Disfiguring is constructive or, perhaps more accurately, reconstructive. By exploring the religious dimensions of twentieth-century painting and architecture, he shows how the visual arts continue to serve as a rich resource for the theological imagination.

Beginning with a narrative about social reactions to my own temporary disfigurement, I note that an individual’s disfigurement can affect others by making them feel unsettled and unsafe. The contemporary approach to disfigurement, exemplified in the practice of cosmetic surgery, focuses on changing the disfigured individual. In contrast, ancient priestly rituals in Israelite culture focus on reintegrating the individual into the community. I compare and contrast the two approaches, noting the value of reintegration rituals, but also recognizing (...) their insufficiency in several contemporary situations. (shrink)

The face embodies for the individual the sense of identity, that is to say, precisely the place where someone recognizes himself and where others recognize him. From the outset the face is meaning, translating in a living and enigmatic form the absoluteness yet minuteness of individual difference. Any alteration to the face puts at stake the sense of identity. Disfigurement destroys the sense of identity of an individual who can no longer recognize himself or be recognized by others. (...) class='Hi'>Disfigurement places a mask on the face. The goal of a facial transplant consists of restoring an individual’s place in the world and reviving his taste for life, returning to him his ‘human shape’. Facial transplants raise essential anthropological questions such as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘To whom belongs this face that henceforth is mine?’. (shrink)

Considering recent re-assessments of Pareto and Mosca, I discuss whether these thinkers’ socio-political orientations contribute to the ‘disfiguration’ of democracy or provide a resource for the renewal of democratic institutions. Femia presents Pareto as being in the “Machiavellian tradition of sceptical liberalism,” revealing the liberal potential of Pareto’s realist political theory. Finocchiaro ameliorates the conservative consequences of Mosca’s thought by reinterpreting him as a ‘democratic elitist,’ who holds a conception of political liberty “as a relationship such that authority flows from (...) the masses to the elites.” Highlighting the significance of internal tensions within each thinker’s work foregrounded by these readings, between the causal primacy of psychic states and the ‘mutual dependence’ of social factors, and between the elite principle and ‘balanced pluralism’, I ask whether the ‘sceptical liberal’ Pareto or the ‘democratic elitist’ Mosca elude Urbinati’s unpolitical, populist and plebiscitarian ‘disfigurations’ of democracy. (shrink)

The author discusses the physical, social and psychological dimensions of personhood as they are affected by disfigurement. She draws on two case studies to discuss varying reactions to disfigurement and explores ways the physician can respond to requests for surgical correction of deformity.

ABSTRACT I discuss Nadia Urbinati's argument by highlighting an alternative dimension of populism, one that departs from the same assumptions but reaches a different understanding: populism as an antisystem electoralist strategy, one that is part of the technology of democratic competition.

Let us count, rather, on disarray. Perhaps “since the beginning of time” is an inauspicious way to begin a composition. And yet, given the project I am undertaking, it does not seem too far off. Let us say this: from the very start of the pedagogical tradition associated with Western rhetoric, which is often represented as having its roots in ancient Greece, the figure of the rhetoric teacher has had a remarkably fraught relationship with cultural and political authority. Just consider (...) the double legacy of Socrates as both—on one hand—the West’s original wise man, a revered and beloved pedagogue, and—on the other—a bothersome wise guy and disruptive corrupter of youth.1 In Aristophanes’ Clouds, which... (shrink)

Mark Johnston has recently attacked various versions of subjectivism and anti-realism, using what he calls the “missing-explanation argument”. In this paper I shall outline the MEA, and show how Johnston takes it to demolish some anti-realist views, both historical and contemporary. In particular, I shall outline how the argument would apply to the view about the origin of piety espoused by Euthyphro in Plato’s dialogue of that name, to the judgement-dependent conception of intentional states recently sketched by Crispin Wright, to (...) the “internal realism” that has been espoused by Hilary Putnam, and to the perceptual model of value that has been advocated by John McDowell. I shall then attempt to deflect the MEA by raising a set of nested dilemmas for the argument. The conclusion I hope to establish is that Johnston is still some distance from establishing the falsity of the versions of anti-realism that he considers. (shrink)

Thomistic ontology -- Ontological morality and human rights -- The war of the philosophers -- The modern way -- Pope Leo XIII and his legacy -- The survival of tradition.

What does it mean to be black in America, to exist as a dark physical body, a "colored" voice, a stigmatized being in a society that sees, hears, and acts according to a set of bleaching assumptions? Versions of that question have echoed across our historical landscape ever since James-town, but rarely have they figured so forcibly as in the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld Ferguson over Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread through the South, degenerationists elaborated the "problem of (...) the Negro," imperialists hoisted the "white man's burden" of "little brown brothers" abroad, and racial lynching peaked at an all-time high that incited a national scandal. Any radical hopes for Reconstruction after the Civil War had long since vanished by the years of the fin de siècle. And a century later, the gains of a "Second Reconstruction" movement for civil rights have likewise eroded, with unparalleled "hypersegregation" accentuating new patterns of black poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, homelessness, and addiction.1 Being black, in other words, has meant—and, to a considerable degree, continues to mean—being excluded from white society, white prerogatives, even white discourse itself, in a process whose effects insidiously appear to legitimate the very causes that produce them. 1. C. Vann Woodward first warned of this unsettling repetition of nineteenth-century patterns in his 1965 suggestion that the civil rights movement might constitute a "Second Reconstruction" . In his recent reassessment of the troubling implications of that prediction, he notes how ghetto speech is growing more distinct from standard English: "The result is a vicious circle in which the longer blacks are made victims of the white stereotypes that foster hypersegregation, the more they appear to conform to the stereotypes that were used to justify segregation in the first place, and the deeper victims sink in isolation" . Lee Clark Mitchell, professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism . He is currently working on the formula western in a book tentatively titled "Writing Westward: Imagining America beyond the Frontier.". (shrink)

The article presents a semiotic mapping of what is generally regarded as “disfigurement”, both as an extralinguistic somatic condition and as a linguistic-conceptual unit. It distinguishes between genetic, traumatic and elective “disfigurement”, also addressing the idea that such a phenomenon is to some extent structurally linked to the very existence and functioning of the face which we use as a relational interface. The article reconstructs the lexical semantics of “disfigurement”, including the alternative terminology that goes beyond derogative (...) intent and is referred to by activists and experts as “visible difference” (title’s “noncompliant faces”). Representation in the media, particularly cinema, seems unable to escape the chain according to which ‘different’ means ‘ugly’ and is a synonym for ‘bad’ or at best ‘negative’. The face, traditionally an invisible filter defining personhood and identity in Western thought, when “disfigured” reveals the ideological overlay of these concepts. The conservative and authoritarian nature of the face (the supposed index of the form of life that lies beneath and is reduced to it) compels those who cannot or will not base everything on the face, and thus risk being dehumanized, to imagine alternatives for vicarious identity expression through a relational interface that can detach themselves from the biological face and the body perceived as a delimited realm. (shrink)

Prosthetic devices that replace an absent body part are generally considered to be either cosmetic or functional. Functional prostheses aim to restore (some degree of) lost physical functioning. Cosmetic prostheses attempt to restore a “normal” appearance to bodies that lack (one or more) limbs by emulating the absent body part’s looks. In this article, we investigate how cosmetic prostheses establish a normal appearance by drawing on the stories of the users of a specific type of artificial limb: the facial prosthesis. (...) Given that prostheses are first and foremost devices worn upon the body, such an analysis requires an understanding of the ways in which bodies and technologies interact. We thus interpret users’ stories by critically engaging with the work of disability researcher and Actor-Network theorist Myriam Winance, as well as with the postphenomenological scholarship of Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. Using this framework, we explore users’ attempts to achieve a proper fit between their faces and their prostheses, the technological transparency such a fit enables, and the ways in which transparency mediates users’ everyday exchanges with others. We conclude that a normal appearance, when it is achieved by means of prosthetics, enables the device’s user to navigate a precarious social environment as they encounter and interact with others in public. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the meaning of bodily integrity in disfiguring breast cancer. Bodily integrity is a normative principle precisely because it does not simply refer to actual physical or functional intactness. It rather indicates what should be regarded and respected as inviolable in vulnerable and damageable bodies. I will argue that this normative inviolability or wholeness can be based upon a person's embodied experience of wholeness. This phenomenological stance differs from the liberal view that identifies respect for integrity (...) with respect for autonomy (resulting in an invalidation of bodily integrity's proper normative meaning), as well as from the view that bodily integrity is based upon ideologies of wholeness (which runs the risk of being disadvantageous to women). I propose that bodily integrity involves a process of identification between the experience of one's body as “Leib” and the experience of one's body as “Körper.” If identification fails or is not possible, one's integrity is threatened. This idea of bodily integrity can support breast cancer patients and survivors in making decisions about possible corrective interventions. To implement this idea in oncology care, empirical-phenomenological research needs to establish how breast cancer patients express their embodied self-experiences. (shrink)

Hundreds of thousands of individuals experience traumatic injuries each year. Some are mild to moderate in nature and patients experience full functional recovery and little change to their physical appearance. Others result in enduring, if not permanent, changes in physical functioning and appearance. Reconstructive plastic surgical procedures are viable treatments options for many patients who have experienced the spectrum of traumatic injuries. The goal of these procedures is to restore physical functioning and reduce the psychosocial burden of living with an (...) appearance that may be viewed negatively by the patient or by others. Even after receipt of reconstructive procedures, many patients are left with residual disfigurement. In some, disability and disfigurement may be so profound that individuals are candidates for vascularized composite allotransplantation procedures, i.e., the transplantation of a vascularized human body part containing multiple tissue types as an anatomical and/or structural unit. This narrative review paper summarizes the literature on the psychosocial burden experienced by those who have visible disfigurement. While many of these individuals experience stigma and discrimination, relatively few studies have employed a stigma framework to understand the psychosocial sequelea. This paper briefly addresses this framework. Last, particular focus is given to the psychosocial issues of individuals with particularly severe injuries who are potential candidates for VCA procedures. (shrink)

The target article misrepresents the foundations of integrated information theory and ignores many essential publications. It, thus, falls to this lead commentary to outline the axioms and postulates of IIT and correct major misconceptions. The commentary also explains why IIT starts from phenomenology and why it predicts that only select physical substrates can support consciousness. Finally, it highlights that IIT's account of experience – a cause–effect structure quantified by integrated information – has nothing to do with “information transfer.”.

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories (...) of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment. (shrink)

This paper will focus on physically impaired and disfigured soldiers and their perception in Roman antiquity from the late Republic until the early Imperial era (third century BC until third century AD). Based on case studies from literary sources, this paper aims to explore the integration of impaired and disfigured veterans into Roman civil society. The first part outlines the ambiguous attitudes shown towards these veterans, who were both praised and ridiculed, and seeks explanations. The second part argues that few (...) impairments and disfigurements precluded veterans from holding political or religious office. (shrink)

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover. If that is right, it really is too bad in the case of Andrew Sabl’s Hume’s Politics. It is too bad because the reviewer’s job would be exceedingly easy, and very pleasant. By any measure this book has a strikingly fine cover. Its image is drawn from John Byam Liston Shaw’s depiction of Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth entering London in 1553. Hume’s interpretation of Elizabeth I plays a prominent role (...) in Hume’s Politics, so I will come back to her. But first, looking beneath the cover, what else does Sabl’s book yield?The short answer is that it yields plenty. There are several important points being... (shrink)

Research has consistently demonstrated that viewing one's body in a mirror after an amputation or other perceived or visible body disfigurements can be a traumatic experience. Mirror viewing or mirroring is a taboo subject, which may be the reason this trauma has not been previously detected or acknowledged. Traumatic mirror viewing may lead to mirror discomfort, mirror avoidance, and a host of psychosocial concerns, including post‐traumatic stress. As mirroring is complex, four qualitative mirror viewing studies, embodiment concepts, polyvagal theory, and (...) memory theories were used to develop a model. In this article, foundational knowledge that led to the development of the model is shared. A neurocognitive model of mirror viewing is offered together with implications for nursing research, practice, and education. (shrink)

The 19th-century story of Phineas Gage is much quoted in neuroscientific literature as the first recorded case in which personality change (from polite and sociable to psychopathic) occurred after damage to the brain. In this article I contest this interpretation. From a close examination of the story of Gage I have come to conclude that first of all there was nothing psychopathic in Gage’s behavior and that changes in his life are more coherently explained by seeing them as his way (...) of dealing with disfigurement that he suffered after the accident. This is not just a matter of reinterpreting a case. The way Gage has been presented and discussed in neuroscientific literature suggests that the new paradigm of neuroscientifically oriented psychiatry may lead to an erosion of clinical knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used (...) to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy. (shrink)

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements (...) usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase. (shrink)

This chapter situates Kant’s rejection of Stoic eudaimonism within his overarching anti-eudaimonist agenda. I begin by emphasizing the importance of the Stoic tradition for Kant’s critical reception of ancient ethical theory. I then reconstruct the central commitments of ancient Stoic eudaimonism and of Christian Garve’s quasi-Stoic eudaimonism. Turning to Kant’s anti-Stoic argument in the Dialectic of the Second Critique, I argue that the primary target of Kant’s error of subreption (vitium subreptionis) is the Stoic Seneca, specifically his account of joy (...) (gaudium) as an accompaniment of one’s consciousness of virtuous activity. After reconstructing Kant’s argument in detail, I offer a new way to understand its anti-eudaimonist implications: practical illusion leads the Stoic to rationalize, and, ultimately, to disfigure the moral law. Even in their moral ardor—or rather, propelled by it—the Stoic commits an error of self-love. (shrink)

In various areas of Anglo-American law, legal liability turns on causation. In torts and contracts, we are each liable only for those harms we havecausedby the actions that breach our legal duties. Such doctrines explicitly make causation an element of liability. In criminal law, sometimes the causal element for liability is equally explicit, as when a statute makes punishable any act that has “caused… abuse to the child….” More often, the causal element in criminal liability is more implicit, as when (...) criminal statutes prohibitkillings, maimings, rapings, burnings, etc. Such causally complex action verbs are correctly applied only to defendants who have caused death, caused disfigurement, caused penetration, caused fire damage, etc. (shrink)

The suffering of non-human animals is great and omnipresent. This is because animals are vulnerable to disease, disfigurement, injury, predation, age-related physical decline and death, and—today—it is also because human beings are subjecting animals to unprecedented violence in two different domains. Human activities and their byproducts are devastating wild animal habitats at such a fantastic rate that we are obliged to speak of a “sixth mass extinction”, and, while the crisis is typically measured in terms of the loss of (...) entire species, it plays itself out concretely on the bodies ofindividuals. At the same time, industrialized societies now objectify and “process” animals on a massive scale in a variety of settings, for instance—to mention but the numerically most significant—in CAFOs, industrial slaughterhouses and aquafarms, where each year the whole lifecycles of hundreds of billions of land and sea creatures are controlled without any consideration for their pain or terror except insofar as it threatens the economically efficient growth and harvesting of their edible tissues. How should we best respond to the awfulness, and the enormity, of animal suffering? (shrink)

What is truth? What value should we see in or attribute to it? The war over the meaning and utility of truth is at the center of contemporary philosophical debate, and its arguments have rocked the foundations of philosophical practice. In this book, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty and the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel present their radically different perspectives on truth and its correspondence to reality. Rorty doubts that the notion of truth can be of any practical use and (...) points to the preconceptions that lie behind truth in both the intellectual and social spheres. Engel prefers a realist conception, defending the relevance and value of truth as a norm of belief and inquiry in both science and the public domain. Rorty finds more danger in using the notion of truth than in getting rid of it. Engel thinks it is important to hold on to the idea that truth is an accurate representation of reality. In Rorty's view, epistemology is an artificial construct meant to restore a function to philosophy usurped by the success of empirical science. Epistemology and ontology are false problems, and with their demise goes the Cartesian dualism of subject and object and the ancient problematic of appearance and reality. Conventional "philosophical problems," Rorty asserts, are just symptoms of the professionalism that has disfigured the discipline since the time of Kant. Engel, however, is by no means as complacent as Rorty in heralding the "end of truth," and he wages a fierce campaign against the "veriphobes" who deny its value. _What's the Use of Truth?_ is a rare opportunity to experience each side of this impassioned debate clearly and concisely. It is a subject that has profound implications not only for philosophical inquiry but also for the future study of all aspects of our culture. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont’s Democracy Without Shortcuts enriches the discussion of deliberative democracy with new insights. After discussing her three objections against Waldron’s denunciation of judicial review as antidemocratic, the main flaw of Waldron’s thesis is argued to remain out of focus. The constitution is understood by him as owned by the living citizens, in a pattern of serial sovereignty that raises three problems: (a) the ‘wanton republic’; (b) the under-individuation of the polity; (c) generational inequality. The answer to Lafont’s question ‘Can (...) We Own the Constitution?’ (Section Three) is then argued to be that only ‘we the people’, including past, present and future ‘free and equal’ generations, own the constitution. The living citizens are the segment of ‘the people’ endowed with agency, have a voice, can modify the inherited political scheme, but cannot legitimately disfigure it, under penalty of destroying the regulatory function of the constitution. (shrink)