According to widespread opinion, the meaning of body part terms is determined by salient discontinuities in the visual image; such that hands, feet, arms, and legs, are natural parts. If so, one would expect these parts to have distinct names which correspond in meaning across languages. To test this proposal, we compared three unrelated languages—Dutch, Japanese, and Indonesian—and found both naming systems and boundaries of even basic body part terms display variation across languages. Bottom-up cues alone cannot explain natural language (...) semantic systems; there simply is not a one-to-one mapping of the body semantic system to the body structural description. Although body parts are flexibly construed across languages, body parts semantics are, nevertheless, constrained by non-linguistic representations in the body structural description, suggesting these are necessary, although not sufficient, in accounting for aspects of the body lexicon. (shrink)

This anthology brings together extracts that come from a wide variety of sources and that illustrate Western thought on the subject of humour and laughter from Antiquity to Late Modernity. The selection of texts is comprehensive, historically representative, and original, and includes writings from more than 40 different authors.

Power is a key concern of international politics, one that the discipline of International Relations has been carefully examining for decades. Political theorists, by contrast – or at least those working within the analytical tradition – have devoted comparatively little attention to the question of which exercises of power beyond borders are problematic. Instead, they have focused on global material deprivation and have elaborated increasingly sophisticated accounts of which principles should govern the distribution of natural and socio-economic resources across borders. (...) But why should we care so much about the distribution of material resources per se, when news that makes the headlines is all about power? (shrink)

Solidarity, Religious Freedom and COVID-19: The Case of the Ultra-Orthodox Sects in Israel The article discusses the tension between social solidarity and religious freedom as demonstrated by the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox sects in Israel to comply with COVID-19 regulations. The article provides a detailed description of the refusal to comply with the regulations restricting mass prayer services in synagogues and studying Torah in the yeshivas, thus interfering with the ultra-Orthodox religious life. The article suggests possible explanations for that refusal, (...) based on either religious beliefs or a socio-political claim to autonomy, and discusses whether the polity should be willing to tolerate such a refusal on the basis of the cultural defence. The article concludes that despite the drastic restrictions on religious life caused by the social distancing regulations, and the special importance of freedom of religion, reducing the pandemic’s spread called for awarding priority to solidarity over religious freedom, and the enforcement of social solidarity legal duties – the social distancing regulations – on all. (shrink)

The most illustrious tradition of romantic poetry on oriental subjects, from the Westöstlicher Diwan to Rückert, Platen, Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, was inspired essentially by Indian and Persian epic, lyric and gnomic poetry, referring only to a minor degree to the ancient poetry of the Arabs—although it is precisely Rückert to whom we are indebted for a version of the Hamâsa, a famous anthology of pagan Arabic poetry. Goethe approached this anthology through the versions of Jones, described it briefly (...) in the “Notes and Commentary” to the Diwan, and among other sections retold one tale splendidly in verse: the “Song of Vengeance” of Taâbbata Sharran. Here the force of his genius lifted him well above the bristling Latin of Freytag, through whom he had come to know the song, and brought him very close in lyrical intuition to the original of this masterpiece of debated authenticity. But on the whole, the poetic heritage of the ancient Arabs was not adequately echoed in the literature of the romantic age. Rückert himself, inspired by pagan Arabic poetry, is read by few people today; and the poetry that was his model is studied rather by philologists, for its documentary value. Theodor Noeldeke, at the beginning of his classic study of the Mu'allakat, declared frankly: “It is questionable whether the aesthetic pleasure provided by the study of ancient Arabic poetry is worth the great pains required even to approach an understanding of the same.” It is difficult to stand in opposition to the authority of the “old master” of German orientalists, who confessed that “the more he studied the Semites, the more he loved the Greeks.” Even the most humble author of these lines dares to appropriate for himself the lines of Noeldeke; and yet, beyond every comparison, which cannot help resulting unfavorably for the ancient poets of the desert, he who knows how to love and seek out poetry will find in them authentic artistic values. Even the harsh pagan song can in certain passages interest us, fill us with enthusiasm, and move us. (shrink)

A woman presents to her physician with a newly diagnosed condition that in her considered and informed judgment requires an elective surgical procedure. The physician, after speaking with her, agrees that this is an acceptable option. The procedure in question is in fact one of the commonest surgeries performed on American women. The physician is also aware that although the procedure is deemed elective in this and in most cases, research has shown that the consequences of not providing the procedure (...) when it is requested can be severe in terms of both physical and emotional sequelaewhich itself can add to the complexity and risk of the procedure. Presented with this option, the patient expresses dismay but also her resigned commitment to follow through with this referral, and leaves the office in tears. (shrink)

An emerging discipline depends on a rich and multifaceted supply of theoretical and methodological approaches. The diversity of perspectives offered in this book will serve as a guide for future explorations in action science.

Born to Rebel is an innovative and important work with much to say to philosophers of science, as well as historians and sociologists of science. Sulloway uses, successfully, quantitative statistical methods that others have despaired of using to analyze the complexities of historical change. In particular, he investigates scientific decision-making during scientific controversies with a multivariate analysis. The goal is to discern, precisely, the contribution of factors such as religious belief, social class, age, years of education, nationality, sex and personality.

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensification as a distinct functional category in the domain of modification. The eighteen papers of the volume contribute to this aim with a new approach (mainly corpus-based). They focus (...) on intensification from different perspectives (both synchronic and diachronic) and theoretical frameworks, concern ancient languages (Hittite, Greek, Latin) and modern languages (mainly Italian, German, English, Kiswahili), and involve different levels of analysis. They also identify and examine different types of intensifiers, applied to different forms and structures, such as adverbs, adjectives, evaluative affixes, discourse markers, reduplication, exclamative clauses, coordination, prosodic elements, and shed light on issues which have not been extensively studied so far. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Chirographen präsentieren medial komplexe Situationen. Ihr Text, ihr Beschreibstoff, ihre Bildlichkeit, ihr Layout und das Siegel tragen ebenso zur Vermittlung ihrer Bedeutung bei wie ihre Herstellung. Wie diese Elemente eingesetzt werden, in welcher Weise sie wirksam werden und welche Bedeutung ihnen beigemessen wird, ist Gegenstand dieses Beitrags. Ausgehend von französischer Überlieferung aus dem 12. Jahrhundert wird gezeigt, dass Chirographen besonders wirkungsvolle Formen der Zurschaustellung von Verträgen sein können, die in besonderem Maße Körperlichkeit ausstellen und durch das Oszillieren zwischen dem (...) Ganzen und seine Teilen wie auch zwischen physisch Präsentem und Transzendentem Status und Autorität des Adels inszenieren. (shrink)

As for Avicenna the human soul is a complete substance which does not inhere in the body nor is imprinted in it, asserting its survival after the death of the body seems easy. Yet, he needs the body to explain its individuation. The paper analyzes Avicenna's arguments in the De anima sections, V, 3 & 4, of the Shifā ' in order to explore the exact causal relation there is between the human soul and its body and confronts these arguments (...) with relevant passages in the Metaphysics. It argues that the causal relation between body and soul remains obscure and that, though Avicenna claims that there is a personal immortality and that the disembodied soul remains individuated, he does not provide a satisfactory ontological account for it. (shrink)

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In _Health Humanities Reader_, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians (...) to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection’s contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, _Health Humanities Reader_ truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness. (shrink)

Internalists face the following challenge: what is it about an agent's internal states that explains why only these states can play whatever role the internalist thinks these states are playing? Internalists have frequently appealed to a special kind of epistemic access that we have to these states. But such claims have been challenged on both empirical and philosophical grounds. I will argue that internalists needn't appeal to any kind of privileged access claims. Rather, internalist conditions are important because of the (...) way in which we expect them to act as causal mediators between states of the world, on the one hand, and our beliefs and actions on the other. (shrink)

The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st (...) and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation. (shrink)

Appropriate concerns about cost and unequal access to healthcare have resulted in the creation of powerful managed networks seeking to share the risks of high healthcare costs among plans, providers, and patients. Much to their credit, these managed networks have slowed the rise in healthcare spending by as much as 44% in markets with high HMO penetration. However, whether these savings will materially improve access and quality remains to be seen.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and advisor to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca—whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson—to his (...) rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities. _ On Benefits_, written between 56 and 64 CE, is a treatise addressed to Seneca’s close friend Aebutius Liberalis. The longest of Seneca’s works dealing with a single subject—how to give and receive benefits and how to express gratitude appropriately—_On Benefits _is the only complete work on what we now call “gift exchange” to survive from antiquity. Benefits were of great personal significance to Seneca, who remarked in one of his later letters that philosophy teaches, above all else, to owe and repay benefits well. (shrink)

We describe a set of two computer‐implemented models that solve physics problems in ways characteristic of more and less competent human solvers. The main features accounting for different competences are differences in strategy for selecting physics principles, and differences in the degree of automation in the process of applying a single principle. The models provide a good account of the order in which principles are applied by human solvers working problems in kinematics and dynamics. They also are sufficiently flexible to (...) allow easy extension to several related domains of physics problems. (shrink)

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)

The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and (...) distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history--the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences (...) worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences. (shrink)

The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism. In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products (...) of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief. (shrink)

While much attention has been paid to the role of divine inspiration in the case of Socrates within Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, this paper examines Plato’s late period works and argues that despite the drastic changes in methodology found in dialogues such as the Sophist and Philebus, Plato still acknowledges, and emphasizes, the role played by divine inspiration in regard to Socratic knowledge.

Professionalism, like common sense, remains a timeless ingredient in the ethically successful practice of medicine in the twenty-first century. Professional ideals are particularly relevant in times of economic and social upheaval, medicolegal crises, provider shortages, and global threats to the public health. The American Board of Internal Medicine specifies professionalism as “constituting those attitudes and behaviors that serve to maintain patient interest above physician self-interest.” Because of its transcendent nature, professionalism, like ethics, is also considered “a structurally stabilizing, morally protective (...) force in society.” Professions enjoy tremendous deference and autonomy in exchange for three unwritten but prerequisite promises: expert knowledge, self-regulation, and a fiduciary responsibility to place the needs of the client ahead of self-interest. Many educators suggest that professionalism includes additional characteristics such as honesty, altruism, temperance, commitment, integrity, and suspension of self-interest. However, there are large gaps in providing more user-friendly and operational models of professionalism to learners and evaluators at all levels of the academic hierarchy. (shrink)

La comparaison entre vieux-saxon (vsax), et vieil-anglais (va), deux langues germaniques historiquement et linguistiquement proches, concerne dans cet article le groupe nominal au sens de Jean Fourquet (1966, publié 2000 et 201), avec une détermination ∅ ou autre que ∅, ayant trait à Dieu. Les deux textes comparés datent du IXème siècle, le poème en vieil-anglais étant la traduction de la Genèse en vieux-saxon. De ces poèmes il ne reste que certains fragments, avec une partie commune de 25 vers allitérés. (...) A partir de ces 25 lignes communes, on essaiera de déterminer le système de détermination propre à chaque langue, qui se situe à la croisée entre un système ancien et un système nouveau. Une évolution est ainsi à l’œuvre, qu’il s’agit de reconnaître dans son caractère dynamique, à partir de la façon dont Dieu est désigné en vsax comme en va. Les appellations de Dieu sont comparables sur les plans morphologique, syntaxique, lexical. Des termes du domaine séculier sont utilisés dans le domaine religieux. La différence entre les deux textes renvoie à la façon dont chaque langue tire parti des mêmes procédés. (shrink)

This article studies the fundamental shift between Paul Ramsey’s and Oliver O’Donovan’s ethics of war and so reintroduces Hegel into the debate on political ethics. The topic is approached through the notion of divine-human and political mediation, whereby Hegel’s early movement from Christology to dialectics provides the analytical framework. The article first studies the theo-logic of Paul Ramsey’s early agapist notions of war up to his transformist period. It then traces how O’Donovan fundamentally transforms Ramsey’s dialectical framework within that of (...) narrated Christology. O’Donovan’s focus culminates in the unified reign of Christ and the overcoming of Hegel’s dialectics. But it is argued that the transition to Hegel’s and Ramsey’s perspectives is constantly required in order to prevent Christian ethics from becoming ossified. The article thus hopes to initiate a comprehensive, because logical-systematic discussion of contemporary wars and war machines, especially in critical conversation with philosophers and military practitioners. (shrink)