In this article, the author aims to demonstrate how Agamben’s concept of Homo Sacer is ideally epitomized by a soldier in war. A soldier in war holds a peculiar position, as killing of soldiers is considered neither illegal by laws nor immoral by ethics, and so a soldier is not considered to be legally or morally “guilty” in the usual sense of the word if he or she kills another soldier in war. The author analyzes the notion of Homo Sacer (...) – a figure representing a human that can be killed without the killer being punished, but at the same time someone who cannot be sacrificed – and further demonstrates that a soldier in war can be said to hold precisely such a status. The reason why a soldier cannot be sacrificed resides in the fact that he has already been “sacrificed to war” by his own society, in exchange for the safety of all other members of society. Perceiving a soldier as Homo Sacer provides a novel explanation and an additional argument for the moral symmetry of combatants, one of the pillars of non-revisionist Just War Theory, as all soldiers can be understood as persons sacrificed by their own societies. (shrink)

Fundamento: El Plan D de la carrera de Estomatología concibe la existencia de una disciplina principal integradora denominada Estomatología Integral, sobre la base de la concepción de interdisciplinariedad y la mayor flexibilización curricular. Objetivo: Realizar una valoración de la asignatura Atención Integral a la Familia II del plan D de la carrera de Estomatología. Métodos: Se realizó un estudio descriptivo transversal en la Facultad de Estomatología de la Universidad de Ciencias Médicas de Camaguey en Mayo 2015, mediante el análisis documental (...) del plan de estudio D y programa de la disciplina integradora, se exploraron criterios de profesores sobre las potencialidades y limitaciones del diseño curricular. Fueron encuestados directivos del proceso docente y profesores de experiencia. Resultados: En los objetivos instructivos de la carrera no se incluye el referente a la Estomatología Legal, pero está recogido en los problemas de salud, en los modos de actuación del modelo del profesional y en los objetivos del 4to año donde se imparte la asignatura. La formulación del primer objetivo instructivo se considera muy general y amplia. Conclusiones: La ubicación de la asignatura es correcta en la malla curricular. Tiene suficientes horas de Educación en el trabajo y es adecuada la proporción de las actividades teóricas; como aspectos negativos contenido resalta la extensión y amplitud del tercer tema y la escasez y pobre actualización de la literatura docente. Introduction: The Curriculum D of Dentistry career conceives the existence of a main integrated discipline called Comprehensive Dentistry on the basis of the multi-disciplinary conception and the most curricular flexibility. Objective: To make an assessment of the subject Family Comprehensive Attention II Curriculum D of Dentistry career. Methods: A descriptive-transverse study was performed in the Dentistry Faculty of the University of Medical Sciences in May 2015 by means of the documentary analysis of the Curriculum D and the syllabus of the comprehensive discipline, different professors´criteria were explored about the potencialities and limitations of the curricular design. The board of directors of the teaching process as well as experienced professors were interviewed. Results: The instructive objectives of the career are not included in Legal Dentistry but they are taken into account when dealing with heath problems, the ways of behavior of the future professional and the objectives of the 4th-year subject. The formulation of the first instructive objective is considered very general and broad. Conclusions: Its location is correct bearing in mind the curricular design. It contains enough hours for the practice at dental clinics and a correct gradation of the theoretical activities, a very broad and lengthy content in topic III as well as scarce and not updated literature were the negative aspects. (shrink)

I have enjoyed my six years as editor of this journal. I was pleased to be able to bring the journal to Purdue University Press and learn how to produce a first-rate academic journal. From the early days of choosing a cover design, to supervising my graduate assistant Jiwon Kim as she expertly sought indexing services, to acquiring an ISSN number, to being lucky to convince David Granger to become the book review editor and, with the next issue, editor, I (...) have been fortunate to work with excellent colleagues. I particularly want to thank the staff at Purdue University Press, especially its former director, Thomas Bacher, who agreed to publish the journal in 2004. Tom later moved the management of the journal's .. (shrink)

El tema monográfico de este número es el de la mirada desde el descentramiento, desde lugares y espacios que no son los habituales, que se sitúan en los márgenes. Se presentan fragmentos de visiones de los excluídos, de los marginados y “condenados de la tierra”; así como pensamientos y formas de acción rebeldes que rechazan toda forma de coerción social. Otros están escritos desde la “anormalidad”; desde los estigmatizados por su condición física o el carácter de su labor. Se hacen (...) presentes.. (shrink)

It is with great sadness that we have to share with you the news of the death of Jim Arnold, MBE. Many of us knew him as the efficient treasurer of the Utopian Studies Society, and we are very grateful for his services to the society.His most passionate work, however, as the "the greatest conservator in Europe" was dedicated to Robert Owen's New Lanark.1 For thirty-six years, Jim was the director of the New Lanark Conservation Trust. Both he and Lorna (...) Davidson, long-standing secretary to the Utopian Studies Society and the second director of the New Lanark Conversation Trust, were instrumental in elevating Owen's village to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001."The world is in his... (shrink)

A recent special issue in the Journal of Business Ethics gathered together a variety of papers addressing the challenges of putting virtue ethics into practice :563–565, 2013). The editors prefaced their outline of the various papers with the assertion that exploring the practical dimension of virtue ethics can help business leaders discover their proper place in working for a better world, as individuals and within the family, the business community and society in general :563–565, 2013). Scholars are yet to explore (...) the role of virtuous organisational leaders in the pursuit of Eudaimonia. This paper is a qualitative study which considered company directors’ self-understandings in light of a virtue ethics conceptual framework. The aim of the study is to explore whether virtue ethics rather than deontology and consequentialism is a better vehicle for expressing directors’ self-understandings about their ideals and role. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to assess the degree of editorial independence at a sample of medical journals and the relationship between the journals and their owners. We surveyed the editors of 33 medical journals owned by not-for-profit organizations (“associations”), including 10 journals represented on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (nine of which are general medical journals) and a random sample of 23 specialist journals with high impact factors that are indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information. (...) The main outcome measures were the authority to hire, fire, and oversee the work of the editor; the editor’s tenure and financial compensation; control of the journal’s budget; publication of material about the association; and the editor’s perceptions about editorial independence and pressure over editorial content. Of the 33 editors, 23 (70%) reported having complete editorial freedom, and the remainder reported a high level of freedom (a score of ≥8, where 10 equals complete editorial freedom and 1 equals no editorial freedom). Nevertheless, a substantial minority of editors reported having received at least some pressure in recent years over editorial content from the association’s leadership (42%), senior staff (30%), or rank-and-file members (39%). The association’s board of directors has the authority to hire (48%) or fire (55%) the editor for about half of the journals, and the editor reports to the board for 10 journals (30%). Twenty-three editors (70%) are appointed for a specific term (median term =5 years). Three-fifths of the journals have no control over their profit, and the majority of journals use the association’s legal counsel and/or media relations staff. Stronger safeguards are needed to give editors protection against pressure over editorial content, including written guarantees of editorial freedom and governance structures that support those guarantees. Strong safeguards are also needed because editors may have less freedom than they believe (especially if they have not yet tested their freedom in an area of controversy). (shrink)

The Ethics of the New Eugenics, edited by Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel ,An introductory “Note on the Text” states: “The research on which this book is based was commissioned by the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics. It is the result of the collective work of many individuals at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics. Initial drafting and subsequent editing was the work of Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel, as agreed to by the Ethics Committee of the Scottish Council on (...) Human Bioethics. They were appointed principal editors by the Council.” is a useful introductory reference book for those interested in the use of genetic technologies to improve the human species. MacKellar is the director of research for the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics and a visiting professor of bioethics at St. Mary’s University College London, and Bechtel is a research fellow at the SCHB. The Scottish Council on Bioethics commissioned and supported research for this volume. .. (shrink)

Review of Luigi Maierù, John Wallis (1616-1703), una vita per un progetto. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2007. 606 pp.

The Editor, Jack Mahoney, has the tables turned on him by being interviewed on his appointment this month to the new Dixons Chair of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at London Business School. Interviewing him is the businessman and well‐known consultant, John Drummond, who is an Associate Editor and Managing Director of Integrity Works and Crime Prevention Consulting.

Editors’ Note:As a matter of policy, the editors believe that publishing several reviews of selected texts is a valuable exercise which will enable a cross-section of views to be aired. The recently published second edition of the National Academy of Sciences’ report “On Being a Scientist” was considered an appropriate text for such treatment. The reviewer, Kenneth D. Pimple, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and a Visiting Lecturer in (...) the American Studies Program, both at Indiana University. He has been involved with training faculty members to teach ethics since 1989 and is the project director of “Teaching Research Ethics: A Workshop at Indiana University,” with funding from the Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. Her interests include nerve development and regeneration. Her research is in the area of analytical chemistry and emphasizes spectroscopic techniques. (shrink)

En la última década, se han producido fuertes reconfiguraciones en la industria editorial argentina. En principio, se puede pensar en tres procesos que coexisten y que marcan tendencias novedosas en la formación y configuración de los campos editoriales nacionales: la concentración de la industria, la irrupción de las tecnologías digitales y la internacionalización. Los tres procesos se articulan de manera transformadora y complementaria. En este contexto, los editores funcionan como intermediarios culturales a partir del fortalecimiento de emprendimientos de nuevo tipo (...) que hacen usos novedosos de las posibilidades de la digitalización de la palabra. El objetivo de este artículo es exponer la problemática de la edición digital en el campo editorial argentino y cómo las tecnologías de la información y comunicación —TICs—, en el marco del capitalismo informacional, generan nuevos editores y modelos de editorial que proponen modalidades digitales de edición. En particular, hemos analizado la emergencia, en 2007, de Teseo, una editorial argentina, desde una perspectiva cualitativa. Por un lado, el abordaje metodológico se vinculó con el análisis de su página web y su catálogo, y se realizaron además dos entrevistas en profundidad con su director, Octavio Kulesz. A través de la indagación por el sentido en que este editor opera como propulsor de procesos de intermediación cultural, profundizaremos en la dirección de estos nuevos procesos culturales. (shrink)

From the editors of Voprosy filosofii: The editors publish herewith the address by the ranking Soviet physicist Academician Petr Leonidovich Kapitsa, Director of the Institute of Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, at the symposium, organized by UNESCO and held in Ulm, West Germany, in 1978, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein. The speech was graciously made available to us by Kapitsa. In it the Academician gives his principal attention to the global problems that (...) have interested him of late, on which he has already expressed himself in the pages of our journal . In the form and manner in which its problems are set forth, this address is designed chiefly for the scientists of Western countries present at the Ulm symposium. (shrink)

On behalf of the editors of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, I am pleased to introduce the editors and venue of the Symposium on Synthetic Life: Scientific, Historical, and Ethical Perspectives, which occupies much of the current issue of our journal. We are very pleased that Professors Ute Deichmann, Michel Morange, and Anthony S. Travis planned, organized, and edited the proceedings of the workshop on this topic, held on March 5-6, 2012, at the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and (...) Philosophy of the Life Sciences and the NIBN at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel.Professor Deichmann has been the founding director of the Centre since it was created in 2007. Although she trained in .. (shrink)

In this article, the editor and scientific director of Nietzsche Source, Professor Paolo D'Iorio, aims at describing the two editions of Nietzsche’s work currently published on this scientific Web site Firstly, the critical edition, the Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe (eKGWB), which provides an electronic version of the German edition of Nietzsche's complete works, based on the critical text established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Secondly, the facsimile edition, the Digitale Faksimile-Gesamtausgabe (DFGA), which reproduces all the documents relating (...) to Nietzsche's life and work. Both editions can be consulted free of charge through the Internet and are regularly used by the German philosopher specialists around the world. (shrink)

Aims and Scope -/- The Vietnamese Social Sciences and Humanities at a Fork in the Road, utilizing an object-oriented structured database on the productivity of Vietnamese researchers, seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of Social Sciences and Humanities in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018. -/- Quan-Hoang Vuong (Ph.D., Université Libre de Bruxelles) is the director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Phenikaa University in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is chairman of the Vietnam chapter of the European Association of (...) Science Editors and serves in the NAFOSTED Scientific Council on Basic Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2019-2021). Dr. Vuong has published more than 120 academic articles, and book chapters in about 50 refereed journals and books by such publishers as Elsevier, Inderscience, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Praeger, Wiley, World Scientific, etc. -/- Trung Tran is an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and works at Vietnam Academy for Ethnic Minorities. He is a member of the Vietnam chapter of The European Association of Science Editors (EASE), a leader of the Vietnamese Science Editors (VSE) Team, and a chairman of Editor's Board of Journal of Ethnic Minorities Research (ISSN: 0866-773X). (shrink)

As the new director of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World, I have no deep sense of departure from Philosophy in the Contemporary World. I am simply losing a task that has at times been, in all honesty, difficult and onerous. As with childbirth, I am told, however, memory of the pain gives way to memory of the glory. And it is to the birth of children I would compare each successive issue of the journal since 1997. The (...) journal is healthy, increasing in subscriptions, and looking ahead to being administered and published by the Philosophy Documentation Center. It is a source of pride for the society's members, who indeed form a multitude of parents. Jim Sauer is an able new shepherd, and will take the journal to heights I could not. In ways I feel like I can be more supportive of the journal, and its editor, now that I am not doing the work myself. I am strongly committed to that support. (shrink)

In 2022, the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) announced that the 17th World Congress of Bioethics would be held in Doha, Qatar. In response to ethical concerns expressed about the Qatar selection, the IAB Board of Directors developed and posted to the IAB website a response using a Q&A format. In this Letter, we (the IAB President and Vice President) address concerns about the ethics of bioethics conferencing raised in a 2023 Letter to the Editor of Bioethics by Van der (...) Graaf et al. We do not represent the Board of Directors, and this Letter expresses solely our own views. (shrink)

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in (...) scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor of The Architecture of Science. (shrink)

Beauchamp and Childress have performed a great service by strengthening the principle of respect for the patient's autonomy against the paternalism that dominated medicine until at least the 1970s. Nevertheless, we think that the concept of autonomy should be elaborated further. We suggest such an elaboration built on recent developments within the neurosciences and the free will debate. The reason for this suggestion is at least twofold: First, Beauchamp and Childress neglect some important elements of autonomy. Second, neuroscience itself needs (...) a conceptual apparatus to deal with the neural basis of autonomy for diagnostic purposes. This desideratum is actually increasing because modern therapy options can considerably influence the neural basis of autonomy itself.Sabine MNeuroScienceAndNorms: Ethical and Legal Aspects of Norms in Neuroimaging at Bonn University Hospital, Germany. Her main research interests are in neuroethics. She is coauthor of three German books about neuroethics and bioethics.Henrik Walter, M.D., Ph.D., is Full Professor of Medical Psychology at the University of Bonn, Germany, and vice-director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Clinic of Bonn. He is author of Neurophilosophy of Free Will and editor of the book From Neuroethics to Neurolaw?. His research fields are biological psychiatry, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, neurophilosophy, and neuroethics. (shrink)

In 2022, the Research Center for Islamic Legislation & Ethics (CILE) and the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) submitted a proposal to host the 17th edition of the World Congress of Bioethics. After announcing that the CILE‐WISH proposal was the winning bid, concerns were raised by bioethicists based in Europe and the USA. To address these concerns, the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) developed a dedicated FAQ section, in coordination with the host institutions, for the first time in IAB (...) history. One‐to‐one communication ensued and individual responses were shared with these colleagues. As a continuation of this conversation, we (CILE Acting Director, WISH Research Fellow and Head of Content, and WISH CEO) address the concerns raised in the Letter‐to‐the‐Editor of Bioethics by Graaf et al. As we support the call to revisit some contentious issues within the global community of bioethicists, we maintain that this should be based on meticulously discussed, informed, consistent and equitable criteria. We also argue that mutual learning from diverse cultures and moral traditions is the optimal way for our scholarly community to be truly global and to eschew the flaws ensuing from ethnocentric discourses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 292-296 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions Subverting Hatred: The Challenge of Nonviolence in Religious Traditions. Edited by Daniel L. Smith-Christopher. Cambridge, MA: Boston Research Center for the Twenty-first Century, 1998. 177 pp. This work raises the challenge of peacemaking to all religious traditions from within each of these traditions. Touching on primary texts, personalities, theologies, (...) histories, and practices Subverting Hatred is a sampling of the rich religious resources for nonviolence. The eight primary chapters cover Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism, Hinduism, indigenous traditions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. There is a summary epilogue and each chapter has a bibliography. Subverting Hatred [End Page 292] ought to be read in religious study groups as well as in academic settings for the study of religion.Editor Daniel Smith-Christopher teaches theological studies and directs the Peace Studies program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles; he is also the author of The Religion of the Landless. In the introduction, Smith-Christopher sets out the intent of this collection. First, in the face of clear evidence that religious traditions "can be manipulated and used to justify all kinds of violence," it is vital to argue that religions are not inevitably "divisive and destructive" (p. 9). Second, the book presents the positive claim that it is "precisely the call to nonviolence that embodies one of the noblest values and sacred obligations of religion" (p. 10). Here, nonviolence means active peacemaking rather than merely refusal to engage in violence.It was exciting to see a chapter devoted to Jainism, and have it be the first of the book. The author, Christopher Chapple, is professor of theological studies and director of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University; among his publications is Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions. Rooted in the deep strand of nonviolence it shares with Hinduism and Buddhism, Jainism powerfully advocates nonviolence. The earliest records of the religious impulse in the Indus Valley are also the earliest images most associated with nonviolence in these religious traditions. These cylinder seal impressions of figures seated in the yoga position surrounded by plants and animals can still evoke a sense of a calm and peace. Thus, in Indian traditions the connection of nonviolence to meditative practices is inseparable.Jainism has arguably made nonviolence a central teaching for all adherents to a greater extent than other traditions. The earliest text of the Jain tradition, the Acaranga Sutra (fourth or fifth century B.C.E.) makes this clear: "'All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away. This is the pure, unchangeable, eternal law." Further, the reason for this prohibition is also presented: the desire to harm arises from a false sense of self-interest, and violence ultimately comes back to harm us. Chapple then presents some striking historical examples of Jain scholarship and nonviolent action. In conclusion, though Jainism has focused upon individual spiritual liberation, Jains do not "disengage from worldly life" (p. 19), but act to promote violence reduction in society.The author of the next chapter, Christopher Queen, is at Harvard and is co-editor of Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia; his interest in the social dimensions of Buddhist nonviolence is reflected in this essay. He shows how the "Peace Wheel" of Buddhist nonviolence transforms the image of the wheel of the war chariot. As the Vedic tradition developed, it produced contrasts to the tradition of yogic nonviolence shared with Jainism. The sun-disk of Vishnu and chariot of Indra were associated with war, and their symbol was the chariot wheel. In contrast, Buddha turns the wheel "by peaceful means."Queen suggests that while much of the attention in the West has focused upon the "inner peace" offered by Buddhist meditation, it is vital that we see the social [End Page 293] setting of Buddhist practice. To understand the Four Noble Truths a person must begin with the proper social relationships as directed in... (shrink)

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor e Director do Center for India and South Asia na Universidade da Califórnia, Los Angeles (UCLA) desde 2004, fez os seus estudos em Nova Deli, na University of Delhi e na Delhi School of Economics, onde leccionou até 1995. Nessa altura integrou a École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, de Paris, como Directeur d’ Études, e tornou-se, em 2002, Professor na Universidade de Oxford. É também Joint Managing Editor da Indian Economic and Social History Review (No...

There are growing bodies of evidence demonstrating the benefits of equity, diversity, and inclusion on academic and organizational excellence. In turn, some editors have stated their desire to improve the EDI of their journals and of the wider scientific community. The Royal Society of Chemistry established a minimum set of requirements aimed at improving EDI in scholarly publishing. Additionally, several resources were reported to have the potential to improve EDI, but their effectiveness and feasibility are yet to be determined. In (...) this commentary we suggest six approaches, based on the Royal Society of Chemistry set of requirements, that journals could implement to improve EDI. They are: adopt a journal EDI statement with clear, actionable steps to achieve it; promote the use of inclusive and bias-free language; appoint a journal’s EDI director or lead; establish a EDI mentoring approach; monitor adherence to EDI principles; and publish reports on EDI actions and achievements. We also provide examples of journals that have implemented some of these strategies, and discuss the roles of peer reviewers, authors, researchers, academic institutes, and funders in improving EDI. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to hear that poor school performance, welfare dependancy, youth unemployment, and criminal activity result more from shortcomings in the personal makeup of individuals than from societal forces beyond their control. Are American values declining as so many suggest? And are those values at the root of many social problems today?Shaped by experience and public policies, people's values and social norms do change. What role can or should a democratic government play in shaping values? And how do (...) these values conditon the efficacy of public policy?In this book, six distinguished social scientists identify trends in America's values and their consequences, and consider public policy tools with which some of those values might be changed.Daniel Yankelovich begins with a discussion of how American values have shifted in the last half-century, and argues that affluence is the driving force behind these changes in values. James Q. Wilson argues that destructive habits which can lead to social pathologies, like crime and drug use, are set early in life; he examines how public policy might intervene when children are young to promote better values. David Popenoe maintains that America has veered too far towards industrialist values, and explores the resulting decline of families and many attendant social ills. Nathan Glazer describes the history and present status of the dispute over multicultural education. Jane Mansbridge examines the process of building cooperation, consensus, and public spirit. And George Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen discuss the problem of gang criminality.Inthe past, social scientists have often sidestepped questions about values as undefinable, unquantifiable, and somehow unscientific. The essays in this volume address these questions at last.Henry J. Aaron, director of the Economic Studies program at Brookings, is the authorof numerous books, including most recently Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing America's Health Care (1991), and coeditor of Setting Domestic Priorities (1992). Thomas E. Mann is director of the Brookings Governmental Studies program, coeditor of Media Polls in American Politics (1992), and coauthor of the Renewing Congress series (1993). Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives at Stanford University. (shrink)

This book brings together ancient spiritual wisdom and modern science and philosophy to address age-old questions regarding our existence, free will and the nature of conscious awareness. Stuart Hameroff MD Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona This book presents a rich, broad-ranging overview of contemporary research and scholarship into consciousness and the self.... It is... to their credit that the editors have assembled a highly stimulating set of scholars whose expertise (...) cover all the relevant areas. I strongly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in understanding the directions in which contemporary thinking about the nature of consciousness is headed. B. Les Lancaster Emeritus Professor of Transpersonal Psychology Liverpool John Moores University, UK This volume is a collection of 17 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the lives of humans and nonhuman primates; and the interrelations between the self and consciousness, which contribute to the understanding of cognitive functions, awareness, free will, nature of reality, and the complex experiential and behavioural attributes of consciousness. The book presents cutting-edge and original work from well-known authors and scholars of philosophy, psychiatry, behavioural sciences and physics. This is a pioneering attempt to present to the reader multiple ways of conceptualizing and thus understanding the relation between consciousness and self in a nuanced manner. (shrink)

'Memoria' is the collection of lectures by different authors, with the occassion of the 50th Aniversary of the "Centro de Estudios Filosóficos Adolfo García Díaz" of the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of Zulia. -/- As Director of that Research Center, I was also the editor of 'Memoria'. -/- PLEASE NOTE: I AM NOT THE AUTHOR OF "MEMORIA" BUT ITS EDITOR.

For readers both acquainted with and new to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche NOW! frames and explains Nietzsche’s thinking on topics of immediate contemporary concern and relevance. Wallis unpacks Nietzsche’s complex philosophy with a deft, empathetic, and brilliantly subtle analysis of the views of the Great Immoralist on democracy, identity, civilization, consciousness, religion, and other momentous topics. Throughout, Wallis includes ample extracts from Nietzsche himself. -/- In Nietzsche NOW! Wallis takes readers on a sometimes counterintuitive, always revelatory journey to (...) grasp the relevance of Nietzsche for our contentious times. Nietzsche NOW! contains Wallis’s original German translations of Nietzsche’s writings from the critical edition along with insights drawn from a decades-long close study of Nietzsche’s works and their academic reception. -/- Glenn Wallis is the editor and translator of The Dhammapada and Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Random House), and the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism (Bloomsbury), An Anarchist’s Manifesto, and How to Fix Education (Warbler Press). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and at the University of Georgia as a tenured professor. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. (shrink)

Belief in Psychology tackles the knotty problem of how to treat the propositional attitudes states such as beliefs, desires, hopes and fears within cognitive science. Jay Garfield asserts that the propositional attitudes can and must play useful theoretical roles in the science of the mind and stresses the importance of their social context in this sophisticated and original argument.Garfield proposes his own alternative to the apparent dilemma of either scrapping the propositional attitudes or of making room for them within a (...) dimly foreseen, futuristic cognitive science. He provides a characterization of the nature of propositional attitudes conceived as psychological states, and of their role in cognitive science. They must, he argues, be understood as relations between their bearers and their environments, including, in the case of persons, their social and linguistic environments. Understanding them in this way is consonant with current practice in empirical cognitive science and provides a philosophically useful analysis of mental representation.Along the way, Garfield discusses the relationship between the enterprise of science and our commonsense conception of ourselves and the world, and the ways in which this relation constrains our understanding of the propositional attitudes, and illuminates a realistic interpretation of a psychology of representational states and processes. Belief in Psychology is the only book that adopts such a view, and it is unique in providing a sustained critique of eliminativism, instrumentalism, and computational individualism - the main competing proposals within philosophy of cognitive science for eliminating or reconciling propositional attitudes.Jay Garfield is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College and a co-director of the University of Massachusetts Cognitive Science Institute. He is a co-author of Cognitive Science: An Introduction and editor of Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding, both Bradford books. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Emile Meyerson's writings on the philosophy of science are a rich source of ideas and information concerning many philosophical and historical aspects of the development of modem science. Meyerson's works are not widely read or cited today by philosophers or even philosophers of science, in part because they have long been out of print and are often not available even in research libraries. There are additional chevaux de!rise for all but the hardiest scholars: Meyerson's books are written in French (and (...) do not all exist in English versions) and deal with the subject matter of science - ideas or concepts, laws or principles, theories - and epis temological questions rather than today's more fashionable topics of the social matrix and external influences on science with the concomitant neglect of the intellectual content of science. Born in Lublin, Poland, in 1859, Meyerson received most of his education in Germany, where he studied from the age of 12 to 23, preparing himself for a career in chemistry.! He moved to Paris in 1882, where he began a career as an industrial chemist. Changing his profession, he then worked for a time as the foreign news editor of the HAVAS News Agency in Paris. In 1898 he joined the agency established by Edmond Rothschild that had as its purpose the settling of Jews in Palestine and became the Director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. These activities represent Meyerson's formal career. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 361 ing should gravitate, it is no wonder that many say: " There are no clear answers." Finally, I wonder if casuistry can even deal with the most significant ethical issue facing medicine in the immediate future: The construction of a system in the United States which will provide adequate health care for all citizens. Director, Center for Health Care Ethics Saint Louis University Medical Center KEVIN (...) O'ROURKE, O.P. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. Edited By GAVIN D'CosTA. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1990. Pp. xii + 218. $16.95 (paper). There are two ways of reading ·this remarkably stimulating collection of essays. At one level it is a vigorous rebuttal of an earlier book in the "Faith Meets Faith Series" entitled The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, edited by John Hick and Paul Knitter; D'Costa's sub-title, "The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions," is a conscious polemical riposte. On the second level it purports to propose an alternative theology of religions which would on the one hand retain the claim of Christian uniqueness but on the other be not exclusivistic but genuinely pluralistic and, therefore, fruitful for interreligious dialogue. In my judgment, the book achieves its first objective well, furnishing an impressive array of counter-arguments to the pluralistic thesis. Indeed, like a swarm of tacklers ganging up on the hapless quarterback, so many contributors attack the same points of the pluralistic proposal that readers must have the impression of witnessing an overkill. On the other hand, the book's positive construction of a theology of religions suffers from vagueness and even internal contradictions. It is a classical case of people banding together because they know what they are against (in this case, the proposal to regard all religions as equally valid ways of salvation, with none allowed to claim superiority and exclusiveness) but not yet able to determine what they are for (except to retain the claim of Christian uniqueness). The volume contains 14 essays divided into three groups. The first three discuss the implications of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity for interreligious dialogue (Rowan Williams, Gavin D'Costa, and Christoph Schwobel); the next five explore the relevance of christology in the context of religious pluralism (M. M. Thomas, Francis X. Clooney, John B. Cobb, Jr., Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Monika Hell- 362 BOOK REVIEWS wig) ; the last six examine the epistemological and hermeneutical issues of religious pluralism (J. A. DiNoia, Lesslie Newbigin, Jurgen Moltmann, Paul J. Griffith, John Milbank, and Kenneth Surin). The editor has done an excellent job of summarizing the main points of each essay; it is therefore unnecessary to replicate his effort. My intention in this review is not to examine each essay individually; space would not permit such an undertaking. Rather I shall list the major criticisms made by the contributors against the pluralistic thesis and then examine their rather diverse positive proposals. Before doing so, however, it would be useful to describe briefly the essential thesis of The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, which is under attack. Its contributors argue that due to the rise of historical consciousness, the nature of God as Absolute Mystery, and the obligation to promote peace and justice, the Christian claim to uniqueness and superiority as a way to salvation should be abandoned. Instead of the exclusivist and inclusivist theologies of religions, they propose the pluralist position that Christianity is one among the many religions, equally valid and mutually complementary. What do the contributors to Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered find wrong with this pluralist thesis? A complete list of their objections cannot be furnished here, but these are some of the more important ones. First, the pluralists are as imperialistic as the exclusivists and inclusivists they denounce because they impose their (Western) notions of religion, dialogue, social justice, and so on, on other religionists (D'Costa, Newbigin, Griffiths). Hence the pluralist thesis is logically incoherent. Secondly, the pluralists wrongly presume that there is such a thing as a common core of religious experience which functions as a genus of the different species of religions (Newbigin, Milbank, Cobb). Thirdly, pluralists neglect the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Past, Present—and Future Perfect?Taking Psychiatry Beyond Its Single Message MythologiesK. W. M. Fulford (bio)I am grateful to John Sadler and his colleagues for their generous invitation to contribute to this collection marking Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP)'s thirtieth birthday. True to our editorial tradition of "no nonsense" publishing, the "ask" was a reflection on PPP's past, present and future, limited to 500 words. In fact, one word does it (...) for me—collegiality.Collegiality was our watch word from the start. I still treasure a group photo taken at an early pre-meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP) convened by Michael Schwartz at his home in 1992, when, among other initiatives, PPP was conceived through transferring our then-nascent journal proposal from a small British publishing house to its current international publisher, the Johns Hopkins University Press. Michael and I had met earlier by phone when he had called the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London to enquire about its recently launched Philosophy Group and (by mere chance) I happened to be standing next to the person who took the call! PPP, with John and myself its founder editors, was subsequently born as, and has remained, a joint venture between our two groups: and Peter Zachar's recent initiative in building closer links with the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP) has taken us an important step towards the vision shared by Michael, John and myself that PPP should grow to reflect and represent a global open society of philosophy and mental health.As a pointer to the future, this global open society was no mere utopian vision but a joint commitment to what we conceived as a necessary ambition. Contemporary disenchantment with the repeated failures of translation of current narrowly empirical models of psychiatry, points to the truth of our German colleague, Paul Hoff's, characterization of the history of psychiatry as a history of serial collapses into single message mythologies. This disenchantment might seem to offer an opportunity for colonial expansion of philosophy into psychiatry (a re-assertion, perhaps, of phenomenology?). But PPP was born out of the "decade of the brain" and has remained throughout an ally of, not competitor to, the neurosciences. [End Page 3] So, while it is true that, with Peter's initiative, and with editorial and other innovations introduced by John, PPP is actively extending its reach (to new areas of philosophy, and to new voices, informed notably by experience as well as by training), this expansion remains a collegial not colonial enlargement of the field. I need hardly point to the challenges presented by the inclusive ambitions of such enlargement (not least to maintaining the highest standards of editorial and peer review). But PPP's collegiality provides the foundation for the work needed to deliver on these challenges. Even if imperfectly realized, this collegiality will help to take us beyond the single message mythologies by which our discipline has too long been hobbled. [End Page 4]K. W. M. Fulford K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford is a Fellow of St Catherine's College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick Medical School; and Founder Director of the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice, St Catherine's College, Oxford (valuesbasedpractice.org).Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

El text d’Ian Ground la traducció del qual transcrivim a continuació va ser llegit a l’acte de presentación del seu llibre ¿Arte o chorrada? (València, Publicacions de la Universitat de València / Col•lecció Estètica & Crítica, 2008) el dia 9 de juny de 2008 a l’Aula Magna de l’edifici del Carrer La Nau de la Universitat de València, amb la presència, a més d’Ian Ground, de Romà de la Calle (en qualitat de Director de la col•lecció Estètica & Crítica) i (...) de mi mateix, Salvador Rubio (en qualitat de traductor, editor i autor de la introducció del llibre). El text va ser llegit en anglés pel seu autor, alternat, paràgraf per paràgraf, amb la lectura de la traducció castellana. Hem preferit que el text traduit aparega ací en castellà, exactament igual al que va ser llegit a l’esmentat acte de presentació. La reflexió que ens proposa Ian Ground, en cara que específicament concebuda per a aquest acte, no necessita cap presentació i pot ser llegida perfectament com un text autònom. Tanmateix, em permet precedir-la amb unes quantes observacions que no pretenen sustituir les meues paraules a l’acte (on, naturalment, els agraïments eren els protagonistes) ni tampoc la introducció del llibre ja publicada, i a la qual es pot remetre directament el lector d’aquest article. (shrink)

Humans have always imagined better futures. From the desire to overcome death to the aspiration to dominion over the world, imaginations of the technological future reveal the commitments, values, and norms of those who construct them. Today, the human future is thrown into question by emerging technologies that promise radical control over human life and elicit corollary imaginations of human perfectibility. This interdisciplinary volume assembles scholars of science and technology studies, sociology, philosophy, theology, ethics, and history to examine imaginations of (...) technological progress that promises to transcend the constraints of human body and being. Attending in particular to transhumanist and posthumanist visions, the volume breaks new ground by exploring their utopian and eschatological dimensions and situating them within a broader context of ideas, institutions, and practices of innovation. The volume invites specialists and general readers to explore the stakes of contemporary imaginations of technological innovation as a source of progress, a force of social and historical transformation, and as the defining essence of human life. Contents Technological Imaginations.- Ethics and Politics of Envisioned Futures.- The Transhumanist Imagination in Context. Target Groups Scholars and students in science and technology studies, philosophy, utopian studies, science and religion The Editors Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism and Director of the Center of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. J. Benjamin Hurlbut is Assistant Professor of Bioscience Ethics in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

We live in turbulent times, our world is changing at accelerating speed. Information is everywhere, but wisdom appears in short supply when trying to address key inter-related challenges of our time such as; runaway climate change, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources, the on-going homogenization of culture, and rising inequity. Living in such times has implications for education and learning. This book explores the possibilities of designing and facilitating learning-based change and transitions towards sustainability. In 31 chapters (...) contributors from across the world discuss (re)emerging forms of learning that not only assist in breaking down unsustainable routines, forms of governance, production and consumption, but also can help create ones that are more sustainable. The book has been divided into three parts: re-orienting science and society, re-connecting people and planet and re-imagining education and learning. This is essential reading for educators, educational designers, change agents, researchers, students, policymakers and entrepreneurs alike, who are concerned about the well-being of the planet and convinced of our ability to do better. The content and related issues can be discussed on the blog by editor Arjen Wals: Transformative learning. 'We are living in times of incertitude, complexity, and contestation, but also of connectivity, responsibility, and new opportunities. This book analyses the consequences of these times for learning in formal, non-formal, and informal education. It explores the possibilities offered by the concept of sustainability as a central category of a holistic paradigm which harmonizes human beings with Earth. To change people and to change the world are interdependent processes - this book contributes to both.' Moacir Gadotti, Director of Paulo Freire Institute, São Paulo, Brazil 'I hope you share my excitement about the innovations for sustainability that this book catalogues and analyses. While the ecological news is grim, the human news is not. Even in a time of accelerating change, people are showing their enormous capacities to learn, adapt, restore and protect.' From the Foreword by Juliet Schor, author of ‘True Wealth: how and why millions of Americans are creating a time-rich, ecologically-light, small-scale high-satisfaction economy’ 'This book implies a ‘culture of critical commitment’ in educational thinking and practice - engaged enough to make a real difference to social-ecological resilience and sustainability but reflexively critical enough to learn constantly from experience and to keep options open in working for a sustainability transformation.' From the Afterword by Stephen Sterling, Professor of Sustainability Education, Centre for Sustainable Futures, Plymouth University, United Kingdom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue ed. by Matthew Levering and Tom AngierChristopher KaczorThe Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue, edited by Matthew Levering and Tom Angier (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2021), 360 pp.The Achievement of David Novak: A Catholic–Jewish Dialogue, edited by Matthew Levering and Tom Angier, brings together twelve essays on various aspects of Novak's thought along with a response to each essay by (...) Novak himself. The topics themselves concern whether Jews and Christians worship the same God, suicide, natural law, Pope Pius IX, justice, the sanctity of human life, and supersessionism. Its contributors include senior scholars as well as those at the beginning of their careers. Each essay, arising from some aspect of Novak's vast corpus, is replied to by Novak himself. These replies are instructive, for they show a great teacher at work, responding with nuance and charity to criticisms and always moving the conversation forward in illuminative ways.Levering opens the volume with a contribution about Novak as a master of Jewish–Christian dialogue, indeed, "the greatest master of Jewish–Christian dialogue who has ever lived" (1). Levering highlights the intellectual pedigree of Novak, whose teachers included Abraham Joshua Heschel, Leo Strauss, Yves Simon, Louis Dupré, and Germain Grisez. Jews are called to live according to the revelation to which they are accountable. Christians are called to live according to the revelation to which they are accountable. Neither Jews nor Christians should hold the other group accountable for their distinctive revelation, but neither Jews nor Christians should hide or minimize what they have to offer to the other.Princeton's Robert P. George interviews Novak, revealing something of the origin story shaping decades of dialogue between the rabbi and [End Page 299] Catholic interlocutors, perhaps the most influential of which was Germain Grisez, Novak's dissertation director in the early 1970s at Georgetown University and a colleague in founding the "new natural law" school, along with George's own dissertation director, John Finnis.Melanie Barrett's essay highlights the importance of natural law, a key theme in Novak's work, for a pluralistic and secular milieu. She cites him saying, "Jews ought to encourage non-Jews to pray in public in order to show how much they believe the world, including the political order, is dependent on God" (48). Such public prayer creates more opportunity also for Jews to express their faith in public.Invoking Gottlob Frege's distinction between sense and reference, Francis Beckwith tackles the question of whether the Trinitarian God is the same God as the God of Abraham. Cassius Clay and Mohammed Ali have the same reference, though different senses. Like Novak, Beckwith believes Catholics and Jews worship the same God.John Berkman returns to the subject of much of Novak's early writing, suicide. Berkman's chapter seeks to explore the similarities and differences between Jewish and Catholic views on the topic. Novak's dissertation exploration of Plato's, Aquinas's, and Kant's views was supplemented by his experience working as a rabbi and hospital chaplain at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, a facility that specializes in treating mental illness. One of Aquinas's arguments against suicide is that it is contrary to proper love of self. In his response to Berkman's essay, Novak highlights that the command "to love your neighbor as yourself" could mean "as you love yourself" or "as you yourself are loved by God" (118).David Elliot, a former student of Novak's, responds to quasi-Marcionite attacks on the manualist tradition by what might be called the "beige moral theologians" of the 1970s. He highlights Novak's insight that "our terror of God's power is mostly sublimated into our reverence for God's wisdom.... It should reappear only when we are tempted to stand up against God in contempt rather than standing before him in awe" (134).Tom Angier, one editor of The Achievement of David Novak, treats the difference between a more typically Scholastic approach to natural law grounded in metaphysics and Novak's theologically formulated approach. But Novak replies, "I tried to... (shrink)

It may seem odd to review a New York social club's yearbook, with its list of members’ addresses and series of committee reports. But such books sometimes contain material of more general interest. The latest one from the Century Association, for example, devotes 250 of its 685 pages to “Century Memorials”—that is, biographical sketches of recently deceased members, written by other members. Among the well-known figures taken up in these eighty-three sketches are the artists Richard Anuszkiewicz and Robert Motherwell; the (...) architects Henry N. Cobb and Charles A. Platt; the newspaper editors Harold Evans and Whitelaw Reid; the historians Henry F. Graff and William McFeely; the translator and literary scholar Donald Keene; the collector of literary and musical manuscripts Frederick Koch; the popular writer on Russian history Robert K. Massie; the clergyman James Parks Morton; the financier Felix G. Rohatyn; the lawyers Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Isaac N. Phelps Stokes; the literary editor Elisabeth Sifton; the university president Michael Sovern; the museum director Evan H. Turner; and the broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur. The sketches are generally well written and often richly evocative: the writers include Louis Begley, Kenneth T. Jackson, D. T. Max, and Honor Moore.The long shelf of Century volumes like this one clearly constitutes a valuable contribution to prosopographical literature. And the Century is not the only institution with such a tradition (other examples are the British Academy and the American Philosophical Society); but their publications are a frequently overlooked source, one not always available in research libraries. Unfortunately, it is also a source that seems to be diminishing: the American Antiquarian Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are examples of organizations, each with a history of providing biographical information, that are no longer doing so. Of course, the great previous runs of the former's Proceedings and the latter's Reports remain (one hopes) on the shelves for those who know to look for them. A step in the opposite direction has recently been taken by the Grolier Club, which has not had such a tradition (except for two biographical volumes in 1959 and 2000): its Gazette now includes a section of memorials in each issue. This is a welcome move, but one has to regret that so little scholarly use is made of this whole body of biographical detail and reminiscence. (shrink)

Take part... and you will bear witness to the semiotic nature of human animals. This event, commented by Charbel Niño El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) and chaired by Elma Berisha (Lyceum Institute), is part of the activities of the 2022 International Open Seminar on Semiotics: a Tribute to John Deely on the Fifth Anniversary of His Passing, cooperatively organized by the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, the Lyceum Institute, the (...) Deely Project, Saint Vincent College, the Iranian Society for Phenomenology at the Iranian Political Science Association, the International Association for Semiotics of Space and Time, the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Semiotic Society of America, the American Maritain Association, the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue, Moscow State Academic University for the Humanities and the Mansarda Acesa with the support of the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education of the Government of Portugal under the UID/FIL/00010/2020 project. *** Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University, Toronto, where he is also an active faculty member in the Ryerson-York graduate program in Communication & Culture. He serves as Co-Editor of Semiotica, Vice President of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics, and executive board member for the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies, and the Semiotic Society of America. Jamin’s research explores semiotic dimensions of language evolution and embodied cognition. He is the recipient of the 2017 Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica and has edited or co-edited twelve collections in linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics, including Tropological Thought and Action (2022), Cognitive Semiotics (2019), Applied Brand Semiotics (2018), Archaeology of Concepts (2018), Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia (2017), Virtual Identities (2016), and The Semiotics of Paradox (2015). His authored books include Dialectology as Dialectic (2011) and The Semiotics of X (2017). He is currently editing Bloomsbury Semiotics, a major reference work in four volumes. *** Charbel N. El-Hani is full professor in the Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Coordinator of the LEFHBio - History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching Lab and the INCT IN-TREE - National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution. Between January 2020 and July 2021, he was visiting researcher at the CES - Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He works in the areas of philosophy of biology, ecology, ethnobiology and science education research. *** Homepage: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s Auditorium: https://www.uc.pt/fluc/uidief/io2s/auditorium *** Technical support assured by Robert Junqueira. The cover image for the video was designed by Zahra Soltani. (shrink)

Ghanshamdas Rattanmal Malkani, a Sindhi Kshatriya, was born in 1892 at Hyderabad Sind, and educated at Karachi, where his principal philosophy teacher was T. L. Vaswami. When the Indian Institute of Philosophy was founded in 1916, he was one of the six original fellows chosen to attend it. He soon became its permanent director and, except for two years at Cambridge University, has been there ever since. Since 1926 he has also been editor of the Philosophical Quarterly, which under him (...) has become India's leading philosophical journal. (shrink)