A model that suggests reconsolidation of traumatic memories as a mechanism of change in therapy is important, but problematic to generalize to disorders other than post-traumatic and acute-stress disorder. We suggest that a more plausible mechanism of change in psychotherapy is acquisition of adaptive emotion regulation strategies.

There have been multiple factors involved in the decline of the anatomy course’s central role in medical education over the last century. The course has undergone a multitude of changes, in large part due to the rise in technology and cultural shifts away from physical dissection. This paper argues that, as the desire of medical schools to introduce clinical experiences earlier in the curriculum increased, anatomy courses began implementing changes that would align themselves with the shifting culture towards incorporating humanistic (...) values early on in the medical curriculum. One of these changes, argued as a product of this shift, included calling a cadaver a ‘patient’ and introducing the cadaver as a student’s ‘first patient’. This change has been seen in different universities and textbooks. This paper argues that the use of the words ‘patient’ to describe the cadaver in order to promote principled habits in medical students may in fact create an environment that does the opposite. By equating an environment in which the subject of dissection is lifeless and incapable of participation, and the space is discouraging of emotions and conducive to untested coping mechanisms to the clinical environment through using the word ‘patient’, values like detached concern, a controversial practice in medicine, can be implicitly encouraged. An ethical analysis of the use of the word ’patient’ to describe the cadaver shows that this practice can promote unethical habits in students and that changing this aspect of anatomy lab culture could improve ethical dispositions of future physicians. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of the level of religious observance on the attitudes toward end‐of‐life (EOL) decisions and euthanasia of Jews in Israel—where euthanasia is illegal—as compared to Jews living in the USA, in the states where euthanasia is legal. A self‐reporting questionnaire on religiosity and personal beliefs and attitudes regarding EOL care and euthanasia was distributed, using a convenience sample of 271 participants from Israel and the USA. Findings show that significant differences were found in attitudes between Jews (...) of different levels of religious observance with respect to patient autonomy, right to die with dignity, and dying in familiar and supportive surroundings. The USA and Israeli Jews have similar knowledge regarding EOL care and expressed similar attitudes and perceptions toward the issues of authority of medical staff and religious figures and patient's autonomy. Findings indicate that the level of religious observance has more potency in shaping their attitudes and perceptions of EOL decisions than the state law. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings with regard to multicultural health systems and providing practical recommendations. (shrink)

The last 20 years have seen the development of a new form of therapy, compassion focused therapy. Although CFT has a growing evidence base, there have been few studies of CFT outside of an Anglo-European cultural context. In this paper, we ask: Might a CFT-based approach be of value for Indigenous Australians? If so, what kind of cultural adaptations might be needed? We report the findings from a pilot study of an arts-based compassion skills training group, in which usual CFT (...) group processes were significantly adapted to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians. At face value, CFT appeared to be a promising approach to enhancing the social and emotional wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. However, despite initial consultations with Indigenous health professionals, the first attempts to offer a more conventional group-based CFT to Indigenous clients were largely unsuccessful. Following a review and advice from two Indigenous clients, we combined elements of CFT with visual arts to develop a new approach, “arts-based compassion skills training”. This paper reports an evaluation of this pilot ABCST group. The group had 6 × 4 h sessions of ABCST, facilitated by two psychologists and two artists. There were 10 participants, who attended between 2 and 6 sessions: five were clients, five were health professionals. Between 1 and 3 months later, six of the participants were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of interview data identified that two key processes—creating a positive group atmosphere and channeling compassion skills training through the medium of visual arts—led to four positive outcomes for participants: planting the seeds of new understandings, embodying the skills of compassion, strengthening relationships with others, and evolving a more self-compassionate relationship. We suggest that the preliminary results are sufficiently encouraging to warrant further development of ABCST in Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse as disorders of volition. Science tries to understand human action from two perspectives, the cognitive and the volitional. The volitional approach, in contrast to the more dominant "outside-in" studies of cognition, looks at actions from the inside out, examining how actions are formed and informed by internal conditions. In Disorders of (...) Volition, scholars from a range of disciplines seek to advance our understanding of the processes supporting voluntary action by addressing conditions in which the will is impaired. Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychiatrists examine the will and its pathologies from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, offering a conceptual overview and discussing specific neurological and psychiatric conditions as disorders of volition. After presenting different conceptual frameworks that identify agency, decision making, and goal pursuit as central components of volition, the book examines how impairments in these and other aspects of volition manifest themselves in schizophrenia, depression, prefrontal lobe damage, and substance abuse. Contributors George Ainslie, Tim Bayne, Antoine Bechara, Paul W. Burgess, Anna-Lisa Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Stéphanie Dubal, Philippe Fossati, Chris Frith, Sam J. Gilbert, Peter Gollwitzer, Jordan Grafman, Patrick Haggard, Jay G. Hull, Marc Jeannerod, Roland Jouvent, Frank Krueger, Neil Levy, Peter F. Liddle, Kristen L. Mackiewitz, Thomas Metzinger, Jack B. Nitschke, Jiro Okuda, Adrian M. Owen, Chris Parry, Wolfgang Prinz, Joëlle Proust, Michael A. Sayette, Werner X. Schneider, Natalie Sebanz, Jon S. Simons, Laurie B. Slone, Sean A. Spence. (shrink)

We investigated how age of faces and emotion expressed in faces affect young (n=30) and older (n=20) adults’ visual inspection while viewing faces and judging their expressions. Overall, expression identification was better for young than older faces, suggesting that interpreting expressions in young faces is easier than in older faces, even for older participants. Moreover, there were age-group differences in misattributions of expressions, in that young participants were more likely to label disgusted faces as angry, whereas older adults were more (...) likely to label angry faces as disgusted. In addition to effects of emotion expressed in faces, age of faces affected visual inspection of faces: Both young and older participants spent more time looking at own-age than other-age faces, with longer looking at own-age faces predicting better own-age expression identification. Thus, cues used in expression identification may shift as a function of emotion and age of faces, in interaction with age of participants. (shrink)

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a certain (...) property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)

I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth‐value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.

In these writings by one of our most creative legal philosophers, Meir Dan-Cohen explores the nature of the self and its response to legal commands and mounts a challenge to some prevailing tenets of legal theory and the neighboring moral, political, and economic thought. The result is an insider's critique of liberalism that extends contemporary liberalism's Kantian strand, combining it with postmodernist ideas about the contingent and socially constructed self to build a thoroughly original perspective on some of the (...) most vital concerns of legal and moral theory.Dan-Cohen looks first at the ubiquity of legal coercion and considers its decisive impact on the nature of legal discourse and communication, on law's normative aspirations and claim to obedience, and on the ideal of the rule of law. He moves on to discuss basic values, stressing the preeminence of individual identity and human dignity over the more traditional liberal preoccupations with preference-based choice and experiential harm. Dan-Cohen then focuses more directly on the normative ramifications of the socially constructed self. Fundamental concepts such as responsibility and ownership are reinterpreted to take account of the constitutive role that social practices--particularly law and morality--play in the formation of the self.Throughout, Dan-Cohen draws on a uniquely productive mix of philosophical traditions and subjects, blending the methods of analytic philosophy with the concerns of Continental philosophers to reconceive the self and its relation to ethics and the law. (shrink)

The nonidentity problem is a deep puzzle challenging the moral intuition that what is bad must be bad for someone. The first part of the paper constructs a new theory of harming, whereas the second part builds on the conclusions of the first to offer a new solution to the NIP. The first part discusses the neglected question of when a burden inflicted in the context of overall benefitting can be discretized as a separate entity—only when it can, is it (...) possible to identify the burden as harm, and only then is it possible to harm in bringing into overall good existence. The second part explains how, in those cases where creating is indeed harming, we can use the logic of concept expansion to construct a concept of wronging that applies to creation cases. (shrink)

This article focuses on Claudio Magris’s reflections on time by interrogating two time-related notions from which his entire narrative oeuvre develops: the idea of eternal con-temporariness and his reworking of Carlo Michelstaedter’s concept of ‘persuasion’. Furthermore, it aims to explore the implications of these notions for the ways in which Magris revisits and represents both the familiar and the less familiar places that make up the fabric of his literary journeys. The discussion of Magris’s use of the two notions of (...) time begins with Danube, where he recounts the experiences of the traveler-narrator on the vast itinerary from the river’s source to the Black Sea. Following the curved and sinuous path that runs parallel to the Danube’s riverbanks, the traveler-narrator records his reflections on the ways in which the historical and intellectual European figures, as well as the ordinary characters around which the book centers, have dealt with the experience of time. In his two later novels, Microcosms and Blindly, Magris picks up the theme of reflection again as it continues to shape his wanderings through global and familiar places. In the short stories of Tempo curvo a Krems [Curving time in Krems], in contrast, the aging characters have somehow come to a standstill after migrating from Central and Eastern Europe to northern Italy. Here, Magris seems to take a different perspective, since the elderly protagonists have renounced the search for persuasion and tend to withdraw from life. At the same time, however, the narrator’s conjectures from the seashore again lead the reader back to the very beginning of Magris’s long-life literary journey “through time and against time.” By evoking the image of the river’s delta and the narrator’s sense of uncertainty when the latter faces the open sea, Magris reaffirms once again the importance of preserving a sense of the beyond through which to discover the complexity and uncertainty of one’s own identity. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII Coda Appendix Acknowledgements.

I critically discuss two kinds of argument in favour of ontological pluralism and argue that they fail to show that ways of being are explanatorily fruitful.

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

This book explores the ethical dilemma clinicians may face when disclosing a diagnosis of atypical sex. The moment of disclosure reveals an epistemic incompatibility between scientific fact and social meaning in relation to sex. Attempting to assess the bio-psychosocial implications of this dilemma highlights a complex historic antagonism between fact and meaning making satisfactory resolution of this dilemma difficult. Drawing on David Hume, WVO Quine and Michel Foucault the author presents an integrative model, which views scientific fact and social meaning (...) as codetermining threads in one fabric of knowledge. From this epistemic perspective, the ethical dilemma is understood as a tear in the fabric signifying a rupturing of ontological integrity. To mend this tear and resolve the ethical dilemma three metaphysical perspectives are considered: essentialism, naturalism and emergentism. The book’s unique features include: an exploration of the impact of diagnostic disclosure on people with atypical sex ; a synthesis of the epistemic perspectives of social and natural science facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration; a critical evaluation of three metaphysical perspectives on atypical sex ; the application of Hume’s epistemological and moral distinctions to contemporary biomedicine and bioethics. The book’s target audience includes academics, students and professionals whose work intersects the natural and social sciences, and individuals interested in the metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics of sex. (shrink)

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life.Although geological time can (...) leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone's endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity's disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature "out there," a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation.Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept --"Geophilia," "Time," "Force," and "Soul"--Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone's potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the "petrification" of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls.Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland--a land that, writes the author, "reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.". (shrink)

This volume brings together a variety of scholars and intellectual disciplines from around the world and across academia. Differences of person, place, culture, history and expertise do not alienate but rather fructify the perspectives of the ongoing conversation of the politics of humanity. The latter is a struggle for justice, for human rights, to be sure, but also for the availability, sustainability and fair distribution of food, clothing, shelter, health care, culture and living environment, and all the concrete conditions necessary (...) to make political rights real and ensure they are flourishing. A politics of humanity therefore demands a humane justice, where everyone universally and each person singularly is accorded respect, where equality, liberty and solidarity intersect supportively. It is not despite differences but because of them that there is discourse, dialogue and conversation, and the aspirations of the present volume. Each author, each chapter raises insights and arguments, solicits a hearing, provokes questions and discussion, while not losing sight of their concrete conditions, the learning, dedication and sensitivity, the cooperation and collegiality that guide research, stimulates truth through constructive criticism, and makes justice possible and worthwhile, despite shortcomings and the great labors—of thought and action—that remain to be done. (shrink)

This paper links two domains of recent interest in science and technology studies, complexity and ignorance, in the context of knowledge practices observed among synthetic biologists. Synthetic biologists are recruiting concepts and methods from computer science and electrical engineering in order to design and construct novel organisms in the lab. Their field has taken shape amidst revised assessments of life’s complexity in the aftermath of the Human Genome Project. While this complexity is commonly taken to be an immanent property of (...) biological systems, this article presents an epistemological view of complexity according to which complexity relates to a specific scientific theory or model and refers to that which exceeds the theory or model’s explanatory power. This epistemological view allows us to narrate a particular story about the changing relationship between biology and synthetic biology in the last decade and accounts for early knowledge practices in synthetic biology that “ignored” biology. This article further argues that while the failure of ignorance to produce clear-cut results for synthetic biologists has led practitioners back to biology, the entanglements between different pragmatic orientations and ways of knowing trouble the implications of this return for assessments of the complexity of biological systems. (shrink)

The immune system, to protect the body, must discriminate between the pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes and respond to them in different ways. How the mucosal immune system manages to make this distinction is poorly understood. We suggest here that the distinction between pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes is made by an integrated system rather than by single types of cells or single types of receptors; a systems biology approach is needed to understand immune recognition.

En 1980, lors d'une décade de Cerisy consacrée à Derrida, Lyotard somme ce dernier de confronter son hégélianisme à celui d'Adorno et de s'expliquer sur la possibilité de l'enchaînement du sens "après Auschwitz". En 1982, lors d'une décade dédiée à Lyotard et consacrée à la question "Comment juger?", Derrida répond et ne répond pas : il s'interroge sur le "pathos" de la question adornienne de Lyotard, mais il ne se réfère pas à la Dialatique négative. Cette querelle forme le foyer (...) à partir duquel une analyse méthodique des lectures et non-lectures lyotardiennes et derridiennes d'Adorno devient possible. Avec cette étude, Michèle Cohen-Halimi invite à penser l'histoire de la philosophie sous le signe du conflit. Derrida et Lyotard dans leur rapport et non-rapport philosophique mutuel comme dans leur relation contrastée à la Dialectique négative se font, à leur insu, les historiens d'un temps de la pensée qui est encore le nôtre. Car toute une part de notre contemporanéité philosophique procède de cette non-réception de la Dialectique négative et apparaît sous trois traits caractéristiques : Lyotard a traduit l'innommable adornien par l'imphrasable puis par la phrase-affect ; cette traduction toujours plus affine du régime kantien de définition de l'irreprésentable a fini par produire une "esthétisation" de l'innommable adornien. L'alternative philosophique est ainsi devenue : soit dire l'incommensurable d'Auschwitz et le dire de telle sorte qu'il soit dit, soit dire cet incommensurable pour que seule soit dite sa non-dicibilité, et qu'il ne soit pas dit. Pour Adorno, c'est la possibilité de dire l'impossibilité qu'il faut pousser et non l'impossibilité de dire qu'il faut formuler. Le second trait est corrélatif du premier : l'antinomie française Kant/Hegel a été le dispositif opératoire le plus récurrent dans la querelle de Cerisy, l'investissement anti-hégélien d'une certaine tradition hétérologique française s'y est montré agissant. L'"irreprésentable", l'"intraitable" se sont traduits dans le vocable "Juif", et ont constitué ce vocable en synonyme de la différence de toutes les différences ou différence exemplaire. Derrida s'est singularisé par sa mise en garde contre l'exemplarité juive, mais cette problématisation nuancée s'est étrangement maintenue à grande distance de la question soulevée par la Dialectique négative : comment la métaphysique pourrait-elle ne pas avoir été entamée, affectée, bouleversée, par la barbarie? (shrink)

S'agissant de notre rapport à l'au-delà, nous sommes les jouets de nos images. Alors que l'on y croit, au fond, on finit par détruire cette " réalité " qu'est l'au-delà, en en faisant une réalité familière. Trop familière pour être encore l'au-delà. Mais il est possible de penser un rapport de l'homme à la mort qui n'abolisse ni la vie ni l'homme. Si tel est le cas, cela voudrait dire qu'il existe une possibilité inédite de vie, que nous ne soupçonnons (...) pas encore, donnant à penser l'au-delà au-delà de tout ce que nous pouvons penser encore à cet égard. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCynthia B. CohenThe explosion of genetic information in recent years raises a fundamental question for us as individuals and as members of various communities: Have we an obligation to know as much as possible about our genes—or should we bypass genetic information, leaving it hidden? A terrible ambivalence grips us when it comes to our genes. We want to respond to the Socratic call to know ourselves by learning (...) what lies on the minute threads of the chromosomes spun into the nuclei of our cells. At the same time, we fear obtaining that information, for it seems functionally equivalent to the oracle at Delphi, revealing a distinct and dangerous knowledge we would rather not have.What is it about genetic knowledge that creates such ambivalence in us? Genetic knowledge is empowering. It offers us the freedom to shape the contours of our lives and those of our families. At the same time, genetic knowledge is disempowering. It bears a peculiar mark of inevitability, telling us that we have no control over our present or future in important respects. Better to hide from such overbearing information than to suffer the assaults on our freedom it seems to create.We can see this ambivalence about genetic knowledge appearing again and again as the field of genetics has grown. Initially, genetics emerged as a tool for understanding how traits and diseases are passed from generation to generation. We used genetic testing mostly to enhance our personal decision making about reproductive matters. It was at this time that our hesitancy about pursuing such testing first arose, for we feared being put into a position of asking such painful questions as, “Knowing what we do about our genes, should we have children?” As the scope of genetic information expanded, we learned to test for genes that could signal the development of such terrible conditions as Huntington’s disease. The possibility of gaining access to such disturbing information exacerbated our fear of genetic knowledge—to some, the certainty of knowing seemed worse than the uncertainty of not knowing. As genetic research has disclosed genes associated with conditions that might, but not necessarily will occur, the uncertainty of knowing, to some, seems worse than that of not knowing. Further, questions focused on individuals, although still pertinent, are being supplanted by broader questions about families and [End Page vii] social groups. When added to the personal agony that genetic information can engender, the specter of egregious discrimination seems to some to outweigh the value of knowing. As the net is cast further and further from the initial genetic inquiries, the call to halt or control certain kinds of genetic testing is growing increasingly loud.Ambivalence about whether to obtain genetic information hovers over the pages of this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. The authors address both the promise and the threat of the information to be derived from genetic tests. Each examines a different facet of the problem of knowing that vexes the terrain of genetic technology and proposes blueprints for resolving it.Cynthia B. Cohen opens by examining whether genetic testing should be used to unearth information about conditions children might develop later in life. She challenges the current trend within the professional genetics community to keep such information hidden, claiming that the putative psychosocial burdens of receiving that information are outweighed by the psychosocial benefits. Moreover, Cohen maintains that having such information can enhance, rather than impair, the adult autonomy of children. She offers a framework for assessing whether to test in individual cases and maintains that it is the responsibility of parents to make the final decision for their children.A similar response to our ambivalence about obtaining genetic knowledge is given by Robert Wachbroit. In discussing the dilemma caused by pleiotropic genetic tests—those in which a single gene mutation is involved in several apparently unrelated diseases—he favors fully disclosing their dual nature to patients before testing. Wachbroit’s emphasis on openness extends beyond informed consent recommendations, for he maintains that patients have an obligation to know as much about their genetic proclivities as possible. He goes on to confute the common wisdom that genetic information is... (shrink)

It is erudite, broad-ranging, respectful of the actors involved, sympathetic, and nuanced. This is the first book of its kind."--Ronen Palan, University of Birmingham "I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

For all its problems, there is still much to be gleaned from the argument-is-war paradigm. Much of the conceptual vocabulary that we use to talk about wars is commonly applied to arguments. Other concepts in the war-cluster can also be readily adapted to arguments. Some parts, of course, do not seem to apply so easily, if at all. Of most interest here are those war-concepts that have not been deployed in thinking about arguments but really should be because of the (...) light they can shed on argumentation. In particular, the concepts, principles, and lessons from Just War theory provide a valuable lens for looking at arguments. We can theorize about Just and Unjust Arguments. Ultimately, however, the analogy between arguments and wars breaks down. There is a strong presumption against wars. There can be no such generic presumption against arguments. The argument against argument is always context-specific. Thus, wars need to be justified in ways that arguments do not. Conversely, sometimes it can be the failure to argue that needs to be justified, again, in ways that a failure to go to war would not. Even so, self-defense justifications, the special justifications for pre-emptive attacks, and the possible need for humanitarian interventions can all be appropriately imported into the discourse of argumentation. (shrink)

To understand the dynamics of the verbalization of surprise, I will start with the philosophical theoretical place that is, in my opinion, the most remarkable in terms of the descriptive phenomenology of surprise, namely, its approach by Paul Ricœur in Freedom and Nature in terms of what he calls “emotion-surprise.” This theoretical position will lead me to retrace, in a second step, the archeology of what Ricoeur calls the “circular phenomenon” or the “circular process” of surprise, which includes body language (...) in a burst of "shaking" and the language of cognitive as well as aesthetic "shock". There is an a priori antinomy here that is based on a post-Cartesian duality of the body and the mind, but it is circularized by Ricoeur. On the basis of this dual model of surprise, I will retrace its genealogy in a number of authors and will analyze some first-person descriptions that come from “microphenomenological interviews” [ entretiens d’explicitation ]. (shrink)

These essays explore the continuities and discontinuities between the Neo-Confucian thought of Ming China and early Tokugawa Japan and the practical learning of the 17th and 18th centuries, underlining the need for a deeper examination of the complex relationship between traditional and modern thoughts and values.