Pocket-sized self-care for every day. Self-care is daily nourishment that gives us a fighting chance to minimize illness, fatigue, depression and anxiety. Central to the idea of self-care is the idea that taking care of yourself is not selfish and offers essential ways to stress-proof your body and mind. In this beautiful little book, Suzy offers 30 self-care practices for the reader to choose from depending on what they need. Chapters include practices for:- Rest & relaxation- Energy boosters- Mind (...) management- Emotional first aid. (shrink)

The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the ground-breaking experiments of the twentieth century that changed the course of history. From the serendipitous discovery of X-rays in a German laboratory, to the scientists trying to prove Einstein wrong (and inadvertently proving him right), to the race to split open the atom, Sheehy shows how our most brilliant, practical physicists have shaped innumerable aspects of how (...) we live today. Radio, TV, the chips in our smartphones, MRI scanners, radar equipment and microwaves, to name a few: these were all made possible by their determination to understand, and control, the microscopic. (shrink)

Art and pornography are often thought to be mutually exclusive. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. Section 1 looks at some of the classic ways of drawing the distinction between these two domains of representation. In Section 2, it is argued that the classic dichotomies may help to illuminate the differences between certain prototypical instances of pornography and art, but will not serve to justify the claim that pornography and art are fundamentally incompatible. Section (...) 3 considers those definitions of pornography that make an a priori distinction between pornographic and artistic representations. The difference between the ‘merely’ erotic and the pornographic is also discussed in this context. Section 4 provides a critical assessment of the most recent and elaborate arguments against the compatibility of pornography and art. Finally, in Section 5, a case is made for the existence of pornographic art, as a subcategory of erotic art. (shrink)

In her 2003 article in the British Medical Journal, Ruth Macklin provocatively declared dignity to be a useless concept: either a vague restatement of other more precise values, such as autonomy or respect for persons, or an empty slogan. A recent response to Macklin has challenged this claim. Doris Schroeder attempts to rescue dignity by positing four distinct concepts that fall under the one umbrella term. She argues that much of the confusion surrounding dignity is due to the lack of (...) disambiguation among these four concepts, but that once we understand the different values in question dignity becomes a powerful tool in the fields of human rights and bioethics. It is the goal of this paper to build upon Schroeder's insights by reconnecting the multiple strands of dignity she identifies. It will be argued that the usefulness of dignity as a guiding principle in medical ethics can be much improved by identifying the single conceptual link that ties together the various values flying under its banner. That conceptual link is provided by understanding dignity as the capacity to live by one's standards and principles.



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'International' and 'internationalisation' are two terms frequently used today in association with the university. In this paper I consider the way in which the notion of internationalisation connects to the contemporary university, which I have termed 'Neo-liberal'. I begin by outlining the main characteristics of the contemporary university and then discuss some of the problems that arise in relation to the notion of internationalisation; it is strongly associated with an economic rather than a cultural imperative. Alternatives to the Neo-liberal model (...) of the university are then considered and rejected. In the final section of the paper I suggest a different interpretation of internationalisation, one that is cultural rather than economic because such an internationalisation degenerates into instrumentalism and robs higher education of what should be essential to it. (shrink)

Toward an ontology of the social-historical -- Proto-institutions and epistemological encounters -- Anthropological aspects of subjectivity: the radical imagination -- Hermeneutical horizons of meaning -- The rediscovery of physis -- Objective knowledge in review -- Rethinking the world of the living being -- Reimaging cosmology -- Conclusion: the circle of creation.

This article offers an unprecedented close reading of the poetic texts created by the Martinican author René Ménil, whose poetry has been almost entirely neglected by scholars to date and who is better known for his philosophical and political writings than for his verse. I pay particular attention to Ménil’s treatment of geographical and cultural spaces in his published poetry from 1932 to 1950, and place that verse in dialogue with a text by another Martinican author at work around this (...) period: Edouard Glissant, and his first poetry collection, Un champ d’îles. Despite their otherwise dissimilar literary approaches, I show how both Ménil and Glissant created verse in these years where landscapes shift unpredictably, where human subjects are often overwhelmed, and where bewildering, vertiginous contact between Europe and the Caribbean is emphasized. This stands in contrast to more descriptive or directly political depictions of local nature created by other Afro-Caribbean poets during the period, and, I argue, underscores the complexities of the unsettling encounters between places and peoples occurring with increasing frequency in these years of rapid change around the Second World War. (shrink)

Since Plato’s Symposium, romantic, sexual love has been characterized as a movement in desire that seeks wholeness and identity since it is, at heart, broken.1 The yearning for sexual consummation is predicated upon the idea that love completes the self. Copulation provides lovers with a moment of rapture, relief, and oneness, but once satisfied it is again wanting in reawakening the desire to pledge and to make love again. Love operates much like a promise whose constant and insistent offerings seek (...) to recover again and again its inherent brokenness. The promise of love and the many promises of love are divided further by the dual possibility of being fulfilled or unfulfilled, sincere or insincere, true or false... (shrink)

A key goal for a professional ethics teacher is to help students improve their moral reasoning within the context of their profession, with the ultimate aim of developing a commitment to the values of their future profession. Using Rest’s Four Component Model as a framework, this study examines the relationship between the first two components of moral sensitivity and moral judgment. The study utilises two scores from the same cohort of computing undergraduates: a score for ethical sensitivity using a devised (...) dilemma analysis; and a score for change in moral judgment resulting from an educational intervention, using the Defining Issues Test. Although average DIT scores showed no significant improvement in moral judgment, this study found that levels of ethical sensitivity had a significant impact on the development of moral judgment. The paper provides evidence that ethical sensitivity appears to play a key role in the development of moral judgment. Therefore an initial key objective critical to any ethics course should be to raise student levels of ethical sensitivity as a necessary foundation for development of moral judgment. The paper also highlights the wide range of levels of ethical sensitivity measured within one cohort and suggests targeted learning support should be provided to students who score in the lower part of the scale to raise their levels of moral sensitivity early in the course. (shrink)

The essay’s argument is twofold: First, it contends that Ricœur’s articulation of the social imaginary in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, reveals a turn to a general theory of culture, which is best understood as a shift from a hermeneutics of culture to a cultural hermeneutics. This move forms part of his philosophical anthropology of “real social life.” The essay proposes it is epitomized in Ricœur’s changing reception of Cassirer. Second, the essay hermeneutically reconstructs the emergence of this turn (...) in Ricœur’s intellectual trajectory, and, in so doing, contends that it is connected to a rearticulation of both the phenomenological reduction and the symbolic function that took place in the mid- to late 1960s. Ricœur’s developing response to the phenomenological problematic of the world horizon underlies these further phenomenological-hermeneutic considerations. The essay concludes with a brief sketch of Ricœur’s understanding of the symbolic mediation of action as a reconfiguration of the hermeneutical actualization of phenomenological preconditions of the symbolic. (shrink)

In the UK, as elsewhere in the world, the global financial crisis has focused attention on the cost of public services and the need to reduce expenditure, not least in respect of higher education. This, however, raises a set of prior questions: What kind of society do we want? What is important to democratic society? What kind of higher education is desirable? The article takes Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of what he calls liberal capitalist society as a starting point for considering (...) questions concerning the kind of higher education that would be valuable and relevant to a healthy democratic society. His thesis is outlined and the implications of this for the university set out. The article examines MacIntyre's notion of community, which he elaborates in relation to medieval religious worldviews, and argues that whilst his conceptualisation is more intellectually and educationally coherent than some others, it is ultimately too restrictive. The article argues instead for a recognition, within education, of what is uncommon. This may open greater possibilities for keeping alive the serious questions that we must constantly attend to, beyond and within our communities, secular or religious. (shrink)

The ontological turn in Castoriadis' thought is exemplified in The Imaginary Institution of Society (IIS). Castoriadis did not stop there, however, but was drawn to enquire into more general ontological questions. In turn, this line of questioning made its presence felt significantly in Castoriadis' intellectual trajectory, such that, as I argue in this article, we can speak of a shift from a regional ontology of the social-historical (as developed in the IIS) to a later transregional ontology of physis as creative (...) emergence. Castoriadis' ontology of physis occurs at the convergence of three intertwined threads in his thought: the rethinking of the idea - and regions - of nature, his growing onto-epistemic critique of `objective' knowledge and his theorization of the creativity of being via time. This leads him to develop an (unfinished) philosophical cosmology that, although placing more emphasis on continuity between anthropic and non-anthropic modes of being, can still highlight the autonomy and uniqueness of the social-historical. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.1 (2002) 1-34 [Access article in PDF] Ninagawa's Production of Euripides' Medea Mae Smethurst [Figures]The Japanese theater director Yukio Ninagawa, known for expressing his opposition to repressive politics in his productions during the 1960s, claimed that he staged the Medea because he wanted Japanese women to know that they could be as strong, as straightforward, as the character Medea. Japan, which has been the largest (...) consumer of his Medea, was and still is a male-dominated society. According to Ninagawa, it is a country in which for a woman to be demure and weak is considered a virtue. 1 And yet, if you look closely at Euripides' Medea you might conclude that Medea, although strong, is not an ideal role model for women. 2 (This was the view of Leda Geh of the Singapore Sunday Star, who reviewed Ninagawa's production in 1992.)Ninagawa's Medea was enormously successful. It ran for more than 250 performances in Japan, in other parts of Asia, and in the West, even though all the performances were in the Japanese language. Between the first productions of the Medea in 1978 and the latest in 1999, Ninagawa played to oversold, sold-out, or virtually sold-out houses in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, as well as in smaller cities throughout Japan. 3 The 1993 [End Page 1] production in Tokyo had a three-night run, in a theater with a capacity of eight hundred seats, which was on average 84 percent filled. 4 During a second tour to Athens in 1984, over a two-night run at the Herodes Atticus Theater (which has a capacity of six thousand people), fourteen thousand attended the performances. According to the producer Tadao Nakane (whom I interviewed in Tokyo on 15 March 1999), the audiences, including those sitting on the sides of the Acropolis, applauded so long and hard that tears came to his eyes. 5 In London, in 1978, Tokusaburo Arashi's performance of Medea brought him a nomination for an Olivier award 6 and, in the fall of 1999, Ninagawa served as the first non-English-speaking foreign director of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of King Lear. Given these and other successes, it is clear that Ninagawa was able to bridge the gap between the West and East, on the one hand, by appealing to Western audiences with his Japanese productions and, on the other, by bringing a Western play to Japanese and other audiences.In this article I will consider how Ninagawa was able to take this ancient Greek tragedy and make it popular, not only with other Asian or non-Japanese audiences but also with those in Japan. He based his Medea on the poet Mutsuo Takahashi's 7 line-by-line adaptation of Euripides' [End Page 2] Medea. Not all of Takahashi's lines are used in each production; however, Ninagawa's productions of Medea, like his production of Oedipus the King, do adhere to the words of the text much more closely and fully than do Tadashi Suzuki's Bacchae or Trojan Women. Ninagawa infused his productions of the Medea with a very strong Japanese presence, consisting of elements drawn from Japan past and present. And it is these elements that I believe have helped ensure his success with Japanese audiences who (like us) bring their own cultural baggage to the theater.To demonstrate the Japanese content of the productions, I draw on a live performance of the Medea that I saw in Tokyo in 1993 and on my translations from the Japanese of both Takahashi's adaptation of Euripides' text and Tange Kazuhiko's translation from the ancient Greek. 8 I also draw on programs, playbills, the published notes of Ninagawa, and videotapes of productions. I hope to show how Ninagawa infused the Greek tragedy with a Japanese presence in the Tokyo production of 1993 and to note how that production differed from the version of his Medea performed in Athens in 1984. I place the Tokyo performance within its cultural context by pointing out the Japanese elements... (shrink)

This article critically engages with Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy. It does so by taking into account the implications of Castoriadis’s enduring interest in the ecological devastation of the natural world, on the one hand, and the changing configuration of his philosophical anthropology, on the other—especially in regard to his reconsideration of the creativity of nature in the 1980s and the reconfiguration of the nomos and physis problematic. It contextualizes these movements in his thought within a broader hermeneutic of modernity that, (...) following Johann Arnason, emphasizes the cultural currents of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment as constitutive of modernity as a field of tensions. In an extension of Arnason’s elaboration, however, the present article argues that a latent opening towards an ecological worldhood is implicit to Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity that, conversely, also finds Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy. (shrink)

Political Imaginaries in Question Content Type Journal Article Pages 5-11 Authors Suzi Adams, School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia Jeremy C. A. Smith, School of Education and Arts, University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia Ingerid S. Straume, University of Oslo Library, University of Oslo, Norway Journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory Online ISSN 1568-5160 Print ISSN 1440-9917 Journal Volume Volume 13 Journal Issue Volume 13, Number 1 / 2012.

John Henry Newman is probably known best for The Idea of a University. In his most philosophical work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, however, he undertakes a detailed investigation of different ways of knowing and understanding in a manner that is of clear pertinence for philosophical enquiry into education. He offers many examples and descriptions of particular experiences, from religious and secular life, and on the strength of these he argues that before enquiry can take place (...) there must be a prior attentiveness: in Newman's preferred terms, this involves an ‘assent’, a saying ‘yes’. There is an interesting resonance here with some of the work that occupied Ludwig Wittgenstein, found in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough and On Certainty. My purpose in this paper is to look at the place, within the university, of a grammar of assent. What is at stake here is not a question of the relations between the university and religion but rather the question of the ethics that constitutes enquiry in.. (shrink)

Since Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the idea of descent with modification came to dominate systematics, and so the study of morphology became subgugated to the reconstruction of phylogenies. Reinstating the organism in the theory of evolution (Ho & Saunders, 1979; Webster & Goodwin, 1982) leads to a project inrational taxonomy (Ho, 1986, 1988a), which attempts to classify biological forms on the basis of transformations on a given dynamical structure.Does rational taxonomy correspond to thenatural system that Linnaeus and (...) his contemporaries as well as all pre-Darwinian morphologists had in mind? Here, we examine how rational taxonomy and the natural system can coincide in the dynamics of processes generating forms during development, which conferexclusivity, genericity androbustness to the forms that do exist. We use the example of segmentation, especially inDrosophila, as an illustration to explore the implications of rational taxonomy for evolution and systematics, and the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

Portraits are everywhere. One finds them not just in museums and galleries, but also in newspapers and magazines, in the homes of people and in the boardrooms of companies, on stamps and coins, on millions of cell phones and computers. Despite its huge popularity, however, portraiture hasn’t received much philosophical attention. While there are countless art historical studies of portraiture, contemporary philosophy has largely remained silent on the subject. This book aims to address that lacuna. It brings together philosophers (and (...) philosophically minded historians) with different areas of expertise to discuss this enduring and continuously fascinating genre. The chapters in this collection are ranged under five broad themes. Part I examines the general nature of portraiture and what makes it distinctive as a genre. Part II looks at some of the subgenres of portraiture, such as double portraiture, and at some special cases, such as sport card portraits and portraits of people not present. How emotions are expressed and evoked by portraits is the central focus of Part III, while Part IV explores the relation between portraiture, fiction, and depiction more generally. Finally, in Part V, some of the ethical issues surrounding portraiture are addressed. The book closes with an epilogue about portraits of philosophers. Portraits and Philosophy tangles with deep questions about the nature and effects of portraiture in ways that will substantially advance the scholarly discussion of the genre. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in philosophy of art, history of art, and the visual arts. (shrink)

NGOs can play an important role in the development, implementation, and reform of public health laws. To be effective, NGOs must recognize the critical role law plays in protecting the health of the public and in the public health system’s emergency preparedness. They must be ready to work with federal, state, and local leaders to advance the goals that public health laws were enacted to achieve. NGOs also have technical expertise, which they can utilize to help translate highly complex scientific (...) concepts into public health action steps that regulators, legislators, and members of the public can readily understand.Those who are most often affected by pollution tend to be low income people, the working class, Native Americans, and people of color. Those most affected by pollution issues, however, usually have the least input in the creation of policy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The proliferation of integrated health care in which a holistic approach of physical and behavioral health is addressed by multiple providers is quickly evolving to be the standard of care in the United States. Social workers are well-suited to be key members of these interdisciplinary teams. As a reference point for professional conduct, social workers are guided by a set of ethical standards. Given the nature of integrated healthcare settings, social workers may encounter unprecedented ethical challenges. This study provides (...) an exploratory examination of the ethical situations among social workers in integrated health care. (shrink)

This article critically considers Castoriadis’ central concept of creation ex nihilo. It does so in two ways. It first draws on recent research to suggest that the historical inauguration of the project of autonomy in ancient Greece - in both its political and philosophical aspects - was more complex and contextually anchored than Castoriadis acknowledges: it did not surge forth out of nothing. Second, it considers the idea of creation from a theoretical perspective. Here the idea of creation as contextual (...) rather than absolute is offered. Within this suggested qualification, two lines of discussion - drawn from the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions - are broached. (shrink)

John Christman has recently objected to substantive conceptions of autonomy on the grounds that they introduce unwanted perfectionism into political thinking. I defend substantive conceptions of autonomy against Christman’s critique on two fronts. First, I defend substantive conceptions of autonomy against the charge that their utilisation in political theory would result in the inappropriate exclusion from democratic respect of individuals in oppressive relations. Second, I defend substantive conceptions of autonomy from the charge that they fail the ‘endorsement constraint’, i.e. that (...) incorporating a substantive conception of autonomy into the concept of the person at the heart of a political theory would be alienating for citizens. (shrink)

Is there progress in art? The question is one which most people would answer vehemently in the negative without giving it much thought. And yet, how is one to account for changes in artistic style? And what is one to think about modern art, which still seems baffling to many in comparison with traditional figurative art? Suzi Gablik's challenging argument is that art, like science, has a history, order and structure which can be called progressive. Progress, however, is not a (...) question of moral or esthetic improvement but involves a cognitive 'growth' of artistic styles and is related to transformations in modes of thinking. The model used for the argument is based on principles of developmental psychology advanced by the famous and revolutionary Swiss experimental psychologist Jean Piaget. By demonstrating the way in which art is linked with the acquisition of stages of development: increasingly complex perceptual and logical structures lead to mental organizations which are increasingly dominated by scientific, rationalistic and conceptual modes of thinking in contrast to earlier more mystical ones. In this light, an attempt is made to explain the shift in art from figurative or iconic representation, where the image resembles the object to which it refers, towards non-representational art which is abstract and conceptual in organization. Three sections of illustrations demonstrate, through revealing juxtapositions, the course of artistic development from ancient and medieval times, through the Renaissance, to contemporary art. -- from dust jacket. (shrink)

The book offers the first systematic reading of Gilles Deleuze's mature philosophy through the lens of creative practice. Six authors - two fine artists, a dancer, a creative writer, a designer and a philosopher - open multiple dialogues between contemporary creative practices and the generative philosophy of Deleuze. These conversations are focused around key aspects of production: forming, framing, experiencing, encountering and practising."-- Back cover.

According to Bergson , the traditional problem of free will is misconceived and arises from a mismatch between the quality of authentic, subjective experience and its description in language, in particular, the language of the mechanistic science of psychology. Contemporary western scientific concepts of the organism, on the other hand, are leading us beyond conventional thermodynamics as well as quantum theory and offering rigorous insights which reaffirm and extend our intuitive, poetic, and even romantic notions of spontaneity and free will. (...) I shall describe some new views of the organism arising from new findings in biology, in order to show how, in freeing itself from the ‘laws’ of physics, from mechanical determinism and mechanistic control, the organism becomes a sentient, coherent being that is free, from moment to moment, to explore and create its possible futures. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the unfinished dialogue between Arnason and Castoriadis, with a particular emphasis on the problematic of world articulation. Arnason’s thought is situated as reconfiguring classical sociological constellations, especially as they pertain to the revitalization of the civilizational problematic and the emphasis on the philosophical dimension of sociological investigation. His interpretative framework is located within the nascent field of post-transcendental phenomenology, which he elaborates via the overlapping problematics of cultural articulations of the world as an inter-cultural horizon, and the (...) human condition as various modes of being-in-the-world. Arnason’s encounter with Castoriadis is considered. Despite the many points of fruitful contact, Castoriadis’ neglect of the phenomenological question of the world as a ‘shared horizon’ is, in Arnason’s view, too great to overcome; Arnason looks instead to Weber, Merleau-Ponty and, more recently, Patočka for interpretative resources. Although Castoriadis’ elucidation of the world proceeds ‘in fragments’, the article contends that hermeneutical reconstruction of his thought reveals openings onto the problematic of elemental world orders that can further the dialogue with Arnason. (shrink)

The physis and nomos controversy first emerged in ancient Greek thought. This article explores Castoriadis' reactivation of the issues concerned; in particular, his radicalization of Aristotle's conception of physis and nomos. It suggests that nomos appears as multifaceted in his work. However, three key variations may be identified: empirical nomos, normative nomos and generic nomos. Empirical nomos signifies the human creation of laws. It challenges the notion, long held in western philosophy, that Being = being determined. Although all laws are (...) by humans created and thus in one sense autonomous, Castoriadis further distinguishes normatively between those societies which embrace their self-creating and self-transformative capacity and those which obscure it. Normative nomos, then, refers to the autonomous or heteronomous institution of society. The third sense of nomos refers to the creation of form. In this generic sense, it is argued that the debate shifts from the human to the non-human realm; that nomos also manifests itself in the realm of physis. (shrink)

The following proposition appears in the context of a discussion about Melanie Klein: By seeing the unconscious as a site of sexual or verbal free fall, the humanities have aestheticized psychoanal...

The scope of this extraordinary selection of essays, distilled from nearly a thousand works that the author has written, is literally the entire universe and universe of knowledge. It charts the author's quest for the meaning of life faced with a dominant knowledge system she regards as incoherent, meaningless, and often acting against people and planet. She shows how contemporary scientific findings across all disciplines already provide an authentic knowledge system that's coherent with life and the universe. The aim is (...) to transform science thoroughly from inspiration to research to applications that work for people and planet. This book is simply unique in its scope and content. There is no equivalent. The author surveys and explains contemporary science in depth ranging over philosophy, anthropology, quantum physics and chemistry, neurobiology, psychology, genetics and epigenetics, cosmology, art, humanities, and mathematics. It presents a truly holistic view of nature, with profound implications for life in the social, political, and personal realm. (shrink)