi yönetimde hem de vilayetlerde ortaya çıkan yetişmiş eleman ihtiyacını birçoğu daha önce Gazneli (...) devlet teşkilatında görev yapmış Fars asıllı devlet adamları karşılamıştır. Bu isimlerden birisi de ileride Nizâmülmülk adıyla şöhret bulacak ve namı isminin önüne geçecek olan Hasan b. Alî b. İshâk et-Tûsî’dir. Nizâmülmülk, devlet gücünün askeri alanda elde edilen zaferlere endekslendiği bir dönemde askerî, idarî, ilmî ve ekonomik alanda attığı adımlar ve aldığı tedbirlerle Büyük Selçuklu Devleti’nin kurumsallaşmasında son derece etkin bir isim olmuştur. Bu etkinlik neticesinde hem halk hem de devlet adamları nezdinde saygın bir yer edinmiştir. Bu çalışma çerçevesinde Nizâmülmülk’ün devlet bürokrasisi içerisindeki konumuna, hükümdar ve hanedan üyeleri ile olan ilişkilerine ve vezirlik sürecinde attığı adımların Selçuklu tarihine yansımalarına değinilecektir. Özet: Devlet kademesinde görev almaya Gazneliler Devleti’nin Horasan Valisi Ebü’l-Fazl Sûrî’nin yanında başlayan Nizâmülmülk, Horasan Bölgesi’nin Selçukluların kontrolüne geçmesiyle birlikte hizmetlerine Selçuklu Devleti’nde devam etmiştir. Çağrı Bey’in hizmetinde rüştünü ispat eden Nizâmülmülk, Çağrı Bey’in en güvendiği isimlerden biri haline gelmiştir. Öyle ki, Çağrı Bey ileride önce Horasan’ın sonrasında tüm Selçuklu yurdunun yönetimini üstlenecek olan oğlu Alparslan’ı Nizâmülmülk’e emanet etmiş, oğluna da Nizâmülmülk’ü bir baba olarak kabul etmesini, ona muhalefet etmemesini öğütlemiştir. Alparslan, babasının tavsiyeleri ve üvey kardeşi Süleyman ile giriştiği taht mücadelesinde gösterdiği yararlılık münasebetiyle devletin en önemli idari görevi olan vezirlik makamını Nizâmülmülk’e tevdi etmiştir. Bu dönemden itibaren vefatına kadar, yaklaşık 30 yıl kesintisiz bir süreyle Büyük Selçuklu Devleti’nin vezirliğini yapmış ve V./XI. yy.’ın ikinci yarısından itibaren Büyük Selçuklu siyasetinin en etkin figürü haline gelmiştir. Melikşah’ın tahta geçebilmesinin Nizâmülmülk ile ilişkilendirilmesi, onun döneminde elde edilen başarıların ve devlet sisteminin düzenlenmesi, şehirlerin imarı, ekonominin güçlenmesi gibi ülke içerisinde yaşanan olumlu gelişmelerin Nizâmülmülk’ün marifetiyle gerçekleştirildiğinin dillendirilmesi, Tanrı tarafından yeryüzünü yönetmek ve inşa etmek için seçildiği düşünülen bir sultan varken bir vezirin devlet için nimet olarak gösterilmesi sultanın vezirine bakışını etkilemiştir. Bu noktada üzerinde durulması gereken hususlardan birisi de Nizâmülmülk’ün kendisini nasıl gördüğü ve devlet içerisinde kendini nerede konumlandırdığıdır. Nizâmülmülk’ün Sultan Melikşah’a verdiği bir cevapta devletin geldiği noktayı ve sultanın mevcudiyetini kendi varlığıyla eşleştirmesi, tarihinin gördüğü en yetenekli vezirlerden biri olan Nizâmülmülk’ün özgüveninin son derece yüksek ve kendisini kudret sahibi olarak gördüğüne işaret etmektedir. Bu anlamlandırma halk nezdinde herhangi bir kutsiyeti bulunmayan vezirlik makamındaki bir kişinin, toplum nezdinde Allah tarafından seçildiğine inanılan kutlu kişiye meydan okutan gücü kendisinde hissetmesinin kaynağını sorgulatmaktadır. Aranan cevap Nizâmülmülk’ün vezirlik sürecinin çeşitli başlıklar altında ve bu başlıklara dair verilecek örneklerle incelenmesi neticesinde onun devletin iç işleyişine etkisinin tespitinde ve farklı kesimlerle kurduğu ilişkide saklıdır. Nizâmülmülk, Selçuklu tahtına karşı sıkı bir bağlılık göstermiştir. Bu bağlılığını lüzumu halinde savaş meydanında göğüs göğüse çarpışarak sergilemiş, gerekli olduğunda kıvrak zekâsı ile sorunları devlet için tehlikeli boyuta gelmeden çözmüş, siyasi öngörüsü ile aldığı tedbirler sayesinde devletin büyümesine katkı sağlamıştır. Onun bu sadakati ve samimiyeti, Selçuklu sultanları tarafından karşılık bırakılmamış, Alparslan vezirinin fikirlerine büyük önem verip tercihlerini bu doğrultuda şekillendirirken, aleyhine söylenen sözlerin hiçbirine kulak asmamıştır. Melikşah da, bir anlamda kendisine Selçuklu tahtını veren Nizâmülmülk’e gerekli hürmeti göstererek bütün devlet işlerinin yürütülmesini ona tevdi etmiş ve kendisini bir “baba” gibi gördüğünü ifade etmiştir. İlaveten Selçuklu tarihinde bir ilk olmak üzere Melikşah, Nizâmülmülk’e atabeg (el-emîrü’l-vâlid) unvanını vermiştir. Melikşah, Büyük Selçuklu tahtındaki ilk yıllarını, gençliğin etkisiyle, polo oynayıp, büyük av partileri düzenlemekle geçirmiş ve bundan dolayı devlet içerisinde bütün güç Nizâmülmülk’ün eline geçmiştir. Ortaya çıkan bu durum da “ülke resmen ve ismen sultanın olmakla birlikte gerçekte ‘Nizam’ına kavuştu.” ifadesiyle açıklanmıştır. Ayrıca Melikşah’ın saltanatı döneminde elde edilen askerî, siyasî ve ekonomik başarılar Nizâmülmülk’ün yeteneği ve devlet işlerinde attığı adımlara bağlanmıştır. Nizâmülmülk, hanedan ile kurduğu ilişkinin yanı sıra devlet kademesinde görev alan farklı zümrelerle de güven üzerine dayalı yakın bir ilişki biçimi geliştirmiştir. Örneğin, Nizâmülmülk’ün katıldığı askerî seferlerde bir nefer gibi askerlerin içerisinde savaşa katılması ordu içerisinde kendisine saygı duyulmasına yol açmıştır. Ayrıca, Melikşah ile Kirman Hâkimi Kavurd Bey arasındaki taht mücadelesinde Melikşah’ın safında yer almakla birlikte Kavurd Bey’i destekleyen bazı isimlerin yazdıkları destek mektuplarının ortaya çıkmasına engel olarak hem emirlerin korkularını yatıştırırmış hem de itibarını artırmıştır. Nizâmülmülk’ün yakın ilişki içerisinde olduğu bir diğer grup ilmiye sınıfı olmuştur. Bilge vezir, Tuğrul Bey döneminde Amidülmülk Kündürî tarafından takibata uğrayan ve baskılara maruz kalan ilim adamlarının yurtlarına dönebilmelerine imkân sağlamıştır. Bu ilim adamları da yurtlarına dönüşlerini sağlayan isme zihinlerinde ve gönüllerinde her zaman özel bir yer ayırmışlardır. Birçok âlimin çalışmalarını Nizâmülmülk’e ithaf etmesi, diğer saiklerle birlikte, bunun bir göstergesidir. Nizâmülmülk bir adım daha atarak, Sultan Alparslan ve Melikşah’ın müsaadeleriyle, bu ilim adamları için hâkim olunan coğrafyanın her tarafında ilimle iştigal edebilecekleri medreseler inşa etmiştir. Nizâmülmülk’ün adına nispetle Nizamiye Medreseleri olarak isimlendirilen bu medreselerde hem eğitim-öğretim kadrosuna hem de öğrenim süresi boyunca ve de mezun olduktan sonra öğrencilere sunulan imkânlar, insanların medreselere olan ilgisini arttırıyordu. Medreseler eliyle bir taraftan önceki dönemde yerlerinden edilen ve baskıya maruz kalan ilim adamlarına bir borç ödenip iade-i itibar sağlanırken diğer taraftan da Büyük Selçuklu Devleti’nin idari ve adli sisteminin ihtiyaç duyduğu yetişmiş insan gücü inşa edilmiştir. Nizâmülmülk, toplum lehine attığı adımlar ve sorunların çözümüne verdiği önem ile halkın desteğini sağlamıştır. Öyle ki insanların hayatları boyunca ona minnettar kaldığı vurgulanmıştır. Nizâmülmülk halkın sorunlarının çözümüne önem göstermiş ve onlarla yakından ilgilenmiştir. Nizâmülmülk’ün verdiği güven duygusu halkın hoşuna gitmiş ve toplum içerisinde kabul görmesine vesile olmuştur. Nizâmülmülk’ün bir diğer hasleti de fakirlere sofrasını açmasıdır. Böylece onlarla diyalog kurmuş ve gönüllerini kazanmıştır. Her yönüyle eksiksiz bir devlet adamı olan Nizâmülmülk, toplumun her türlü ihtiyacının çözümünü düşünmüş ve bu yönde adımlar atmıştır. Nizâmülmülk’ün toplumun her kesimi ile kurduğu samimi ve yakın ilişki o kadar büyük bir takdir ve beğeni toplamıştır ki bu durum Nizâmülmülk’ün toplum nezdinde sultan itibarı görmesine sebep olmuştur. İlaveten Selçuklu coğrafyasının her yerinden ve toplumun her kesiminden insanın kendisine yönelmesi hasebiyle Kâbe’ye benzetilmiştir. Nizâmülmülk, devlet kademesinde görev alan aile bireyleri, ilişki içerisinde olduğu âlimler, kendi ordusu ve emirleri ile bir güç odağı haline gelmiştir. Bunun sonucunda Nizâmülmülk, 11. yüzyılın son çeyreğinde rakipsiz bir şekilde Büyük Selçuklu siyasetinin en etkin figürü, Selçuklu yönetimini ve politikalarını belirleyen isim ve Selçuklu tarihinin en önemli olaylarında karar mercii olmuş ve sonuçta Selçuklu tarihine damga vurmuştur. İbnü’l-Esîr, Fatımî veziri Bedr el-Cemalî’nin kendisi için kullandığı sayısız lakabı kaydettikten sonra sadece Mısır’a hâkim olan bir devletin veziri bu kadar lakap kullanıyorsa Nizâmülmülk’ün “ilah”lık iddiasında bulunması gerekirdi diyerek hem Selçuklunun azametini hem de Selçuklu devletinde Nizâmülmülk’ün yerini göstermektedir. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a significant increase in stakeholder pressure on firms to be not only economically sustainable but also from an environmental and social perspective. Besides operational changes in practices and products companies have reacted toward this increased pressure from a strategic perspective through structural changes of their top management team. A recent addition to the TMT has been the appointment of the chief officer of corporate social responsibility. In this paper, we take a behavioral perspective and investigate how (...) the employment of a chief officer of CSR to the TMT impact on firm performance. Specifically, we explore how certain characteristics of the newly appointed chief executive of CSR impact on a firm’s financial performance. We collected secondary, longitudinal data of listed companies in the United States. Results indicate that appointing a chief executive of CSR does under certain conditions and characteristics result in financial performance benefits. Furthermore, the greatest financial performance benefits can be achieved if the appointee is female and has a CSR functional background. (shrink)

The strong weak truth table (sw) reducibility was suggested by Downey, Hirschfeldt, and LaForte as a measure of relative randomness, alternative to the Solovay reducibility. It also occurs naturally in proofs in classical computability theory as well as in the recent work of Soare, Nabutovsky, and Weinberger on applications of computability to differential geometry. We study the sw-degrees of c.e. reals and construct a c.e. real which has no random c.e. real (i.e., Ω number) sw-above it.

O artigo explora a aparente contradição, na filosofia de Schopenhauer, entre o significado moral e o diagnóstico do “pior dos mundos”. O filósofo afirma a compaixão como o único fundamento moral universal e concreto ao rejeitar o transcendentalismo e a intervenção de um Deus ou inteligência suprema. A compaixão emerge como fundamento universal da moral, capaz de mitigar o sofrimento e instaurar solidariedade em meio à “guerra de todos contra todos”. Embora frequentemente associado ao quietismo e ao conservadorismo, o pensamento (...) schopenhaueriano também revela um potencial transformador, ao enfatizar a força disruptiva da moralidade e da arte, as quais iluminam possibilidades de ação e convivência, mesmo no pior dos mundos. (shrink)

Resumo: Procurar analisar um conceito como o de Substância é, por si mesmo, entrar no coração da metafísica. Quando este conceito se situa no Corpus Aristotelicum a tarefa ganha outra dimensão pois implica uma leitura conjunta das suas obras principais, a saber, As Categorias e a Metafísica. Tal leitura conjunta levanta desde logo vários problemas: a autenticidade, a articulação entre os seus próprios livros, e sobretudo, a questão fundamental: se é possível fazer uma tal leitura. O propósito do nosso ensaio (...) é executar tal tarefa, levando-nos a efetuar uma desmontagem necessária e decisiva do conceito. A terminar, perceberemos como partir desta análise, o significado de substancia abriria para um modelo que persistiria durante séculos. (shrink)

Encore un livre sur saint Thomas, dira-t-on. Que pourrait ajouter celui-ci à tout ce qui existe déjà? Nous voudrions d'abord dans cet ouvrage répondre simplement mais en vérité, et en lisant les textes eux-mêmes de saint Thomas et d'Aristote, à certaines objections ou lieux communs entendus ou lus plus ou moins régulièrement, qui empêchent de commencer à vouloir connaître la pensée de frère Thomas. Il s'agit de mettre en évidence la grande richesse, pour l'intelligence et le coeur humains, de sa (...) pensée philosophique, de ses analyses, de ses manières de poser les questions et d'interroger le réel. Un préambule pour une introduction à la philosophie de Thomas, telle est essentiellement l'intention de ces quatre études et non pas une introduction à la philosophie thomasienne purement et simplement. Elles cherchent ainsi à définir l'esprit d'un apprentissage philosophique qui a aussi en lui tout ce qui convient pour aider à un apprentissage théologique et spirituel, mystique même. (shrink)