A review of Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture, edited by L. Layne (NYU Press, 1999).

Maternal gift-giving sustains life and creates positive human relations. Addressing important issues in the theory of language and communication, Genevieve Vaughan associates language and mothering to the free gift economy. A fundamental hypothesis is that maternal gift-giving, mothering/being-mothered forms a non-essentialist, but fundamental core process of material and verbal communication that has been neglected by the Western view of the world. The mothering/being-mothered paradigm is thematized in the framework of gift logic, which is otherness (...) logic. Restoring such a paradigm offers a new light on language, communication and human relations, contributing to recovery of the “properly human” in terms of gift economy values, ultimately to the end of affecting social praxis for radical social change and creating better worlds. The second part of this text is titled “For the Sake of the Other” and presents an exchange of ideas with Vaughan in the form of a written conversation. This text is structured around the following titles: 1. Otherness and Gifting as the Basis of Communication: 1.1. Semiosis, Language, and the Gift Economy; 1.2. The Gift of Speaking and the “Mother Work Schema”; 1.3. Material gifting, Verbal Nurturing, Imagination; 1.4. New Perspectives for Studies in Language and Communication; 2. For the Sake of the Other, with Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)

This essay presents Genevieve Vaughan’s writings on language, communication and social praxis for social change. Mothering/being-mothered is thematized, in the framework of gift logic, as a core practice characterizing human relationships, shedding new light on the properly human in terms of gift economy values.

In this book Alexander García Düttman explores and expands the works of Heidegger, Rosenzweig, Adorno, Benjamin, and Derrida. Out of his very fresh and pointed re-reading, he uncovers a peculiar correspondence of obsessions, interests, and priorities between these diverse twentieth century philosophies, And from these discoveries Düttman details a singular philosophical theory of memory and promise. Düttman's methodology is as groundbreaking as his discoveries, Alan Udoff writes: "This is not an exposition in the conventional sense: a scholarly, historical report, with (...) some attempt at criticism, Rather, it is at every turn a thinking through of certain texts, a thinking that, in putting questions to the texts... reveals or releases what is... stored in those texts." Düttman's questions are so philosophically and theologically penetrating that the reader is set out in new direction of thinking. While Düttman's book helps the reader achieve a new understanding of the gift of language in the works of Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig, his study also is fraught with implications for reading Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas and Lyotard. (shrink)

Though La parole donnee memoire et promisse, published in 1989 by Editions Galilee, was the first book Garcia Duttmann's (German, Middlesex U., England) wrote, and he has developed many of its ideas more fully in subsequent works, he has chosen to make few changes for the translation. He muses on the path towards toward sacred names, translating the thing, over-naming and melancholy, and apparitions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

This essay attempts to think anew the relationship of pain with finitude and language. If man is that finite, mortal being whose being is essentially linguistic and being-in-communication, where language is not seen as mere attribute, property, or instrumental means of appropriation, then language cannot be understood in its cognitive disposal as categorical grasp of the “entities presently given,” but must be understood in a more originary manner as opening of the coming into presence, as the event (...) of this coming itself. If a certain dominant ontology, in its innermost ground, understands pain as the very grounding work of logos, then it is necessary to open up the closure of this logos of metaphysics to another, more originary experience of pain in relation to mortality that dispropriates us beforehand, and thereby grants us language itself as gift and promise which welcomes the incalculable event of the “not yet.” This essay reads Heidegger, Schelling and Benjamin to think of the promise of this redemptive, messianic language in relation to an originary finitude, outside the metaphysics of subjectivity, insofar as this metaphysics subsumes language to its cognitive disposal, to its categorical grasp of entities’ “given present.”. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH BIRTH CONTROL REMAINS A CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC AMONG Roman Catholics, it has all but disappeared in Protestant discussions of sexual ethics, owing to the seemingly more pressing issues of abortion and in vitro fertilization, as well as to the almost unanimous approval of contraceptive use among Protestant church bodies in the mid-1900s. This essay seeks to revive some past Reformed arguments pertinent to the subject, especially John Calvin's and Karl Barth's teachings on marriage and children, which both theologians view as (...) distinct goods. Marriage is seen as a covenant relationship, a good in and of itself, even apart from procreation; while children are a gift or "divine offer" from God that demands response. Reviving distinctively Christian descriptions of marriage and children is crucial to critiquing the utilitarian language that seeks to overshadow current conversations about marriage and children. (shrink)

This article aims at a critical reevaluation of the trading zone concept. It starts from a case study of the Faraday–Whewell collaboration in coming to terms with electrolysis experiments. The case is supposed to be an example of a trade zone of science/philosophy interaction though it demonstrates the unequal nature of the “trade.” This requires the analysis to log in some details concerning Galison’s metaphor of trading zones, which reveals its market-oriented connotations. The following criticism of the market metaphor for (...) science applies a revised version of Boris Hessen’s argument against misinterpretation of technology by some British scientists. A closer look at the ancient trade rituals in Marcel Mauss’ seminal work enables discovering another cultural pattern for describing scientific communication as opposed to trade—gift. This helps picture science as a distribution of social roles and statuses and uncovers the normative and value dimension of gift zones language. (shrink)

In his classic essay The Gift, Marcel Mauss argued that gifts can never be truly free; rather, they bring about an expectation of reciprocal exchange. For over one hundred years, his ideas on economy, social relations, and exchange have inspired new modes of thought, none more so than what crystallized in the 1980s around an innovative group of French academics. In The Gift Paradigm, Alain Caillé provides the first in-depth, English-language introduction to La Revue du MAUSS - (...) or, "Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences," combining the work of anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others. Today, the very idea of a "general social science" seems unthinkable, unless you count the pervasive sway of a utilitarian logic in orthodox economics, or the diffuse influence of neoliberalism. Here, Caillé offers a distinctly different reading of economy and society, inspired by Mauss - as vital now as ever. (shrink)

Martin E. Rosenberg -/- The Gift of Silence: Towards an Anthropology of Jazz Improvisation as Neuro-Resistance. -/- ABSTRACT: -/- This essay addresses how the complex processes that occur during jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss. It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift from (...) focusing this analysis of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. By silence, I refer to the embodied, yet shared pure duration as felt synchrony within an individual performer, that extends to the members of an ensemble. Thus, I refer to both aesthetic and micro-political implications of embodied, yet also distributed musical cognition in real time. -/- For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Here I expand my previous work establishing similarities in the behavior of bifurcating systems in physical and cognitive sciences to the unfolding of ambiguity in real time during improvisation with respect to polyphony, polytonality and polyrhythms in the history of jazz from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. We can therefore re-conceptualize jazz improvisation as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified in a sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” By examining silence from this anthropological perspective, we can conceive of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to top-down cognitive control immanent with social and digital networks. The ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation points towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously a micro-politics of neuro-resistance. In other words, I argue that freedom of thought requires freedom from thought as an initial condition. -/- Yet, I emphasize the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. The valorization of silence by jazz musicians is not simply etiquette, an ethics of reciprocity for performers exchanging “riffs,” but an initial condition that jazz performers (and, I would argue, listeners) experience in their bodies, thus linking embodied cognition to a collective field of cultural production that emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems. The recent and remarkable research on music and the brain has demonstrated that it is now possible to describe jazz improvisation as possessing both embodied and distributed cognitive properties. The emergent neuronal ensemble behavior within the individual that is visible in jazz improvisors, discovered by the neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins led by Charles Limb, bears striking resemblance to the interactive behaviors of the jazz ensemble itself. Thus, it is by recourse to recent research by myself and others into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation specifically, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible. (shrink)

We can be hacked because there are not indiscreet questions but there are imprudent answers. The main aim of this paper is actually to learn how to create the best possible answers, the most prudent ones, in order to remain as safe as we can. That is what Hunting Hackers means: to think about what piece of information was relevant for the hacker and why that one in particular and not another. If we could preview our flaws then we would (...) be able to keep our zone safer from hackers. In order to reach this objective, we will analyse how the cryptic language known as Russian Cards operates. This study does not intend to show how the cryptic language is broken into, but to take advantage of the learning gifted in knowing the flaw itself. It is precisely in the learning of the flaw that we can find the answer to what and why we may be hacked. In proportion to the amount of flaw information at our disposal, we will be able to hunt hackers: to stop them completely or, at least, to weaken a possible hacker attack. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 629-633 [Access article in PDF] Phiroze Vasunia. The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Classics and Contemporary Thought 8. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. xiv + 346 pp. Cloth, $45. Alexandre Tourraix. L'Orient, mirage grec: L'Orient du mythe et de l'épopée. Edited by Evelyne Geny. Paris: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, 2000. 165 pp. Paper, fi24.39. (...) Professor Tourraix is an optimistic reactionary. He sets out his aim with refreshing clarity. He seeks to challenge "l'orthodoxie provisoirement établie," which denies that the Greeks were "tributaires de la représentation du monde véhiculée par leur langue... indo-européenne." Tourraix accuses the "adepts" of this "orthodoxy" of citing Dumézil when he excluded Greece from the regularity of Indo-European patterns of thought, while they reject his basic trifunctional theory. This, Tourraix insists, is not a "doctrine" or an "ideological credo," but the result of a "rational elaboration" (15-16).Tourraix is not concerned with radical outsiders. He dismisses the whole of Said's Orientalism because of the latter's blunder in referring to the chorus of the Persae as women. He warns that Bernal should not be taken seriously because his works are not founded on a "scientific hypothesis but on ideological presuppositions" (75). Tourraix's opponents are the professional classicists, notably Martin West, Walter Burkert, and Ruth Edwards. These promote the idea of a substantial Southwest Asian influence on Greek civilization but are unconcerned with Egypt. In the terminology of this reviewer, Tourraix's polemic is not against the "Revised Ancient Model" but as a supporter of the "Extreme" version, he opposes the "Broad Aryan Model."Tourraix's two centers of concern are Troy and Thebes. Troy interests him as a marginal entity between Greek and Barbarian. He admits that pottery and Hittite texts indicate that there were Mycenaean influences in the Troad. On the other hand, he rightly points out that Homer Hellenized the Trojans more than evidence from other sources can sustain. It has also been impossible to correlate the Homeric version of the city's fall with the date and scale of the destructions of Troy VI, VIIa, and VIIb. Tourraix therefore follows the hypothesis of Paul Wathelet that the destruction described in the epics was not that of an unimportant settlement on the Dardanelles but was really that of the great Greek city of Thebes, which was undoubtedly destroyed in the thirteenth century B.C.E.This is just one example of Tourraix's general approach, which is not to accept things at face value but to probe more deeply. On the central theme of his [End Page 629] book, he agrees that many Greek myths and legends would suggest "Oriental" connections and origins and that much Greek iconography appears to be "Oriental" or Egyptian (75). But he knows that such symbols were devoid of content (23). Unfortunately for his scientific credentials, however, he frequently has to rely on the words probablement or peut-être to see Indo-European essences behind the Oriental forms (e.g., 22-23).Clearly Tourraix has always been concerned with Indo-European "cultures." He has published extensively on both Greeks and Persians and the relations between them. When looking at Greek culture, he sees three main indicators of "l'héritage indo-européen." The first is language: He takes a Whorfian view of its determining power and is unconcerned that less than 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has known Indo-European cognates. The second indicator is trifunctionalism: Tourraix sees the Indo-European base whenever he encounters a triple. Three, however, is an attractive number to speakers of many languages. The Christian Trinity appears to have originated among Aramaic speakers, and Mesopotamian and Phoenician cities had the same tripartite division of the male inhabitants into citizen, resident alien, and slave that later occurred in the Greek poleis. Thus, besides its vagueness, trifunctionalism is not an... (shrink)

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 90-114, February 2020.

Much of modern technology critique inherits Heidegger’s ontico-ontological distinction. In this paper, following Stiegler’s linking of the ontic to the transgenerational, I argue that Heidegger leaves the materiality of technics as a potential site for difference in the wake. Put differently, Heidegger “declines the gift of the ontic,” instead constructing an order of an imagined Graeco-German inheritance—a culturally and linguistically specific “saving-power” against the ills of modern technology. Through Derrida’s inheritance of Heidegger’s work—marked by a different language and (...) positionality—I reconsider ontico-ontological difference as an opening to a co-constitutive productivity of world and thing, where the passing on of mnemonic inheritance features multiplicities of languages and cultural techniques that preempt Heidegger’s “Graeco-German monolingualism.” This calls for a central positioning of the politics of memory and inheritance within modern technology critique, thereby attending both to the material realities as well as the cultural differences of technics. (shrink)

_A many-faceted exploration of spoken eloquence: how it works, how it has evolved, and how to tap its remarkable power_ We all know eloquence when we hear it. But what exactly is it? And how might we gain more of it for ourselves? This entertaining and, yes, eloquent book illuminates the power of language from a linguistic point of view and provides fascinating insights into the way we use words. David Crystal, a world-renowned expert on the history and usage (...) of the English language, probes the intricate workings of eloquence. His lively analysis encompasses everyday situations as well as the oratory of great public gatherings. Crystal focuses on the here and now of eloquent speaking—from pitch, pace, and prosody to jokes, appropriateness, and how to wield a microphone. He explains what is going on moment by moment and examines each facet of eloquence. He also investigates topics such as the way current technologies help or hinder our verbal powers, the psychological effects of verbal excellence, and why certain places or peoples are thought to be more eloquent than others. In the core analysis of the book, Crystal offers an extended and close dissection of Barack Obama’s electrifying “Yes we can” speech of 2008, in which the president demonstrated full mastery of virtually every element of eloquence—from the simple use of parallelism and an awareness of what _not_ to say, to his brilliant conclusion constructed around two powerful words: _dreams_ and _answers_. (shrink)

This article examines gift-giving within the Persian empire and its perception in Greek literary sources. Gift-giving in the Greek world was often framed in the language of friendship, and Greek authors subsequently articulated Persian traditions using the language and cultural norms of their intended audience. There were fundamental differences in the concepts of gift-exchange and reciprocity between the Greeks and the Persians. This article will examine Persian traditions of gift-giving followed by Greek traditions of (...) gift-giving, and will argue that the Greek misrepresentation of Persian customs led to numerous misunderstandings in relations between Greek and Persian individuals. The use of Greek descriptive language, rather than more accurate terminology, to describe Persian traditions has hindered our understanding of gift-giving in the Persian empire. In addressing these misconceptions, this article will demonstrate the successful use of gift-giving in the Persian empire and the perils of Greek misrepresentation of foreign customs. (shrink)

The paper is a reply to Bassi and Rasin ( 2018 ) on the treatment of sentences like [_The gifted mathematician that you claim to be_] _should have solved this task without problems_ by Grosu and Krifka ( 2007 ), which was published in _Linguistics and Philosophy_. Grosu and Krifka provide an analysis of the _de dicto_ interpretation in which the bracketed expression refers to an individual concept. Bassi and Rasin question this because equivalent expressions in Hebrew, in which the (...) gap is rendered by a resumptive pronoun, do not exhibit the _de dicto_ interpretation, but only the _de re_ interpretation. We provide independent evidence that person-marked pronouns in post-copular position are incompatible with antecedents that denote individual concepts, thus explaining Bassi and Rasin’s observation within Grosu and Krifka’s framework. We furthermore point out two new problems for the analysis of Bassi and Rasin presented in the body of their article, which does not make use of individual concepts or of some alternative mechanism that can deal with substitutivity in opaque contexts. We also note that an alternative analysis they present in an appendix amounts to a notational variant of ours. (shrink)

What does it mean to give a "gift"? In this timely collection, distinguished anthropologists--Maurice Godelier, George Marcus, Stephen Tyler--and philosophers--Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo, Jean-Joseph Goux and Adriaan Peperzak, explore an enigma that has disturbed contemporary philosophers from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida.The essays included in the volume: Some Things You Give, Some Things You Sell, But Some Things You Must Keep for Yourselves: What Mauss Did Not Say about Sacred Objects by Maurice Godelie.The Gift and Globalization: (...) A Prolegomenon to the Anthropological Study of Contemporary Finance Capital and Its Mentalities by George MarcusCapitalizing (on) Gifting by Mark C. Taylor"Even Steven" or "No Strings Attached" by Stephen TylerMothering, Co-muni-cation and the Gifts of Language by Genevieve VaughanThe Time of Giving, the Time of Forgiving by John D. CaputoSeneca against Derrida: Gift and Alterity by Jean-Joseph Goux Giving by Adriaan Peperzak. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Language of Reciprocity in Euripides' MedeaMelissa MuellerEuripides' Medea is a character who is adept at speaking many languages. To the chorus of Corinthian women, she presents herself as a woman like any other, but with fewer resources; to Jason in the agōn she speaks as if man to man, articulating her claim to the appropriate returns of charis and philia. Even when she addresses herself, in the (...) great monologue, two distinct voices appear, that of the pitiful mother who loves her children and, opposed to this, the voice of the heroic warrior who demands revenge.1 The subject of this article will not be the versatility of Medea's speech, per se. Rather, I will consider the narrower but related issue of how—with what words and weapons—Medea enacts her revenge on Jason.Christopher Gill recently has argued that Medea's revenge is the final episode in the series of exchanges of charis between husband and wife.2 The exchanges began long ago in the mythical past, when Medea first helped Jason obtain the Golden Fleece.3 My argument, building on that of Gill's, is that the language of charis extends in this play to the material medium of the heroine's revenge. The "textiles" given by Medea to Creon's daughter are, I suggest, a significant component in the play's construction of Medea's agency and her participation in relations of philia.4 What can the objects that Medea uses as instruments of vengeance tell us about the identity of this heroine and the active role she [End Page 471] creates for herself?5 Why, more specifically, does Medea use gifts—a crown (plokos) and a robe (peplos)—to kill Creon and his daughter?6 By reading the gifts themselves in relation to the preceding agōn and Aegeus episode we will arrive at a more complete picture of the issues at stake in Medea's revenge.7To do this we will need to take into account several preliminary considerations. First of all, gifts are not given in isolation.8 There is always some reference to past acts of generosity as well as to future obligation when an offer is made. In Medea's case, the plokos and peplos—gifts given to her by her grandfather, Helios—are implicated in her own genealogy and, as I will argue, in her history with Jason. Standing as symbols of the autonomous power that Medea once used to give herself away in marriage, these objects are called upon once again, in this play, in order to punish Jason for his violation of philia.Secondly, the giving of gifts and the revenge take place in the context of two marriages: the marriage of Jason to Medea, and subsequently, his marriage to the princess of Corinth. In the final section of this article I will argue that Medea manipulates wedding gifts and imagery in such a way that the fulfillment of her revenge is conditional upon (and coextensive with) the unraveling of both of these marriages. The approach I am taking toward Medea's revenge therefore raises the important issue of female subjectivity in Greek tragedy, especially in the context of marriage. Recently, Victoria Wohl, Kirk Ormand, and Nancy Rabinowitz have given subtle and thorough consideration to the problems that arise in reading female subjectivity within the constraints of male authorship and the patriarchal systems of exchange of Greek tragedy. [End Page 472] I am for the most part in agreement with their description of marriage in tragedy as a homosocial institution: the exchange of women solidifies social and economic bonds between men—and therefore, should be read from this perspective.9Nevertheless, I believe that the Medea offers an interesting and significant challenge to this generalization. For it is precisely containment by a patriarchal system (and husband) that Medea seems to defy. Medea speaks a language of reciprocity that is usually spoken between men only, and she negotiates an uneasy balance for herself (in the agōn) between the roles of marital and aristocratic philia (as discussed below). When her claims to philia are not heard there, she stages another scene of exchange—this time... (shrink)

In recent studies it has been possible to apply new approaches in philosophy, especially of linguistic philosophy, to exegesis of the writings of the New Testament. Utilizing Wittgenstein’s model of language games, the following study of the meaning of the (apparently hidden) speech in the most difficult book of the NT, the “Book of Revelation,” reveals that the seer John does not speak of hidden events in the future but intends to point the addressee of his writing to a (...) new Christian existence already in the present world. For baptized believers the symbols of his visions become signposts, on the basis of which they would understand and act in their present world. The final motif of Revelation, God’s gift of the “New Jerusalem,” is therefore not only a symbol of the fulfillment of the history of theworld, but in the first place a real description concerned with the present, perhaps even a prescription of conduct for the Christian communal life in a non-Christian world. This result is reached in consideration of (a) the pragmatic dimension of the language act that is emphasized in the language game, and (b) the rule-laden character of a game, in which is winning is intended. In this way, the author and content of Revelation is seen in a new, not previously considered way. In the end John does not only say what will happen, but also what has to happen, i.e., what Christians are to do—or not to do—in the world, in order to overcome it and to contribute to its transformation. (shrink)

In this comment-response Mikael Lindfelt makes some suggestions to how one could develop the argument for witnessing as experiencing meaningfulness in life as put forward by Nicole Note and Emilie Van Deale. While being positive to the main phenomenological approach, and especially the dialectical relational aspect of the phenomenological argument, Lindfelt uses Alain Badiou’s talk of Event in trying both to develop the phenomenological argument and to point out some idealistic tendencies in the line of the argument. Lindfelt suggests that (...) the aspect of uniqueness in the relational experience of the other should be taken to more radically than suggested by Note and Van Deale. By pointing out the dialectical fragility of the Event of witnessing Lindfelt is arguing for that the concept of respect could be more utilized in arguing for the experience of meaning seen as a gift. (shrink)

An important part of our Theory of Mind—the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states—is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different location, (...) thereby rendering the belief and either the photo or text false. At the same time, participants performed either a concurrent verbal interference task (rehearsing strings of digits) or a visual interference task (remembering a visual pattern). Results showed that performance on false belief trials did not decline under verbal interference relative to visual interference. We interpret these findings as further support for the view that language does not form an essential part of the process of reasoning online (“in the moment”) about false beliefs. (shrink)

An incidental extension of the central domain of argumentation theory with non-classical ways of constructing arguments seems to automatically raise a question that is otherwise rarely posed, namely whether or not it is useful to consider the sex of the arguer. This question is usually posed with regard to argumentation by women in particular. Do women rely more, or differently than men do on non-canonical modes of reasoning stemming from the realm of the emotional, physical and intuitive, instead of the (...) logical? One may simply refer this question to folk-linguistics. One may also take the question seriously, given the findings on women's linguistic behaviour, and for various other reasons that will be explained below.Section 1 sums up the most frequently quoted differences in language use between women and men. This is followed by a non-exhaustive, interdisciplinary review of studies on male/female differences in verbal and written argumentation.Section 2 discusses the role of language and texts in generating and maintaining ideas on gender. These gender messages not only influence the actual argumentation behaviour of women and men, but also the way such behaviour is valued.Section 3 subsequently shows that our ideas on rationality are gendered, and therefore also our ideas on the proper central domain of argumentation theory.Section 4 briefly reflects on why this kind of wrong question about the reasoning of women should sometimes be addressed seriously anyway. (shrink)

Canon law has an abiding purpose in the Church: to aid in the creation of a community that is a true sign of the fellowship of love.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 425-444 [Access article in PDF] The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-1700 R. W. Serjeantson "Do not think, kind and benevolent readers, that I am proposing a useless subject to you by choosing to discuss the language [loquela] of beasts. For this is nothing other than philosophy, which investigates the natures of animals." 1 The Italian medical professor Hieronymus Fabricius (...) ab Aquapendente began his 1603 treatise On the language of beasts with this captatio benevolentiae with good cause. For early modern natural philosophers almost universally insisted that only humans were capable of language and speech. In this they followed, sometimes explicitly, their ancient authorities. "Man," Aristotle had said in the Politics, "is the only animal that has the gift of speech." "Men," wrote Cicero in the De inventione, "most excel the beasts in this, that they can speak." 2 They were sentiments echoed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "There is no true language among beastes," said Sir Kenelm Digby. "Language" (loquela), concurred G. J. Vossius, "is unique to man." And according to John Ray in The Wisdom of God (1691), speech was "a quality so peculiar to Man, that no Beast could ever attain to it." 3Language was a subject of absorbing interest to numerous early modern philosophers. They investigated its origin, its production, its signification, and its use. But behind almost all of these investigations lay one of the most profound suppositions in early modern anthropology: the uniqueness of the human [End Page 425] capacity for language, and the brutishness of the brute beasts. Harsh judgments were passed on those who thought that animals might be able to speak. Lawyers held that belief in animal language was sufficient evidence of idiocy. According to Kenelm Digby it was only vanity, ignorance, and a specious desire for reputation that had led some authors to argue that animals used "compleate languages as Men haue to discourse with one another in." And the seventeenth-century English writer on the passions, Edward Reynolds, thought that only "melancholy men" believed "that Elephants and Birds, and other Creatures have a language whereby they discourse with one another." 4Yet despite this pervasive assumption that humans spoke and animals did not, the question of animal language kept arising in early modern culture. Readers met speaking animals in beast fablesand on Lucianic voyages. There was a popular belief in early modern England that "in the olde tymes" animals could speak. 5 Theodore Zwinger, Claude Duret, and G. J. Vossius all recorded many accounts of human communication with birds, with the ancient claim that Apollonius of Tyana could understand birdsong being particularly notorious. 6 In the Old Testament Balaam's ass asks his owner what he has done to deserve being beaten. 7 And St. Basil had even suggested that before the Fall Adam and Eve had been able to talk to the animals as well as to name them--a suggestion that both Thomas Browne and Joseph Glanvill gave short shrift. 8 But my purpose in this paper is not to follow speaking animals through early modern fables, popular beliefs, or even Biblical commentary. Instead, I propose to explore the serious investigations of zoosemiotics and animal communication that were undertaken by numerous philosophers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 9For then as now, the question of animal language, broadly interpreted, was a serious one for the sciences. It was a question that was addressed across a wide range of disciplines, from logic to natural history. As such it was an important component of the many discussions of the nature of animal reason--discussions that provided a means for skeptical moral philosophers to humble human pretensions [End Page 426] to rationality and wisdom. 10 Natural philosophers, too, undertook detailed inquiries into the question of animal expression, exploring issues of articulacy, anatomy, and function. Almost all early modern authors agreed that animals could not speak and did not possess language in the same way that humans did. But this still left a great deal of scope for considering the extent... (shrink)

This paper wants to bring about a “linguistic turn” in the current theological discussion on gifts and giving. It focuses on the linguistic constructions around “give” and their use in religious and theological texts. The linguistic approach is enriched with the help of Seneca's philosophy of gifts and services. Seneca's De beneficiis is not, however, interpreted as a handbook of anthropology and economic exchange, but as a guide to the proper use of the words “give” and “receive”. In the last (...) sections of this paper, some prominent themes of Reformation theology are discussed from the linguistic perspective of giving. In particular, the issue of receiving something purely passively is addressed. (shrink)

Post-Quinean Nominalism is widely regarded as a metaphysics of concreteness, suggesting (in line with scientific naturalism) that ordinary language and common sense might be in the grip of “ordinary hallucinations” (Varzi 2010), or untutored belief in abstract entities. Drawing on both medieval and contemporary sources, this paper argues that, far from encouraging our minds to stick to concreteness and individuals, an untutored usage of Ockham’s Razor prompts the elision of concreteness and the everyday world from contemporary metaphysics. A theory (...) of individuality based on Husserl’s concept of Unitary Foundation is outlined, and partially traced back to the metaphysicians of essential individuality, or haecceity: Boethius, Scotus, Leibniz – the champions of the “Unitarian Tradition.”. (shrink)

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We highlight the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions (...) and clarifying the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia BaracchiJoseph GamacheBARACCHI, Claudia. Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift. Translated by Elena Bartolini and Catherine Fullarton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 146 pp. Paper, $30.00Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift offers a series of reflections on friendship that "outline thoughts, visions, stories." It is well to bear this in mind. There is no sustained (...) discussion of (and not many references to) other commentators or interpreters of the ancient Greeks. Nor is there, despite the title, a sustained philosophical treatment of friendship or its future. It is a series of reflections on ancient Greek texts. These reflections are unified by the theme of friendship, even when friendship seems to recede into the background. Each chapter is organized around a specific text, the reading of which is interspersed with the aforementioned thoughts, visions, and stories.The first chapter focuses on Plato's Timaeus. Friendship in its "most elementary sense" is "looking at the sky" and seeing not only myself, but "myself as us." This sort of cosmic friendship is a look, a "unitive force, a capacity for seeing the bonds and holding together the elements that form every living organism." The second chapter takes up the analogy of the soul and the city in the Republic. I am a friend to myself when the parts of my soul are in harmony.In the third and longest chapter, Baracchi takes up friendship between equals as discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. The thematic focus is now friendship between persons, and we read that friendship is a "privileged place in which to be," that it "corroborates, strengthens, amplifies, and emphasizes" the friends, that it is the "condition and context for the utmost explication of human dynamis." Friends resemble each other like poetic images "that illuminate and elucidate one another." The third chapter also takes a swipe at "us moderns," whose notions of liberty undermine our ability to appreciate friendship. We moderns "struggle to contemplate seriousness, fidelity, and the depth they entail, without cynicism." The critique is familiar, and trades, at times, on what seems to be a conflation of Hobbes with the entirety of early modern philosophical anthropology. [End Page 535]Chapters 4 through 6 return to Plato, first with a reflection on the Apology and Symposium, and then with a discussion of Aristotle's friendship with Plato. The fifth chapter takes up the tension between the pursuit of truth and the love of one's friends, as that dilemma manifests in the life of a philosopher. Baracchi convincingly argues that Aristotle should be read as honoring the deeper teachings of Plato, and Socrates before him, that one should care about not who holds a belief but only whether the belief is true. Thus did Aristotle resolve the dilemma between truth and friendship. His pursuit of the truth, even when it caused disagreement with Plato, was an act of friendship.Chapter 6 focuses on the origin of the polis as described in the Republic. Baracchi shows how Socrates tries in the Republic to widen the circle of those who count as one's friends, from select others within the polis, to everyone within the polis, to the entire Greek world, as well as to push back against those who argue that enmity is the necessary foundation of the polis. The last three chapters of the book return to Aristotle's views about friendship: first, about the relationship between friendship and justice, second, about friendships between unequals, and lastly, about the embodied aspects of friendship, its sweetness, and pleasure.There are limits, however, to how helpful the work might be to philosophers interested in friendship. The language is often too abstract, as in the recommendation, "to learn to think human community in its entirety, without this entailing the elimination of differences, and without reducing the differences to identity-related and localistic velleities." Or in the claim that the difference between complete and derivative friendship is the former's ability to "to grasp the broader reasons in the finite, and thus to place the contingent in an otherwise articulated context." Too often there are exaggerations that obscure whatever point is... (shrink)

In a recent study of 1 Corinthians 12:7 11, the Hong Kong Monthly Meeting explored how Quakers might interpret Paul’s presentation of nine “spiritual gifts” (or “manifestations” phanerosis in Greek] of God’s spirit). The nine gifts can be neatly grouped into three categories, using Matthew 7:7 (“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you”) as a basis: the three “vocal” gifts (the spirit’s manifestation in response to our (...) asking) are tongues, interpretation, and prophecy; the three “visual” gifts (the spirit’s manifestation in response to our seeking) are knowledge, wisdom, and discernment; and the three “victorious” gifts (the spirit’s manifestation in response to our knocking) are faith, miracles, and healing. In a series of three post Meeting discussions, we examined how Quakers might recover some of the meaningfulness of these classical distinctions, which have often been merely cast aside as a result of the overly literal way they are often interpreted in some Christian denominations. During the Meeting for Worship prior to the first discussion, one participant read the whole of Acts 2 as a voice ministry. During the discussion, we came to realize that this chapter, where the gift of speaking in tongues is first mentioned in the Bible, is a profound statement of our need to express the language of love . This is where the church begins. Speaking in tongues has the effect of universalizing God’s Word by opening it up to all cultures and peoples. The gift breaks through the boundaries of human language, making “that of God in each of us” a living reality. Sadly, some Christians use this gift as a divisive tool to isolate and alienate one “special” group of believers (those who “know how to speak in tongues”) from all others. To do this is to miss the point. It is no accident that Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 reminds us that “whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (verse 21): asking is the doorway to spiritual understanding. Asking for guidance from God is often difficult because of our pride, and so the gift of a language we do not own or even understand can have the beneficial effect of humbling us.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges on Language and TranslationJon StewartAlthough Jorge Luis Borges had years of philosophical training and expressed a number of philosophical theories in his literary works, he never published a philosophy treatise. The result is that his oeuvre has often been viewed as purely literary and been largely neglected by trained philosophers. However, by ignoring the philosophical aspects of Borges’s thought, criticism has neglected a vast dimension of his (...) work and has thus frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted many aspects of it. As I have tried to demonstrate in an earlier article, 1 there are important philosophical themes in the short stories of Borges, which have yet to be considered. In the present essay, I take up one of these heretofore neglected themes.We can find perhaps no better example of the literary exposition of Borges’s philosophical ideas than in his short story or cuento, “Averroes’ Search.” 2 There Borges reconstructs for us a culture and an age radically different and temporally distant from our own. He recounts the story of Averroes, the Arab philosopher living in Spain in the second half of the twelfth century. The history of philosophy knows Averroes as one of the great medieval commentators on the works of Aristotle. Borges recreates the historical moment and the passion of Averroes in his task of translating and providing a commentary for the texts of the great Greek philosopher who remains forever distant from him. The story takes as its point of departure Renan’s observation about a curious misinterpretation of Aristotle found in Averroes: “S’imaginant que la tragédie n’est autre chose que l’art de louer...”(p. 180). Borges poses [End Page 320] the question of why Averroes, who had dedicated his life to understanding the work of Aristotle, had so badly misunderstood the concept of tragedy treated by the Greek philosopher. To answer this question, Borges brilliantly employs the faculty of historical imagination in order to think himself back into Averroes’s particular time period and cultural context. The short story presents us with a thesis about the intimate connection between culture and language and the ultimate futility of translation and crosscultural knowledge and comprehension. In the present essay, I wish to argue that the point of Borges’s story about the fate of Averroes is (1) to refute the common view which sees language as an entity neutral with respect to culture and history, and (2) to bring to light the comprehensive nature and scope of particular culturally and historically determined ways of thinking and perceiving the world. These philosophical elements have been neglected by the various literary scholars who have treated the works of Borges. 3 Moreover, Borges anticipates many of the most celebrated epistemological and hermeneutical theories of our day from philosophers such as Gadamer, Davidson and Quine, and presents them in literary form.IThere is a common view according to which the manifold languages of the various peoples and cultures of the world are more or less interchangeable. According to this linguistics of common sense, language is something secondary and accidental which is only an inessential corollary to our basic understanding and perception of the world. Human perception and cognition are thought of as constants for all humans everywhere. A dog will be perceived as a dog regardless of time period, place or culture, and the words we create to represent “dog” in the medium of language are secondary and even arbitrary. As a result, individual words in one language correspond to individual words in another. Dog in English corresponds straightforwardly to Hund in German or perro in Spanish, and nothing could be more simple. The gifted translator is merely someone with a great capacity to memorize words and to effect rapid replacement changes, and translation is regarded as a more or less mechanical process with little room for creativity. The diversity of languages is neither epistemologically necessary nor important, but rather explained as an historical accident as in the etiological tale of the Tower of Babel. Language has no necessary connection to the time period in which it is spoken or to the culture of [End Page 321] the people who speak it. That we... (shrink)

For Clarice Lispector, language is a sacrament on dazzling display in her work, where the celebration of writing and the emergence of a creative consciousness through the act of writing about writing access an immanent experience of grace beyond any historical religious sensibility. In this, she simultaneously accesses the “great potency of potentiality” that is an experience of freedom undoing anything bound up by language. She embraces the failure of language as the “glory of falling,” the useless (...) experience of grace, and of experiencing the gift of having a body beyond whatever words we can place upon it. In the struggle to behold the “it” underneath language, she strives for an impersonal love – a joy – that respects the inviolability of nature, the “Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.” If “the absence of the God is an act of religion,” as she claims, the inviolability of nature is that which preserves an experience of immanent grace in our world. Rather than describe the limitless potential of the self, one’s immersion in the joyful failure of language points toward the self in unique and profound ways without offering definitions, instead allowing internal contradictions to condition one’s selfhood. In Lispector’s fiction we thus confront the pure paradox of the self: an internal, singular individual who yet maintains within themselves (hence, its immanence) a plurivocal affirmation of existence itself and a redefining of God. (shrink)

The present is, in fact, made out of the residue of the past.For here the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man's humanity, and of humanism. But situated where language no longer lets itself be effaced.A note to readers, an apologia: this is an experimental critical theory essay, a performative piece of academic writing that attempts to wrestle with the porous zones, the hiccups, slips and falls between languages, translations, and between (...) writing and genre. Some readers may find it obscure, dense, in parts; open and too free, too vulnerable, too self-revealing or narrative–too variable in its intensities, its modalities, its genres. But that is also the point. It is in part... (shrink)

I explore how we negotiate sexual encounters with one another in language and consider the pragmatic structure of such negotiations. I defend three theses: Discussions of consent have dominated the philosophical and legal discourse around sexual negotiation, and this has distorted our understanding of sexual agency and ethics. Of central importance to good-quality sexual negotiation are sexual invitations and gift offers, as well as speech designed to set up safe frameworks and exit conditions. Sexual communication that goes well (...) does not just prevent harm; it enables forms of agency, pleasure, and fulfillment that would not otherwise be possible. (shrink)

Man is an open existence, exposed to mortality and free towards the coming that is revealed to him in the lightening flash of language. Free towards, and endowed with the ever new possibility of beginning, the mortal is endowed with the gift of language that remains beyond his death: here alone lies redemption for the mortals. It is this affirmative question of the coming time that is pursued in this work: it occurs as and in a configuration (...) of questions, not constituting a system: question of mortality and temporality, the flash of language that reveals man - beyond any predication - his finitude, the opening where man finds himself to welcome the coming, and finally redemption in the coming itself in the existential attunement of hope. This article attempts, reading the works of Schelling, Heidegger and Benjamin, to think the gift of language as redemptive, beyond any appropriation, in the face of evil whose possibility is given to the mortal alone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Meditations on the Letter A:The Hand as Nexus Between Music and LanguageEleanor V. StubleyThe image is that of a little girl. She stands alone, center-stage, her lips moving quietly as she rehearses the letters of the alphabet so that her forthcoming performance will be fresh and perfect. Her name is called. She takes a deep breath and begins, haltingly, doh,... doh, ray,... doh, ray, me,.... Her tongue catches at (...) the beginning of each sound as if it were a new found delight, but it is the sequence, the linear progression that is the focus of her concentration. And slowly, her recitation begins to take on its own rhythmic fluidity, each sound's name becoming stronger and more confident than the one before. Then just as quickly as it began, it is over, and she stands tall in the glory of the final doh's resonance, proud in her belief that having mastered the letters of the alphabet, she has at long last discovered the key to unlocking music's deepest and darkest mysteries.The alphabet—I begin its story with the hand behind the hieroglyphic markings of our ancient ancestors, the hand that discovered in the tracings of its own aimless movements across the sand a capacity to replicate the arc of the moon, the flowering branches of a shrub. It was a hand pre-occupied with the visual, its scratchings serving to extend the communicative power of its own reach by calling forth the image of a thing not immediately present. Meaning, as such, was typically a matter of a one-to-one correspondence inferred on the basis of shape and form, with concepts such as speed and light portrayed by animals and natural objects that one would associate with each (for instance, a running cougar, a stylized sun). But as language and the art of storytelling evolved, the emergence of concepts lacking precise visual associations required the development of a variety of phonetic strategies that, often working through pictographic puns (that is, belief, bee+leaf), used the visual to invoke the sound of the human voice.1 The effect, David Abrams suggests, was that of magic, the word having seemingly been "drawn" from the silence of thin air.2 And, like all tricks, the hand disappeared behind the magic. Where initially voice and hand had worked as extensions of one another, the voice serving to bring people together,3 the hand pointing to that which was voiced, the word as name now sounded alone.The story continues with the artistry of the storyteller. It was the artistry of a rhapsodist, one who used the voice to spin a tale of a "remembered present" from [End Page 42] the remnants of the hand's scratchings that had withstood the ravages of time.4 I say "remembered present" because the voice was valued for its expressive qualities and worked in and through a battery of memorized melodic embellishments that allowed it to stitch one image to the next on the basis of the storyteller's own experience and knowledge.5 It was a voice, consequently, that worked in the moment, a voice that drew energy and inspiration not only from the hand's scratchings but also from those that had gathered to listen. The first alphabets did little to change the dynamics of the event, they being nothing more than crudely assembled compilations of idiosyncratic phonograms (that is, z = buzzing bee) designed to define the possibilities of language as a vocabulary of names.6 Etched into bark, tree, stone, and parchment, however, they came to have a longevity that allowed the sounding codes they represented to be carried "word of mouth" from place to place. Where the spoken word had once been both fleeting and fluid, gone before it was fully sounded, it now had a repeatability that served to fix both its spellings and its meanings. And it was not long before the spinning of a tale had become a matter of second sight, the work of an extraordinary memory able to "recall" that which the storyteller had not been present to hear.7The gift worked through a self-conscious awareness of oneself as... (shrink)

Both Heidegger's Being and Time and Helen Keller's The Story of my Life address the problem of what it means for humans to be optimally human. In reading these texts together, I hope to show that Helen's life-story confirms Heidegger's existential analyses to some extent, but also, importantly, poses a challenge to them with respect to the interrelated issues of disability, language and others. Heidegger's hermeneutic explication of what it means to be human is intended to uncover supposedly basic (...) human existential structures. As a fore-structure for this explication, Heidegger projects an already able-bodied, self-sufficient adult, resolutely engaged in daily activity. I shall argue, however, that it is due to this starting-point in adult-Dasein that Heidegger's existential analyses miss important insights concerning the meaning of being human to be gained from Helen's experience. Starting from the essentially disabled child-Dasein, Helen describes her struggle to achieve the very condition that Heidegger assumes from the start, first through rescue by the other as teacher, who offered the gift of language and community, and thereafter in her grasp of language as a “pharmakon.” I hope to show in the end that Helen's experience of a struggle for humanity offers the model for an alternative projection, that of an essentially disabled and needy Dasein, which, I believe, provides a more viable fore-structure than Heidegger's for a hermeneutics of humanity. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(1) 2003: 98-112. (shrink)

I have argued elsewhere that non-sentential representations that are the close kin of scale models can be, and often are, realized by computational processes. I will attempt here to weaken any resistance to this claim that happens to issue from those who favor an across-the-board computational theory of cognitive activity. I will argue that embracing the idea that certain computers harbor nonsentential models gives proponents of the computational theory of cognition the means to resolve the conspicuous disconnect between the sentential (...) character of the data structures they posit and the nonsentential qualitative character of our perceptual experiences of corporeal (i.e., spatial, kinematic, and dynamic) properties. Along the way, I will question the viability of some externalist remedies for this disconnect, and I will explain why the computational theory put forward here falls quite clearly beyond the useful bounds of the Chinese-Room argument. (shrink)

The rise of precision medicine has led to an unprecedented focus on human biological material in biomedical research. In addition, rapid advances in stem cell technology, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology are leading to more complex human tissue structures and new applications with tremendous potential for medicine. While promising, these developments also raise several ethical and practical challenges which have been the subject of extensive academic debate. These debates have led to increasing calls for longitudinal governance arrangements between tissue providers (...) and biobanks that go beyond the initial moment of obtaining consent, such as closer involvement of tissue providers in what happens to their tissue, and more active participatory approaches to the governance of biobanks. However, in spite of these calls, such measures are being adopted slowly in practice, and there remains a strong tendency to focus on the consent procedure as the tool for addressing the ethical challenges of contemporary biobanking. In this paper, we argue that one of the barriers to this transition is the dominant language pervading the field of human tissue research, in which the provision of tissue is phrased as a ‘donation’ or ‘gift’, and tissue providers are referred to as ‘donors’. Because of the performative qualities of language, the effect of using ‘donation’ and ‘donor’ shapes a professional culture in which biobank participants are perceived as passive providers of tissue free from further considerations or entitlements. This hampers the kind of participatory approaches to governance that are deemed necessary to adequately address the ethical challenges currently faced in human tissue research. Rather than reinforcing this idea through language, we need to pave the way for the kind of participatory approaches to governance that are being extensively argued for by starting with the appropriate terminology. (shrink)

For most of the 1980s, Jon Barwise focused much of his research in the area of natural language semantics. This article surveys his research publications in that area.Most, but not all, of those publications were in the area of situation semantics, a new approach to natural language semantics Barwise developed jointly with his colleague John Perry in the first half of the 1980s. That work was both blessed, and cursed, by becoming closely identified in academic circles with the (...) award of a $23 million gift to Stanford from the System Development Foundation for the establishment in 1983 of its Center for the Study of Language and Information. The development of situation semantics, and in due course its underlying mathematical foundation Situation Theory, carried out for the most part within the framework of CSLI's STASS research group, was actually a relatively small part of the overall research program at CSLI. But because Barwise and Perry were leading figures at CSLI, were centrally involved in securing the SDF gift, and were respectively the first and second directors of CSLI, a general impression sprung up that the two of them had been awarded millions of dollars to develop situation semantics.A major consequence of this false impression was that from the theory's early days, a great deal of interest was shown in the project. With so many accomplished scholars pouring over the work while the ink was still wet on the manuscript pages, Barwise and Perry were able to take advantage of a broad range of helpful criticism. This meant that they were able to develop the new theory much more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. (shrink)

Every culture has its own taboos. Communication works better when the participants share more assumptions and knowledge about each other (Scollon & Scollon, 2000). However, in many cases, participants realize the existence of the rules associated with taboos only after they have violated them. Those who do not observe these social “rules” might face serious results, such as total embarrassment or, as Saville-Troike (1989) puts it, they may be accused of immorality and face social ostracism. This paper reports that certain (...) verbal and non-verbal taboos among Chinese people centuries ago still affect their language and behavior choices. Two types of Chinese possible taboos in language and behavior are introduced and compared with cultures of the Koreans and Americans: (1) gift-giving taboos which are phonologically linked to the “separation” and “death” in Chinese society, and (2) verbal expressions which are linked to the twelve zodiac-animals in Chinese traditional metaphors. This research paper also tries to answer two questions related to Asian culture and history: (1) whether Koreans share more of these phonologically-linked taboos than Americans do because Korean language has very similar sounds to Chinese; and (2) whether Koreans share with Chinese people more of the zodiac-animal-linked metaphors (i.e., the rat, the bull/cow, the tiger, the rabbit, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the sheep/lamb, the monkey, the chicken, the dog, and the pig) than Americans do because Korean people also use the same animals as a cycle of every twelve years. Data were collected in two ways: questionnaires and interviews. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s recent appointment to Princeton University created considerable controversy, most of it focused on his proposal for active euthanasia of disabled infants. Singer articulates utilitarian ideas that often appear in public discussions of euthanasia. Drawing on Pope John Paul II’s work on ethics and suffering, I argue that Singer’s utilitarian theory of value is impoverished. After introducing the Pope’s ethic based on the imago dei, I discuss love as self-gift. I show how this concept supports a theory of (...) value in which spiritual goods are preeminent over material goods. I then describe how suffering reveals spiritual goods, discussing how participation in Christ’s suffering can alter our perception of value. I also consider how communal responses to suffering provide opportunities for self-giving. Third, I consider Singer’s proposal for killing infants with hemophilia, arguing that it arbitrarily ignores spiritual goods. I then discuss proposals to kill anencephalic infants, discussing how parental response to their suffering can demonstrate an extraordinary love in seemingly hopeless circumstances. I conclude by calling for a more sustained social response to euthanasia initiatives. (shrink)

"Language is a great and divine gift" Reformation and Language Culture In this paper Luther's anthropology is shown as being based on the human capability of speaking. As a speaking person, the human being is not outside the world but involved in the world by communication. For Luther being human means – thanks to the capability of speaking – being in a personal relationship. The author argues that this relationship to others is based in the relationship to (...) God. Although speaking is a gift of God, it can be abused whenever someone stirs up people to degrade others, as populists do. Luther had been reproached to be a populist in his closeness to simple people, but this was only due to his intention, that everyone should understand his translation of the bible. Instead of stoking fears, as populists do, Luther helped people to overcome their fears, by telling them in their own language – due to his German translation – that God loves them. (shrink)

Many church fathers have been identified as having held a xenolalic view on the gift of tongues. Scholars who have shown evidence of this have, however, omitted to give sufficient attention to the scope of the tongues the church fathers detailed. Many of these church fathers, referenced, identify the gift of tongues as the ability to speak all languages. This supernatural ability to speak all languages has been appropriately designated as pan-xenolalia. This article aimed to highlight the existence (...) and prevalence of the pan-xenolalic view among the church fathers and examined the works of the relevant church fathers to determine how they gave expression to their view, which passages of Scripture they applied their view to and how they motivated their view. The pan-xenolalic sentiments of many church fathers could be confirmed though they used various phrases to express it. These references to pan-xenolalia were used in the context of both Acts and 1 Corinthians. Their possible motivations for holding this view seemed to have come from sources outside of the text itself, with tradition, expectation and purpose of tongues from their perspective being the most likely influences. Contribution: The patristic perspective on tongues were not merely xenolalic but pan-xenolalic. Pan-xenolalia as interpretive key to 1 Corinthians 12–14 provides a fresh perspective to reading the text, which may pose some significant challenges to how the text is interpreted. Establishing the veracity of the pan-xenolalic view lays the foundation for scholars to evaluate a reading of 1 Corinthians 14 from this perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of IncarnationEdwin SteinWilliam Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation, by David P. Haney; xiii & 269 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, $35.00.To the English Romantic poets, David Haney notes, the world seemed to have died at the hands of Enlightenment rationalism by being made merely a referent of transpicuous representational sign-systems. One of their fundamental projects was to reanimate it, (...) and Wordsworth committed himself to an animating poetics, incarnational in concept. Haney quotes the Wordsworthian incarnational locus classicus, the third “Essay Upon Epitaphs”: “If words be not... an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift;... Language, if it do not uphold, and feed,... is a counter-spirit unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve” (p. 1). He conjoins Wordsworth’s statement in a note to “The Thorn” that words should seize us “not as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are themselves part of the passion” (p. 24). “Incarnational” is not further defined directly, though we are told that it characterizes a poetic practice, “a philosophically and theologically important concept embedded [in our cultural] heritage,” and a theoretical orientation that acts “against the very idea of a ‘theory’” (p. 4). Haney draws principally from Gadamer, Lévinas, Cavell, Geoffrey Hartman, and Charles Taylor to explore through philosophical argumentation the ways in which Wordsworth incorporated, elaborated, problematized, and even betrayed these aspects of the incarnational process in his work.One of Haney’s concerns is to show how reading through the lens of incarnational poetics helps us see that Wordsworth incorporated historicity rather than suppressing it, as he is often accused of doing these days. Another is to demonstrate that deconstructive analysis, new-historical critique, and the secularized-Protestantism approach of M. H. Abrams are each inadequate to account for the hermenuetics of this poetics, because it resists and finesses the drive to create the transparent representational structures on which these critics focus. In his incarnational mode, his poetic thought aims not at realizing allegorized abstract truth but at presenting kerygmatically what is instantiated by incarnation as event; thought becomes materially existent without being changed into something else. Incarnational poetics thus acts to counter the binary oppositions (presence/absence, body/spirit, divine/human, etc.) on which both Enlightenment and Romantic discourse relied (the latter reversing the values), and defeats the binarism-dependent drive toward pure self-consciousness that always gets entangled in solipsism and semiological webs. Incarnating thought opens it to the historical process in the sense of Gadamer’s wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein: incarnation is not embodiment or an “ideal effacement of the difference between word and referent, but rather a process of spirit becoming event”; and words thereby become “things and events... which must enter the realm of mortality” (p. 19). [End Page 138]Haney links this confrontation of mortality to both Cavell’s idea of skeptical acknowledgment of the mortal other replacing knowledge and Lévinas’ conception of a preontological “saying” that dialogically makes us responsible for the other but must die into the “said” to be understood. These connections allow him to enlarge brilliantly our understanding of The Prelude, Book 5, and the “Lucy poems.” Here words achieve visionary power not by a symbolic link to transcendence but “by allowing themselves to be interrupted by that which is absolutely other, and therefore ‘infinite’ in Levinas’ sense” (p. 87). Haney extends this and related insights in a chapter on the final books of The Prelude that shows, among other things, how its figural structures for the autobiographical self begin to break down and are replaced by tropological performatives. These lead away from a systematic code of representation but allow recuperation through the “dialogue” with Coleridge, a non-totalizing process of closure that by linking the autobiographical self to the extratextual self opens the poem to a “range of projective sympathies” (Charles Altieri, quoted in Haney, p. 137).Haney also explores how the incarnational hermeneutic works to close the widening gap between epistemology and ethics fostered by the Enlightenment’s commitment... (shrink)