Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the (...) realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. (shrink)

The question how to account for illusion has had a prominent role in shaping theories of perception throughout the history of philosophy. Prevailing philosophical wisdom today has it that phenomena of illusion force us to choose between the following two options. First, reject altogether the early modern empiricist idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience. Instead we must characterize perceptual experience entirely in terms of its (...) representational content. Second, retain the early modern idea that the core subjective character of experience is simply constituted by the identity of its direct objects, but admit that these must be mind-dependent entities, distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. I argue here that the early modern empiricists had an indispensable insight. The idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any such mind-dependent objects. (shrink)

In what many consider to be Pastor Bill Johnson's life message, you will rediscover God in a whole new way. Get ready for what you thought you knew about God's goodness to be lovingly challenged, as beliefs - as popular and widely accepted as they may be - are measured next to the eternal standard of Scripture and are either found to be false or recognized as truth.

This chapter contains sections titled: Moving Apart On First Reinterpretation The Real: From the Mouths of Babes … and Dudes Reconnecting and Misconnecting Keeping at Arm's Length Aristotelian Trauma Talking Sexy Graphic Sex The Ideal The Arts of Distance Loving The Last Word.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture by Richard B. MillerBill BarbieriFriends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture Richard B. Miller new york: columbia university press, 2016. 416 pp. $60.00In his studies on casuistry, war and peace, pediatric ethics, and other occasional topics Richard B. Miller has for some time been a leading source of creative impulses in the field of religious (...) ethics, so it is a welcome event to have this volume organizing past essays of his into a thematically cohesive presentation. His book sets out a vision of the character and concerns of religious ethics that helps counter critics, such as Stanley Hauerwas, who have expressed skepticism about the field.The governing conception of Friends and Other Strangers is that the study of religious ethics is properly shaped by attending to how "our lives ineluctably oscillate between experiences of intimacy and otherness" (5). Accordingly, Miller seeks to guide the field beyond either a one-sided focus on matters of friendship and special relations or a preoccupation with alterity and heterology. To grasp how the dialectic of intimacy and alterity shapes the normative character of personal and public life, he recommends religious ethicists should employ "the category of culture as an organizing rubric" (6).In the book's initial section Miller elaborates on his view of the enterprise of religious ethics and its place in the broader intellectual landscape. In a discussion drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and James Gustafson, Miller first offers his account of the characteristic concerns and history of the field. He then presents the case for a "cultural turn" in religious ethics, arguing not only that practitioners would benefit from incorporating anthropology and cultural studies into their work but that they should extend their ambit to normative questions throughout the academy. Responding to the problems of ethnocentrism and the moral authority of outsiders in criticizing cultural practices, Miller rounds out the section by proposing constructive norms for nonchauvinistic social criticism in multicultural contexts.Among the remaining essays are several that showcase Miller's appreciation of Augustine as a principal source of ethical insight. In a chapter scrutinizing the case for replacing disembodied patterns of moral reasoning with an "ethics of empathy," he proposes that Augustine's ethics of love can sharpen our grasp of both the possibilities and pitfalls of empathy as a moral value. Writing on friendship and evil, Miller invokes the Augustinian "theocentric imaginary" as a guide to how intimacy and alterity are balanced in friendship. And taking [End Page 194] up the ethics and social psychology of war, he presents Augustine's writings on the morality of killing as a source for just war standards that can be applied in cross-cultural normative criticism. That Augustine's seminal reflections on time and memory do not appear in a further chapter on "the moral and political burdens of memory" is a slight disappointment, no doubt attributable to the chapter's origins as a review essay.Other topics tellingly subjected to Miller's characteristically nuanced and sharp analysis include indignation and solidarity, responsibilities to children, and democracy and public reason. A bonus chapter collects six lengthy reviews of recent books—five on topics related to Islam—touted by Miller as exemplary in their embodiment of a cultural turn in religious ethics.Given its endorsement of a "cultural turn" in ethics, the book would have benefited from deeper reflection on discrete meanings of "culture," "cultures," and their various cognates. In addition, the individual chapters, originating in diverse settings, are not all equally well integrated into the book's governing themes. Overall, however, Miller's book amply succeeds in its Geertzian task of presenting both a model of and a model for the field of religious ethics. A fine distillation of the thought of a leading figure in the guild, it is essential reading for serious students of ethics.Bill BarbieriCatholic UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Many Epicurean arguments for the claim that death is nothing to us depend on the ‘Experience Constraint’: the claim that something can only be good or bad for us if we experience it. However, Epicurus’ commitment to the Experience Constraint makes his attitude to will-writing puzzling. How can someone who accepts the Experience Constraint be motivated to bring about post mortem outcomes?We might think that an Epicurean will-writer could be pleased by the thought of his/her loved ones being provided for (...) after his/her death. Warren has argued that this does not dissolve the puzzle, since it involves a hope which the Epicurean should take to be empty just as the fear of death is empty. However, if it is a necessary condition of an emotion’s being empty that it involve accepting a claim which is not only false but also harmful it is not clear that this hope is indeed ‘empty’: there is a crucial disanalogy between fearing death and hoping for the prosperity of one’s children here. And if emptiness does... (shrink)

The question how to account for illusion has had a prominent role in shaping theories of perception throughout the history of philosophy. Prevailing philosophical wisdom today has it that phenomena of illusion force us to choose between the following two options. First, reject altogether the early modern empiricist idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience. Instead we must characterize perceptual experience entirely in terms of its (...) representational content. Second, retain the early modern idea that the core subjective character of experience is simply constituted by the identity of its direct objects, but admit that these must be mind-dependent entities, distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. I argue here that the early modern empiricists had an indispensable insight. The idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any such mind-dependent objects. (shrink)

This is a review of the biographic drama Love and Mercy. More than a story of the evolution of The Beach Boys, it is the story of the lead Beach Boy, Brian Wilson, and his struggle with substance abuse, mental illness, family stress, emerging love, and a controlling psychologist. Interwoven are many bioethics themes, including the doctor–patient relationship, conflict of interest, autonomy, and patient welfare. For those unaware of the sadness and torment running directly alongside the sunny, bubbly (...) life of The Beach Boys, this film is an eye-opener. It is also a great reminder of the importance of boundaries between clinicians and their patients. (shrink)

In my paper “Parental Love and the Ethics of Sex Selection,” published in the previous issue of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, I set out to determine whether a plausible argument could be constructed in support of a common intuition about the ethics of sex selection. The intuition in question is that sex selection for nonmedical reasons is incompatible with a proper parental love: that is, with the sort of love that a parent ought to have (...) for her child or, equivalently, with the sort of love that someone accurately describable as a good parent will have for her child. I concluded that there is a prima facie compelling argument that fits the bill, though I did little more than introduce and set that argument out. In the current paper, my aim will be to subject it to closer scrutiny, by considering a number of possible objections to it. I will start by asking why the argument should be thought to apply only to sex selection for nonmedical reasons and not to cases in which selection is employed in order to prevent the birth of children with serious sex-linked genetic conditions. (shrink)

Global warming has aroused profound concerns about the future of humanity and the planet as a whole. Indeed, Bill McKibben has argued that anthropogenic climate change is tantamount to the very end of nature and articulates a sense of deep anxiety that many people share. I argue that this feeling of anxiety cannot be fully accounted for either by appeal to the consequences of global warming or the associated injustices. I locate its source with our recognition that human beings (...) are now responsible for some of the basic conditions supporting all life on Earth. I argue that if we are to assume such an awesome responsibility (and we must), it's good that we do so anxiously. While some have criticized the "I have a nightmare" global warming rhetoric of environmentalists, I identify a particular feature of our nightmare and claim that in it we can find a source for hope. (shrink)

People have a love/hate relationship with rapidly changing healthcare technology. While consumer demand for medical apps continues to grow as rapidly as does supply, healthcare professionals and safety experts worry about the impact of these apps on the health consumer. In response to the rapidly growing mobile healthcare sector, the Food and Drug Administration has put forth guidelines to regulate ‘mobile medical apps’, those health-related apps that are designated as medical devices. In this article, I argue that this decision, (...) to only regulate apps that bill themselves as medical devices, will create a market for ‘off-label’ app use. Further, I will talk about the oft used analogy between off-label apps and off-label pharmaceuticals, showing that off-labeling apps will provide patients none of the benefits that come with a physician prescribing a drug off-label, while exposing the mobile healthcare consumer to significant risks that go significantly beyond those that we know of from prescription drugs. Recognizing that the Food and Drug Administration is not going to be able to significantly change its policies on oversight, I will suggest specific actions to at least mitigate some of the risks associated with off-label app use. (shrink)

How to conceptualize loving relationships so as to accommodate that just love is geared toward preserving and fostering individual autonomy? To develop an answer, this paper draws on the recent debate on the rational role of experience to motivate a view dubbed Murdochian presentationalism. Murdochian presentationalism takes seriously two presentationalist ideas: 1) individuals harboring different world views who respond to identical situations differently can be equally rational; 2) our views and concepts develop under the constant pressure of experience. It (...) combines these ideas with Murdoch’s tenet that coming to know others (and thus being able to do well by them) requires unselfish love, construed as just attention that involves a continuous refinement of our evaluative concepts and makes us better attuned to what is real. Complemented with a broadly Kantian notion of autonomy, the resulting view fits the bill. The paper ends on a sketch of what is dubbed the ideal lovers’ pledge and a comment on what metaphor the view arrived at suggests for thinking about loving relationships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the article's first paragraph: The noted philosopher and Santayana scholar Irving Singer, author of the magisterial three-volume work The Nature of Love, died on February 1, 2015, aged 89. Singer was born in Brooklyn on December 24, 1925, and served in World War II. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1948, under the G.I. Bill. The following year he wed Josephine Fisk, an opera singer with whom he had four (...) children. They spent a year at Oxford (1949–1950), during which time Singer read The Last Puritan, and in 1950 they took a trip to Italy to meet its author. This trip is related in detail in the delightful article, “A Pilgrimage to Santayana,” which can be found in Singer’s 2000 book George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, an essential work for anyone interested in the life and thought of Santayana. (shrink)

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one”, Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the (...) twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Patient Self-Determination ActElizabeth Leibold McCloskey (bio)What are the ethics of extending the length of life? We know that we cannot artificially end life (Thou Shalt not Kill), but how about artificially extending life? Is that always good, sometimes good?... In ethics, is keeping people alive the highest good? Should our priority be to keep people breathing?... What does basic religious ethics say about this?(John C. Danforth, letter to (...) the author, 19 August 1989)The Patient Self-Determination Act, signed into law as part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA '90) last November, marks the first time that Congress has passed legislation concerning the ethics of life-sustaining medical treatment. The bill was spearheaded by Senator John C. Danforth (RMO), who has a special interest in this area. An Episcopal priest, Danforth was formerly an assistant chaplain at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and now sits as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. Although Senator Danforth's legislative initiative was not a result of the Cruzan case, it was in his state of Missouri that the U.S. Supreme Court case involving removal of Nancy Cruzan's feeding tube arose (Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health, U.S. Supreme Court, 58 LW 4916, 26 June 1990). From his unique vantage point, he felt it was time to craft a legislative response to some of the difficult issues surrounding prolongation of life.The short answer to Senator Danforth's questions about when to artificially extend life is simple enough: people must be free to determine that for themselves. Common law and common sense dictate such a conclusion; living will and health care proxy statutes, enacted in almost every state, codify that right. The Catholic moral tradition teaches that one is not morally obligated to use extraordinary means to prolong life, a tradition shared both by the mainline Protestant and the reform and conservative Jewish community. Yet most people are unaware of their fundamental legal right to make such decisions, and as court cases from Quinlan (In re Quinlin, 137 N.J. Super. 227, 1975) to Cruzan demonstrate, few know [End Page 163] how to make arrangements for this right to be exercised if they become incapacitated.Meanwhile, health care practices are often driven by a denial of death. When Senator Danforth and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) introduced the bill on October 17, 1989, Senator Danforth said:More and more it is arguable that we play God by subjecting people to unwanted and sometimes unnecessary treatment, treatment that unnaturally prolongs the dying process. Our health care system has become obsessed with extending life, at times neglecting the caring component of medicine and trampling on the rights of patients.(Congressional Record 1989, 135:5.13566)The American Hospital Association estimates that 70 percent of deaths now occur after a determination to withhold or withdraw medical treatment. Many of those decisions are made without the benefit of an incapacitated patient's views, yet a Harvard study revealed that 95 percent of the population would like to prepare in advance for such decisions. Only 4 percent of hospitals have a systematic method of asking patients if they have an advance directive. Family members confront painful choices in the face of uncertainty about their loved one's wishes and it can be even more painful when a family knows the patient's desires but providers and the courts act otherwise because clear evidence is lacking.The Patient Self-Determination Act is rooted in the belief that people should be given information that enables them to specify the extent of medical treatment they wish to receive should they become incapacitated. The public should be educated about applicable state laws that protect the individual's right to make such choices through the use of an advance directive.The Act moves toward that goal by promoting knowledge of state laws. It requires every hospital, nursing home, home health agency, hospice, and health maintenance organization that participates in Medicaid or Medicare to routinely give all adult patients information about advance directives. Patients will also be given information on the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Expose of a BreakdownIngrid HindellIregard my pension as a social wage, and even though I wish it took my disability and the extra costs that brings into consideration, eighteen years ago, I felt privileged to be able to work in the community, not in a sheltered workshop.At this time, a number of us worked voluntarily for numerous little organizations when the government cut their funding and in effect, took (...) away our jobs.It was around this time that I started a “stress cough.” Foolishly, I didn’t take much notice. I was enjoying “life”—studying, working, taking part in a documentary called “Untold Desires” and being a member of the “Friendship Group”—in which a group of us tackled the subject and nature of friendship for people with and without disabilities....The processes and the cohesion of the group brought up a lot of “stuff” for me that I wasn’t able to articulate. It made me question the wisdom of my lifestyle up to then—of marrying a person without a physical disability, for example.My mother used to tell me to tell him to tidy the flat, not in the least realizing that: i) it was distressing that I couldn’t do this; ii) that given all our interests it was difficult to tidy up. (This situation was also not helped, I now realize, by us trying to live and run home businesses from my small three–roomed accommodation behind my parent’s home, without enough support worker hours....)The flat was always cluttered, not conducive to encouraging a feeling of ease in us bringing clients onto the premises. As Robert’s massage workload grew, so did our underlying tension, I see now. And when I was starting to counsel other people with disabilities the situation was made worse....Added to this, my mother had, just prior to this period in our lives, stopped giving us our main meal because we were becoming more and more interested in eating organic and vegetarian food.At the same time, listening to other group members’ stories made me realize how “undervalued” people with disabilities are in society as I had been brought up in a loving extended family and had not long been “out.”It made me realize how much people with disabilities were constrained by lack of governmental funding for recreational—especially relationship options—with each other and with able–bodied people. The government was trying to close down little advocacy organizations that could keep this issue in the forefront of policy makers’ minds. No wonder I was getting close to breaking point! [End Page E1]When I got really bad, my husband almost went mad himself trying to cope with me. I had been the outgoing partner in the relationship for the past 12 years. Now I was getting panic attacks and clinging like poison ivy....And the therapists I went to at that stage didn’t help. The Naturopath was so expensive she made me much worse. She had told a “friend” of Rob’s that she would treat me for $30.00 a time. She did not say that she would present me with an ever– increasing bill every time I had an appointment—to pay her back when I could! And that her admin assistant would keep commenting, in my hearing, that people wouldn’t pay their bills on time.... At last, when the amount got to $450.00, I paid her all my savings, and managed to quit.I now also believe she treated me with a totally inappropriate therapy—colonic irrigation—for far too long, any natural therapist would say nowadays—five weeks!I believe it made my mental state worse. People say that an unquiet mind can stress the body into illness but I believe losing too much weight too fast as I certainly did, stressed my mind, instead of other way around.By this time I wasn’t only having panic attacks. I had slipped into, what I recently discovered, was a clinical depression. This brought in its wake, a terror so real, so all encompassing that I wonder I lived through a day of it—much less four... (shrink)

leaps and bounds, and some portion of the growth may already be spilling over; most of the immigrants to buffalo in re­ cent years were canadian. buffalo of­ fers urban living free of traffic jams and boasts one of the nation’s last under­ developed stretches of premium wa­ terfront. During its city of light heyday, when buffalo was the first electrified metropolis, Frank lloyd Wright, Fred­ erick law olmsted, and other fabled names designed homes and parks. in the lovely Delaware (...) Park area, magnifi­ cent beaux arts homes sell at exceed­ ingly low prices compared with homes in elite U.S. cities—or in toronto. So long as the bills keep a foot in the city, they keep alive the dream of a Su­ per bowl win—a hope that an infusion of loonies (canadian dollars) might sustain. and should the bills win the Super bowl, buffalo will return to na­ tional prominence. i don’t just think this will happen, i know it will. Gregg Easterbrook is an atlantic contributing editor. (shrink)

With the exception of the occasional Damn-you-to-Hell types such as Mr Owen Burke of Timaru (ODT, 7/7/04), most opponents of the Civil Unions Bill like to pretend that they are not doing it out of hostility to homosexuals (who they sometimes, rather patronizingly, claim to love as people) but out of zeal for the institution of marriage. If civil unions are allowed, marriage will be damaged, and that is why they are against the Bill. The problem with (...) this rationale is that it is obviously false. Civil unions won’t damage marriage. And this so very obvious that it calls into question either the good sense or the good faith of those (like the Catholic Bishops and the members of the United Party) who proclaim that it is a zeal for holy matrimony rather than a dislike of a deviant minority that dictates their political conduct. (shrink)

Shoot straight from the hip. Tell it like it is. Keep it real. We love these commands, especially in America, because they invoke what we love to believe: that there is an authentic self to which we can be true. But while we mock Tricky Dick and Slick Willie, we are inventing identities on Facebook, paying thousands for plastic surgeries, tuning into news that simply verifies our opinions. This is frontier forthrightness gone dreamy: reality bites, after all, and (...) faith-based initiatives trump reality-based ones, and becoming disillusioned is a downer. In his new book, part memoir, part cultural analysis, Keep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life, Eric G. Wilson clarifies this confusion. He draws on neuroscience, psychology, sociology, philosophy, art, film, literature, and his own life to explore the possibility that there's no such thing as unwavering reality. Whether our left brains are shaping the raw data of our right into fabulous stories, or we are so saturated by society's conventions that we're always acting out prefab scripts, we can't help but be phony. But are some fakes more real than others? Are certain lies true? In lively prose—honest, provocative, erudite, witty, wide-ranging (as likely to riff on Bill Murray as to contemplate Plato)—Keep It Fakeanswers these questions, uncovering bracing truths about what it means to be human and helping us turn our necessary lying into artful living. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of Compassion: Visualizing (...) Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

Lewis was not, and is not, very popular in the academy. I think there are three reasons.First, he did not stick to his subject, which was medieval and Renaissance literature. He wrote highly successful children's books, theological works, and articles accessible to nonspecialists, and was an acclaimed broadcaster. All this allowed his critics to suggest that he was not a proper academic, because proper academics do not throw their nets so wide.Second, he was good at everything he did (except perhaps (...) some areas of philosophy: he was famously bested by Elizabeth Anscombe when he ventured onto her home ground). This was perhaps the most infuriating thing about him. The justification for academic superspecialization is that one cannot do more than one thing really well. But Lewis did. He was a better Renaissance scholar than those who criticized him, moaned about him in the Oxford cloisters, and blackballed him for appointments. He is relentlessly readable; therefore (said his detractors) his scholarship must be shoddy.Lewis infuriates me too. Often, when I think I have had an original thought in some domain a million miles from Renaissance literature, I discover not only that Lewis had had that thought already, but had explicated it, seeing angles I never noticed, and more often than not he had exploded it, using a tenth of the words I used, and all in devastatingly simple prose that would entertain and illuminate the most uninterested plumber.And third, of course, he was a Christian, which was then becoming an unforgivable sin, as it remains now in the humanities (though not the physical sciences or mathematics). The usual (stated) objection to academic Christians is that their theological commitment precludes objectivity, but Lewis's academic writing (notably his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama [1954]) was so good that that indictment could not stick, and his opponents descended into incoherent fulmination about superannuated paradigms.These reasons help to explain the chilly reception (or, more often, nonreception) by self-billed “serious thinkers” of Lewis's “space trilogy”: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength (hereafter THS). In relation to THS there is another reason: the novel is about them. No, about us. Lewis's view of us is just too keen, his diagnosis too alarming.The main concerns of THS are dehumanization, the role of institutions in that dehumanization, and the desire of individuals to be part of an esoteric circle. More broadly, it concerns the nature of evil. Its debt to the Divine Comedy and to Charles Williams, Lewis's fellow Inkling, are clear.The central character is a young academic, Mark Studdock. We all know him. His education had been “neither scientific nor classical—merely ‘Modern.’ That left him pathetically manipulable. The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour.” Studdock was “a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.” He stood for nothing; he weighed nothing.Humans are not supposed to be weightless. We will do anything to convince ourselves that we have mass. Many of our strategies are counterproductive. Some are disastrous and lead to dissolution. Studdock's strategy is one of the commonest and most catastrophic: he tries to get to the center of things—to the “Inner Ring” whose geography is described by Lewis in his 1944 lecture (and later essay) of that name. At some level, at least occasionally, Studdock knows the stupidity of this ambition, but he closes his eyes and his mind. And he begins to be used by forces far greater than any he had dreamed of.The book opens with a merciless (and horribly entertaining) account of academic politics. Read it and cringe in recognition: the mechanics of toadyism; the devices for getting your own way with a committee (put the real business in coded form at the end of an agenda, to be dealt with on a hot day after lunch); infuse everything with an appeal to self-interest, but never put it quite like that, for fear of awakening long-dormant altruism. Obfuscate: do not call the sale of an ancient woodland in which Merlin's body lies “the sale of Bragdon Wood” but the sale of “the area coloured pink on the plan.” Learn to talk like the bursar of Studdock's college, for each of his sentences was “a model of lucidity: and if his hearers found the gist of his whole statement less clear than the parts, that may have been their fault.” As a manual for getting your own way in institutions, The Prince is artless and benign beside THS.Studdock becomes a pawn in a big and diabolical game. A vast organization, the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, known, of course, as “NICE” (never underestimate the importance of an acronym), which turns out to be the instrument of dark supernatural forces, is becoming a state within a state. It is unaccountable. That is its tagline, indeed: it will be free of the red tape that inhibits the research of more conventional institutions. And who can define with sufficient exactitude the difference in principle between tedious administrative red tape and moral stricture? If you are in with the NICE, anything goes.The NICE's project is the unmaking of everything that is quintessentially human and, eventually, everything that is biological. Life itself is just too unhygienic. Beauty is a joke. Sentiment a delusion. Love merely a result of chemical interactions in the brain. Nothing signifies.The NICE has a handful of opponents—a raggedy bunch (including a bear) under the direction of Ransom, who has traveled outside planet Earth in the previous two books in the trilogy. The company, it turns out, is the remnant of the old Arthurian kingdom of Logres, which has always been in tension, if not war, with the modern kingdom of Britain: “Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney—and of Cecil Rhodes.” They recruit Studdock's wife, Jane, who can spy clairvoyantly on the NICE, and then a revived Merlin comes from his tomb to their aid.THS is strong meat. Many will balk at its supernaturalism, and perhaps in particular its complementarian view of the relationship between the sexes. But hear Lewis out: you might not agree with him, but he is always interesting. When I read THS thirty years ago, I thought it a ripping yarn. It still is. But now I see it as prescient, prophetic, and profoundly important. It should be on every university reading list, for every subject, and no one should be allowed to hold any kind of public office until they have shown that they have assimilated its lessons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual LifeBrian KarafinThe Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life. Edited by Phil Cousineau. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 314 + xxiv pp.A certain air of dialectical paradox hovers around the figure of Huston Smith, a seeming conjunction of opposites that constitute "Huston Smith," apprehended not so much as a real individual but (...) as a cultural phenomenon in the life of our time. In books, television shows, interviews, and innumerable public talks and workshops, not to speak of five decades of classroom performativity, "Huston Smith" dances before us as a friendly master, a bearer of secret lore that seems freely offered in his open palms. He is an esoteric metaphysician who has played the role of public intellectual in matters religious from virtually the beginning of his career in the 1950s into the twenty-first century. As a champion of the perennial philosophy contained in the revealed traditions of the past, his writing addresses itself not to the scholars of that past but to the spiritual seekers and general publics of the postmodern new age. He is a guardian of orthodoxy, a defender of the hierarchical worldview of the great chain of being, who nevertheless, perhaps out of an excess of geniality, seems always on the verge of heterodox admissions. In these senses Huston Smith stands before us asa kind of hermetic trickster figure, a psychopomp attempting to lead the post-traditional multitudes back into touch with their spiritual roots hidden in the occulted shadows of the cultural unconscious—an unconscious constituted by the sunlit world of modern science as its repressed Other. There are riches in that underworld, hermetic Huston asserts beckoningly; follow me down into this dark Light.The interviews collected and edited by Phil Cousineau are, short of some future biographical study, the best place for the uninitiated to enter into the world of Huston Smith. Those who already know Smith's corpus might find this book slightly irksome in the repetitiveness, which is inevitable in any such gathering of interviews [End Page 186] conducted by a wide assortment of journalists who often have similar if not identical questions. The Way Things Are is nonetheless valuable in bringing forth the public voice of Huston Smith on his signature range of themes: the world's religions as repositories of "forgotten truth," the ideology of scientism as standing in need of philosophical critique in order to recover that truth, and the continuing cultural implications of the clashing worldviews of religion and science, tradition and modernity.Huston Smith's biographical trajectory as discussed in many of these interviews, while known in its general outlines by many (especially since the Bill Moyers series of televised interviews), bears meditating on as a way of elaborating this sense of dialectical paradox in what is often, overly simply, seen as the sunlit and straightforward figure of Smith as contemporary religious philosopher. Born in China of Methodist missionary parents, religion dawned for Smith in the form of a benevolently evangelical Protestantism surrounded by a religious and cultural other: the world of "the East." Returning to the United States for college and with plans for a career in ministry and mission work, Smith fell in love with the discipline of philosophy, which he pursued in graduate school under the tutelage of Henry Nelson Wieman. The naturalistic theism of Wieman was soon displaced, however, by Smith's encounter with the writings of Gerald Heard, who gave expression to the mystical worldview that has been the foundation of Smith's philosophy ever since. A sense of the reality of monistic, neo-Vedantist mystical experience, as formulated by Heard's writings of the 1940s and 1950s, led Smith to an encounter with Heard's fellow exiled English mystical Vedantist and perennial philosopher Aldous Huxley. The combined influences of Heard and Huxley, inclusive of their interest in psychedelic experimentalism, shaped the spiritual perspective of the next decade of Smith's life in St. Louis, studying with a swami of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda order, beginning his academic career, and launching into his role as popularizer of comparative religion through a television series... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lisa’s StoryLisa P. (wife of patient) and Jeanne KerwinMy husband suffered from sudden onset of heart failure with a very low ejection fraction and was on IV Milrinone at the age of 47. One of the most powerful things he told me was that he was not afraid to die and therefore did not want to move forward with Milrinone. He eventually “did it for the kids.” After the (...) Milrinone drip was no longer working, he was offered an LVAD (left ventricular assist device) to keep him alive. He refused, but the doctor again convinced him to “do it for your kids” and said, “we put these devices in 80-year-olds.” He did not have time to explore any other options and reluctantly accepted the LVAD. It was implanted in May of 2014 in a very long and complicated surgery with a long and difficult recovery. He was in the hospital for a long time, and then he refused to go to rehab upon discharge, making it difficult for our family to manage, as he was extremely weak and needed care of his wound dressing. He worried about the financial [End Page 7] impact of a heart transplant and the medications required, as we were already struggling with the medical bills. He refused to have more surgery with the potential complications and never agreed to get on the transplant waiting list.After the implanted LVAD, my husband was not able to do most of what he loved in life. He couldn’t work (he was a truck driver), he couldn’t go fishing or swimming in the ocean, he couldn’t go hunting and fishing, and his overall physical condition was so poor that he couldn’t cook, garden and, most aggravating to him, he could not take a regular hot shower. The LVAD had to be covered with plastic in order to avoid getting the drive-line area wet, so bathing was a complicated process. He had trouble with stairs, had neuropathic pain in his legs from diabetes, and because of the pain medications, he felt cloudy and dizzy and slept most of the day in his recliner. I took care of him, even after I had to go back to work, and at the same time, I managed our two children (ages 9 and 12 at the time of LVAD).After almost two years of living with the LVAD, multiple hospitalizations for GI bleeds then seizures, more medications, and weekly blood draws for INR1, my husband requested that the LVAD be de-activated and that he be allowed to die of his heart failure. He described his life as “miserable.” He watched as his misery impacted his children and me. He suffered daily and had none of the joys that made life worth living for him. When we approached the cardiac team that implanted and monitored his LVAD with his request, they said “no.” They would not de-activate the LVAD because it was working. It was keeping him alive and he had no other terminal illness. His palliative doctor, who was treating his pain, also heard his request and told us to call for an “ethics consult” to determine if he would be “allowed” to have the LVAD de-activated. We got the number and called on March 31, 2016.At the time of the call to Ethics, we had no idea what “Ethics” was, other than a general definition of the word ethics as in professional behaviors and such. We did not know what to expect but we called. We would never have known to call “Ethics” if the palliative doctor had not advised us to do so, and my husband might have suffered a longer, more painful life both mentally and physically prolonged by the LVAD.We explained the request to the ethics consultant. She listened to my husband describe his daily living and his dissatisfaction with the quality of his life, his physical and emotional suffering, and his wish to rid himself of the LVAD and allow nature to take its course. There was actually no decision to be made on his part. He had already made up... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning Through ServingDanny ReedI am a male CNA currently registered in Wisconsin since 1991, having worked as such since 1980 when I left high school. I have worked with ten different employers and many precious people I remember very well.I remember virtually everyone I have cared for in my over 30 years of work and yet there is not one person, place or moment that characterizes them all except (...) perhaps, May. She died within 24-hours of admission and we never spoke, except with the eyes. May had end-stage nerve and muscle wasting disease that left her mind intact but her body immobile and in pain. Her boyfriend brought her in after taking care of her at home, but he was wasted on some kind of drug, maybe her pain medication, feeling he needed it more than her. We ordered morphine and got her settled and she finally relaxed. She was gone by morning.May reminded me of Mary, another woman with a similar disease. Mary's husband Harold came to visit drunk. She could just point to a letter board similar to an Ouija board and spell out words and phrases with her right hand and then use her eyes to indicate if we were correct. Mary was a refined woman but very patient with me because I was an 18-year-old boy trying to be a man, sensitive but having a lot to learn. Mary taught me how to communicate without words—just using the eyes.These women are the core of understanding the meaning of what I have done for 30 years. Whether imprisoned by hearing loss, loss of sight or mobility, failing bodies and minds or simply being alone—the challenge was the same, to know when to reach into another's soul and touch them, to stay out of the way, and have the good sense to know the difference. Can I honestly say I fell in love with the woman that quietly said, "I'm tired of being old?" These were largely rhetorical questions without an answer.The men and women of this generation were far superior to me. I could only stand by and watch them die. Oh, I did the necessary things like I was paid to do, trained to do, but they were the ones patiently trying to teach me. I will spend the rest of my life trying to decipher their encrypted message because I am trapped here, too. Imprisoned by the ignorance of believing I understand what my eyes have seen, what I have heard, and experienced. That it can all be regulated and catalogued in journals of medicine.Is it not ironic that primary caregivers struggle to stay alive while money movers make millions, even billions tax free, moving money from here to there and acquiring the power and influence to change the world, but will not lift a finger unless they can make more money doing it? Ironic because I have taken care of them in their final hours and they would give me it all had I the power to give them more life. Yes, I have turned down a fortune because in their grief they wanted to pay me money for an hour of genuine kindness that in reality they could not afford. If you must ask how much it is worth you cannot afford it. Sincere kindness is priceless so I don't charge for it.It is not my intent to humiliate the achievements and status of professionals and others fallen upon hard times due to aging and disease because no one deserves these indignities. Indeed, I delight in restoring dignity to every human in need of it regardless of cause. I do not wish such suffering upon my worst enemy. Bill wanted one more hour. The cancer was sudden, painful, and terminal. Being sidetracked into a cozy hospice in the country is hardly comforting when given less than six months to live just when retirement promised the rewards earned from a life of hard work and sacrifice. Bill had spirituality and strong beliefs but it seemed to make matters worse because he cried every day begging God... (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 5, May 2022.

_A timely and provocative essay about the parallel lives of Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt and their mission for a more humane society__ “[A] short but moving book... Even better, the volume’s advice is not only pragmatically political—necessary during a time of threats to democracy and mounting failures to deal with the climate crisis—but modestly uplifting.”—Bill Marx, _Arts Fuse___ “An intimate and timely meditation on dark times, Hermsen’s illuminating essay offers readers a way to think with Hannah Arendt and (...) Rosa Luxemburg about how to build a more humane world in common.”—Samantha Rose Hill, author of ___Hannah Arendt__ Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) and Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) were critical Jewish mavericks who both suffered under violent political regimes and sought to reform systems of power. Although temporally separated by the Second World War and the rise of totalitarianism, they held in common strikingly similar convictions about freedom, human dignity, capitalism, democracy, and political commitment. In this powerful book, Joke J. Hermsen explores the lives and works of these two remarkable thinkers and the essential hope that emboldened them in the political struggle. Luxemburg and Arendt were spurred on by a restless love for the world and an unwavering belief in the possibility of new beginnings; for them, hope was an absolute prerequisite of resistance and a counterpoint to melancholy—a defense against despair that kept them attuned to what could be. Exploring the intertwined nature of philosophy and the active pursuit of justice, this is an urgent, courageous reminder to remain alert to the glimmers of hope in dark times. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iago’s Roman Ancestors JAMES TATUM Othello is that rare thing: a tragedy of literary types who half suspect they are playing in a comedy. —D. S. Stewart, 1967 In memoriam Bill Cook1 Shakespeare’s Othello is a drama created for a world where everyone was bound by “service,” a formal connection to someone else superior, in a hierarchy that linked all persons in court, theater, and society through unavoidable (...) obligation. Service could range from the lightest kind of tie, to indentured servitude. This meaning of “service” reflects its origin in Norman French, from the Latin word for slavery, servitium. It is Iago’s sense of the word in his comment to his dupe Roderigo: “Why, there’s no remedy, ’tis the curse of service.” The perceived color of Othello poses a perennial challenge which producers and directors in the United States have to consider every time Othello is performed. Jim Crow did not officially end in most parts of the former Confederacy until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s; and even then such legacies of slavery and segregation as color prejudice remain a challenge, alive if now not entirely well, and they haunt many a production. It is this more recent history that inspired Patrick Stewart’s “photo-negative” production of Othello in Washington, DC in 1997, in which the English actor himself played Othello while the rest of the cast were black. Given recent and not so recent history, it is important to realize that there actually is a slave hard at work throughout Othello, from opening scene to last: not Othello himself, but his “ancient” or ensign, Iago. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 the slave-playwright of shakespeare’s OTHELLO Lodovico: O, thou Othello, that was once so good, Fallen in the practice of a damnèd slave, What shall be said to thee? Othello, 5.2.289–91 the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello comes from the story “Disdemona and the Moorish Captain” in Giraldi Cinthio’s The Hundred Tales (1565), but the theatrical tradition he used to adapt it for the stage was not other tragedies. He went back to a classical theater he had used to write one of his earliest successes, The Comedy of Errors, one he knew as well as any other through his study of it in Latin grammar school and afterwards: Roman comedy. What resulted was something of a puzzle to his later critics. Since the 17th century some of Shakespeare’s readers have alternately complained or marveled at the way Othello has the fast pace and structure of a farce. This accounts for its exceptional power as a tragedy when it is intelligently performed; the double catastrophe of Othello’s murder of Desdemona and his own suicide come more quickly and more violently, for example, than the endings of Macbeth, King Lear, or Hamlet. All of Othello’s characters are cast in the stereotypical roles first created in Menander and other playwrights of Greek New Comedy, and then passed on to later European vernacular theater through Plautus and Terence’s adaptations. In performance, Shakespeare’s Iago is at once a reprise of his earlier stage villains and a reincarnation of the servus callidus or clever slave playwright of Plautus. It is as if Zero Mostel’s Pseudolus in Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were playing Richard III. Iago creates what he regards as a comedy, from its opening scene before Brabantio’s house to its catastrophic end in Cyprus, and to the bafflement of Christian interpreters and others, he seems incapable of recognizing the enormity of his evil. Unlike his resourceful Roman ancestors, who think up ingenious plots to help their less clever owners 78 iago’s roman ancestors in their love affairs, Iago’s scenario is demonic, designed to destroy his master Othello, not save him. As I’ve suggested, one comedy in particular may have played an important role in the making of Othello: Plautus’ Amphitryon, with its story of Jupiter’s adulterous affair with Alcmena, the wife of the heroic king Amphitryon of Thebes. To aid him in his schemes Jupiter calls on his son the trickster... (shrink)

The 21st century, in which science and technology developed with great acceleration, made the physical and social distances between people more permeable with the effect of globalization inherited from the previous century. In such an age where everybody is aware of everything, not only positive developments but also all kinds of information, beliefs and actions that may be considered negative for humanity can instantly spread and become widespread all over the world. For example, the adoption of attitudes and behaviors that (...) do not correspond to human values such as consumption, selfishness, narcissism, vanity, arrogance, humiliation, mockery, especially among young people, is worrisome. It is a fact that the generation Z, who was born in the lap of technology, is vulnerable to technology and more susceptible to its damages. In today's world, which is also defined as the age of technology and information, young people can be exposed to all kinds of written and visual information pollution via the internet. Moreover, this situation paves the way for negative attitudes and behaviors such as waste of time and energy, consumption habits, addiction, estrangement from values, alienation, problem of belonging, dissatisfaction among young people. For this reason, this age is polluting the young people not only mentally but also spiritually. Not only the individual themself but also societies have to pay the bill for the inability to satisfy the material and spiritual dimension of the human in a healthy and appropriate manner. For this reason, the education of the new generation is a duty on the family, educators, non-governmental organizations and society as a whole. One of the first and most important steps to be taken in order to protect young people from all these adverse developments and to ensure their participation in the society as a healthy individual is undoubtedly their upbringing with moral values. Because values are the preconditions for a young person to exist as an adult with personality, morality, responsibility, sensitivity to the other and their environment, and who has discovered their own meaning and importance in the world. Therefore, knowing the spiritual-humanistic values of young people, who are the guarantors of the future, will give adults an idea about predicting today and the future and taking necessary measures. The aim of this study is; to determine the spiritual-humanistic value tendencies of high school students. The research was conducted on a total of 450 students studying at different types of high schools in the province of Sinop in the 2019-2020 academic year. The research data was collected through questionnaires and scales from quantitative research methods were analyzed according to age, gender, class, economic status, perception of success, family structure, family attitude perception, duration of social media use and social media usage purpose variables. According to the results of the research, the students got the highest average score (4.28) from moral values and the lowest average score (3.19) from respect value. There is a positive correlation between all dimensions of the spiritual-humanistic values disposition scale. Mann Witney U-Test and Kruskal Wallis H-Test, which are non-parametric tests, were used in the analysis of the scale that did not show normal distribution. According to the test results, there was no relationship between the sub-dimensions of the scale; moral values, love, respect and sensitivity mean scale score and gender, age, perception of success, family attitude perception, duration of social media use and social media use purpose variables, because p> 0.05. However, there was a significant correlation between the point average of moral tendency of the sample group and school type, mother education and father education; between the average score of love value and the school type variable; respect value average score and class, school type, perceived economic situation and mother education; between the mean score of sensitivity value and the variable of family structure (p <0.05). (shrink)

Socialism has long been thought by many to be the enemy of freedom. Here, I argue that in order to understand the relationship between socialism and freedom, we must have a better idea both of what socialism is and of what it is to have a right to freedom. To start, I argue that the right to freedom is best understood as a right to direct one’s own will in the world consistently with the rights of others to do the (...) same. This Kantian conception of the right to freedom is importantly different from the ubiquitous conception of freedom as negative liberty: with this Kantian conception, one’s right to freedom is limited to directing one’s own will and does not include a right to direct the wills of others. I then argue that socialism, like the right to freedom, is often misunderstood: today, socialists often argue for robustly democratic forms of socialism that are far from the autocratic so-called “socialist” regimes of the last century. With a better understanding of both socialism and the right to freedom, we can see that the right to freedom is indeed compatible with a robustly democratic form of socialism. (shrink)

_Published in its entirety for the first time, a candid conversation with Susan Sontag at the height of her brilliant career_ “One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment... and I don’t believe it’s true.... I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.” Susan Sontag, (...) one of the most internationally renowned and controversial intellectuals of the latter half of the twentieth century, still provokes. In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a founding contributing editor of _Rolling Stone_ magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion ever made it to print. Now, more than three decades later, Yale University Press is proud to publish the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings and observations reveal the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at a moment when she was at the peak of her powers. Nearly a decade after her death, these hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist." “I really believe in history, and that’s something people don’t believe in anymore. I know that what we do and think is a historical creation....We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular moment. So when I go to a Patti Smith concert, I enjoy, participate, appreciate, and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche.” “There’s no incompatibility between observing the world and being tuned into this electronic, multimedia, multi-tracked, McLuhanite world and enjoying what can be enjoyed. I love rock and roll. Rock and roll changed my life....You know, to tell you the truth, I think rock and roll is the reason I got divorced. I think it was Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that made me decide that I had to get a divorce and leave the academic world and start a new life.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 43-50 [Access article in PDF] On the Practice of Faith: A Lutheran's Interior Dialogue with Buddhism Paul O. Ingram Pacific Lutheran University I earn my living practicing the craft of history of religions. In Lutheran theological language, this is my "calling" and "vocation." I know this to be true because of how I was first opened to an amazing world of religious pluralism nearly forty (...) years ago during my first undergraduate history of religions course. I am still amazed by this world and at times stunned to silence. The history of religions continues to inform my self-understanding and has recently become for me a primary mode of theological reflection and practice that intensely energizes both my exterior conceptual dialogue with Buddhist doctrine and teaching and my interior dialogue with Buddhist meditative practice. 1So my vocation is teaching an academic field of inquiry I love to young people as I engage in research and writing. I am paid for doing this by a university related to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that bills itself as a "new American university" located in one of the most culturally pluralistic and beautiful regions in the United States.While I'm not sure what a "new American university" is, I am certain I have a great gig. I am equally convinced that my professional life constitutes for me some of the evidence of the grace that Christian tradition in general--and Luther's theology in particular--describe as flowing "in, with, and under" this universe like a waterfall, like a tidal wave.Admittedly, all this is highly confessional, perhaps too confessional, for a scholar's essay on how reflection on Buddhist traditions of practice has informed his practice. Yet when it comes down to it, all theological reflection--as well as the discipline of practice itself--is confessional. We can only write about our particular interior journey as it is informed by the particular community of faith that gives context to our practice, for it is not probable that most persons can be religious in general, but only in particular. 2 After all, Carmelite nuns do not ordinarily seek or experience nonduality with the Buddha Nature, nor do Buddhist nuns ordinarily seek or experience interior union with Christ the Bridegroom.Yet sometimes a few historians of religions and a few Christian theologians and Buddhist philosophers are able to participate in communities of faith and practice other than their own. This too seems to me a sign of grace. [End Page 43]I have learned two lessons from interior dialogue with Buddhists as this shakes out in my particular practice. First, our interior journeys lead us through time--forward and back, seldom in a straight line, most often in spirals. Each of us is moving and changing in relationship to others and to the world, and, if one is grasped by Christian faith, to God, or if grasped by Buddhist faith (srada), the Dharma. 3 As we discover what our interior journeys teach us, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we discover when our separate journeys converge. It is at spots of Christian and Buddhist convergence that I have experienced the most dramatic and creatively transformative processes of interreligious dialogue.Second, as a Lutheran it strikes me as a bit glib to suggest that the focus of practice is "God" or, if Buddhist, "Emptiness," because I often feel intellectually and emotionally blindsided by what people who practice mean by these words. The question, always an epistemological one, is what do these terms mean as we practice whatever we practice. Plenty of theological-philosophical propositions can be strung together to answer this question, and, I think, it is important to guide practice by theological-philosophical reflection. But we must never cling to belief in propositions, because the moment we do, they will hide the reality to which they point. Conceptualizing and believing in rational propositions is a necessary beginning because it is a form of"faith seeking understanding." But faith is never, in... (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 463 Kawika Guillermo Libido Ergo Sum Sitting atop a red beanbag stained with dark splotches, Kelsey watched the tells from the five boys sitting on the carpet in front of her. One by one they gave away their hands, their eyes dodging hers, perhaps afraid of her female intuition. She loved these surreptitious moments, when her boys tried (...) to fool her, believing that they had her in their clutches, as if she couldn’t help but be pulled by their charms. Kelsey went all in, moving her chips into the middle of the carpet. Kaleb’s mouth grinned to the right while Gabriel impatiently tapped on his knee, keeping beat with the remixed 80’s tune coming from the large boom box behind him. Billy’s face was in a gleeful Leave-It-to-Beaver of daffiness, and Michael’s dumbfounded expression—worn to distract her— was put out by a nervous scratch of his neck. After each had pussied out, Kelsey leaned over to distract them further with her cleavage as she picked up the red playing cards, her hair settling onto the boys’ laps as if to imitate fellatio. “Alright, pussy bitches,” she said, collecting the chips and stirring the toothpick in her mouth like a mortar. “Pass’em down,” pointing to the gold dealer’s piece. “Big blind, little blind.” She watched the world as if from a recliner and saw herself dealing the next hand with the finesse of a professional dealer. Her gaze circled the carpet of poker players. Their eyes never met hers. In every house party Kelsey hosted, she always saw a faint bleakness in her guests. She always cleaned them out, her eyes scanning them like food at a supermarket, unveiling their moves with every glance. She watched them all at once: Jackson wiping his mouth, Michael adjusting his glasses, Gabriel 464 Kawika Guillermo chewing on bubblegum in loud smacks, Billy grinning as he mouthed curse words. Finally, Kelsey took only a glimpse at her own cards before doubling the ante. Tommy shrugged and tossed his cards; Michael met her raise and she went all in. She noticed these patterns all between them. She saw their reactions before they even happened: Michael shaking his head and calling her a bitch as he splashed his cards onto her living room carpet. At two in the morning she drank two tequila shots in the kitchen with Paul, one of the many toxic men that she had invited to her party from work. He was a sturdy baseball player/lightweight alcoholic, toxic in his thoughtless remarks on meeting schedules, upcoming due-dates, and portfolios. “Then you put the salt on your thumb, or whatever,” Paul said, shaking up a bottle of Patrón Silver, as if it needed to be shaken. Kelsey stuck out her shot glass for another. A year ago she would have been doing homework, playfully kicking off the dust of the world with a big biology textbook in her hands. Since then, she had discovered that there was a pattern to debauchery that led to some existential fulfillment—a realizing of herself as a living substance—an uber-debauchery. Refusing to dilute her angst into anything but total surrender, she was still a Vegas girl, willing to throw herself into in the Las Vegas rites of passage of drunk driving, diving nude into neighbor’s pools, and waking up in hotel rooms with a hundred dollar bill on the cupboard, weighted in place by Gideon’s Bible. “Another sausage fest,” said a man in a cowboy hat and vintage overalls. Kelsey didn’t know him. He sat on the countertop like the Cheshire Cat and flipped through a book of bumper stickers. He wore one with the words “Libido Ergo Sum” on his forehead. “All right!” another drunken voice shouldered through waves of sound: “Seize the day!” “James’s baby sure looks cute tonight,” said another drunken voice. “’Course no one would try, except this guy.” The man in the cowboy hat smiled up at her. “How come you don’t invite your girlfriends to your parties?” “I don’t have... (shrink)

The explanatory challenge of sentience is known as the “hard problem of consciousness”: How does subjective experience arise from physical objects and their relations? Despite some optimistic claims, the perennial struggle with this question shows little evidence of imminent resolution. In this article I focus on the “why” rather than on the “how” of sentience. Specifically, why did sentience evolve in organic lifeforms? From an evolutionary perspective this question can be framed: “What adaptive problem(s) did organisms face in their evolutionary (...) past and how were those challenges met? I argue that sentience was a critical component of the adaptive solution (i.e., adopting an agentic stance) to increasingly complex and unpredictable demands placed on vertebrates approximately 500 million years ago (the so-called Cambrian explosion). One consequence of taking an agentic stance is that it freed the organism from its neural moorings, positioning it within phenomenal space outside its brain. (shrink)

There have been repeated attempts in the history of comparative biology to provide a mechanistic account of morphological homology. However, it is well-established that homologues can develop from diverse sets of developmental causes, appearing not to share any core causal architecture that underwrites character identity. We address this challenge with a new conceptual model of Character Identity Mechanisms. ChIMs are cohesive mechanisms with a recognizable causal profile that allows them to be traced through evolution as homologues despite having a diverse (...) etiological organization. Our model hypothesizes that anatomical units at different levels of organization—cell types, tissues, and organs—have level-specific ChIMs with different conserved parts, activities, and organization. Relying on a methodology of conceptual engineering, we show how the ChIM concept advances our understanding of the developmental basis of morphological characters, while forging an important link between comparative and mechanistic biology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 42-70 [Access article in PDF] "O Happy Living Things" Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety Anne-Lise François With all the flowers Fancy e'er could feignWho breeding flowers will never breed the same. —John Keats, "Ode to Psyche" And I could wish my days to beBound each to each in natural piety. —William Wordsworth, "My heart leaps up" O happy living things! no tongue Their (...) beauty might declare:A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware!Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless'd them unaware. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" "O happy living things!"—vitamin-enriched grains; potatoes equipped to kill their predators; silk-producing goats; fast-growing salmon that hardly require feeding. Is it possible to predicate the breathless exclamation that escapes Coleridge's mariner, unaware not of water snakes but of the fantastic array of genetically modified creatures—animals and plants—currently under design or production by biotech industries? Already in May 2000 a New York Times article was announcing the imminent arrival of "fast-growing trout and catfish, oysters that can withstand viruses, and an 'Enviropig,' whose feces are less harmful to the environment because they contain less phosphorus." An article inset describes the emergent production of "pharm-animals":These domesticated beasts—cows, pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens—have been given the ability to produce pharmaceuticals and other valuable substances in their milk, eggs or semen. Endowed by scientists with foreign genes, often taken from humans, these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories. Two companies, the Genzyme Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., and PPL Therapeutics, a Scottish company, already have products from pharm animals being tested in clinical trials supervised by the Food and Drug Administration. Many other animals are [End Page 42] still in the development stage. For example, Nexia Biotechnologies in Canada is working on a goat that carries a gene from spiders allowing it to produce spider silk in its milk. When the spider silk, which consists of extremely strong, light proteins, is extracted from the goat's milk, the substance, potentially, can be used in applications like bulletproof vests. [Yoon] This last sentence is intriguing. The genetic revolution often bills itself as a second green revolution that will prevent starvation and alleviate disease, promising to feed the world's growing population in terms that tend to essentialize poverty and hunger as inevitable symptoms of a human condition, rather than understand them through the lens of specific colonial and postcolonial histories. But bulletproof vests? The indignant leftist response here would be to deride the collusion between biotechnology and the military-industrial complex—bulletproof vests leaving little doubt as to whose desires count as universal, timeless needs. Yet such a response is perhaps too quick to attribute reason to these genetic experiments in cross-species breeding, and too quick to accept the terms in which biotechnicians present themselves—as the instruments of reason, whether of global capitalism or universal human progress. Part of what this essay wishes to suggest is that to dream up such things and to think of wanting to do them—make a goat produce spider silk in its milk—involve particular fantasies, fantasies not simply about recreating the world in one's image, but about learning to desire the world again, to be excited by it or "surprised" by its existence, to borrow a phrase from Stanley Cavell. The journalist's parenthetical "potentially" indicates that no use has yet been determined, no burning need fuels such experiments, and hints at the boredom behind them—what William Wordsworth might have called the "state of almost savage torpor" in which desire itself has to be invented.As the New York Times writer's double metaphor of animal as laborer- and factory-in-one suggests—"these animals, or bioreactors, as they are also known, earn their keep as living chemical factories"—the binaries animal-human, machine-animal... (shrink)

June 2022 A Revolutionary New Metaphysics, Based on Consciousness, and a Call to All Philosophers We are in a unique moment of our history unlike any previous moment ever. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. As I write, the planet is in deep trouble, heat, fires, great storms, and record flooding, (...) weather patterns drastic everywhere. Capitalism has been so successful in supplying us with an endless array of consumer items, that we have never noticed there is a cost. But there is a cost, the cost is the very life of the Earth herself, and now the day of reckoning is here. Days of reckoning are most often days of rath. But I am hoping that this is a day of major Awakening over the entire planet. We have caused a crisis so great for the Earth we can hardly get our minds around it. But I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis are ideas, about who and what the Earth is, Ourselves, and what we are here for. I am proposing that this is a call to all philosophy and philosophers to rethink ourselves from the ground up. The human race has never gotten the Earth right and now we must, for the Earth is the true foundation for civilization. We are in deep trouble with the Earth, and it owes to the fact that the great male thinkers never got the Earth right, they could never make the connection between the life of mind and the life of the Earth. I am proposing that deeply embedded in the crisis we are in are ideas. And that in fact the planet is in the grip of a false metaphysics, and scientific image of nature that really comes most recently from Descartes. His conviction that matter, and with it the Earth, are simply the weighable, the measurable the extended in space and time, utterly devoid of any inner life of mind thoughts or Consciousness. This view of matter and the Earth goes back to the very dawn of thought, Descartes is just its most recent and comprehensive version of things. This view of matter is really a false metaphysics that dominates most of the modern world and underpins the whole scientific image of nature itself. I am proposing this is a false metaphysics and offering a new version of things based on Consciousness. If there is a single idea fueling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something without Consciousness. When you intend to ravage and savage the planet, turn it into consumer items to be converted into money in the bank, first pretend that all of the bright beings in the natural world are devoid of Consciousness, just “things” you do not have to have any conscious about destroying them. I am proposing that this term Consciousness, that has appeared as term and a problem for modern science, is the key to getting ourselves right with the Earth. I propose this new theory for science will ramify into every other disciplines as well, and the ways we think just about everything. This old paradigm based on a false theory of matter, has run its course, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction. We need new ideas, and we need them now. You will find my recent work in the Scientific God Journal under the title: Consciousness as the Organizing Principle, and a very complete version of my arguments for this term Consciousness, along with radical reinterpretation of modern science itself, on the Galileo Commission site. It is a radical moment for all of the thinkers among us, take this as my small contribution to rethinking ourselves in new terms, based on my understanding that the true basis for the whole of Being, the Universe, the Cosmos, and with them Ourselves, is this term Consciousness. And unpack it. And I predict that with this term Consciousness every intractable human problem in both science and the modern world will go down like a line of dominos before it. And so, here are a few new ideas I would offer you. These are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine, a great Awakening as of Springtime after a long dark and lonely Winter. We are leaving behind us an old civilization based on male dominance, fear lies and control, now in decay, disease, and death disintegrating all around us. We are moving into a whole new civilization based on Love and Truth. A new civilization requires new basic terms values and first principles. And so, I return to Descartes. 1. Just over 300 years ago a young man travelling with the army found himself stranded in a foreign town in a bare room lit by a candle with nothing to do but think. And in a couple of nights Descartes laid the entire thought foundations for modern science and most of the modern world. It isn’t clear that modern philosophers with their funding sources of grants, their graduate students, their reputation and all the perks and privileges of academia can do any better. Descartes claimed there are just two principles in the Universe, Matter and Mind. God was pure mind; human beings were mind and matter. And we are the only ones on the planet with mind. Everything else all of the bright array of beings who share the planet with us are simply matter. And matter? The weighable the measurable the extended in space and time utterly devoid of any inner life of thoughts, feelings, or Consciousness This classification was a boon for developing science. Scientists did not have to worry about any inner life in nature, ideas or Consciousness, they could just set about weighing and measuring, as they have until the present day. But it was a disaster for the Earth. Earth was once worshiped as a Goddess. With Descartes she became almost overnight “things.” Simply commodities and resources, an endless of supply of consumer items, to be turned into money in the bank. And now Descartes concept of matter is up for us. If there is a single idea that is enabling and driving the destruction of the Earth, it is the conviction that Earth is something without Consciousness. This whole scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is driving the destruction of the Earth, and driving us all insane, and it needs to change. Ever since Descartes formulated Dualism, scientists and philosophers have been trying to get rid of it. They have done this by attempting to make matter the fundamental term of reality, and to explain mind or Consciousness in terms of matter. And now, Consciousness has emerged as term and a problem for modern science. 2. The prevailing Universe picture has been mainly based on the belief that Consciousness appears only at the end of evolution in ourselves and some of the higher animals when matter attains “a certain state of complexity” and it is produced by neurons in the brain. But Consciousness is nothing real in itself, the neurons are doing the work, Consciousness is simply a byproduct of neural activity. As William James summed up this position, not his: Consciousness is to the brain as a shadow to the runner, it runs beside him but never influences his stride. And so, the great problem of neuroscience: How do neurons produce Consciousness? So far, no one has been able to say how. All we have is parallelism. Two processes are running in parallel a train of neural events and a train of Consciousness events. And so, which one is primary? The face of neuroscience and much of the modern world is that the neural events are what is really real, Consciousness is secondary. The conviction that Consciousness is something produced by neurons is so deeply held and has been so for so long, that it seems like an obvious fact. It is in fact an assumption and a theory, and it could all well be the other way around. The scientific image of nature as something devoid of Consciousness is now up for us. It has enabled the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a unique place in our own evolution where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, there are the best reasons for rethinking Descartes concepts of matter. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to escape dualism by making matter the fundamental term. And now, this has not worked. In a nutshell: The mind body problem, the “hard problem of Consciousness” ---how do neurons in the brain, atoms and molecules give rise to ideas thoughts and feelings and who what and where is the “I” who sees them? And then, the near-death experience. I remind you of the truth of the near-death experience. The body in the bed is brain dead eeg flat, but the patient, pure Consciousness is hovering at the ceiling watching the doctors work over the body below, able to read dials he could not have seen from the bed, sometimes able to events in the corridor beyond the room, all subsequently confirmed by the doctors. Evidence as good as it gets that the patient really was out of his body. And so, the patient is able to see without eyes, hear without ears and to think and remember without a brain. There is not a single scientific principle that can account for this. And I am proposing that the near-death experience is a threshold and a key for a much deeper understanding of the Universe. These three problems are so hard they cannot be solved by present scientific principles and therefore call all present principles and ways of thought into question. When your axioms cannot account for the data, it is time to drop them and find better fundamental terms. We have not been able to solve the problems of Consciousness with the assumption that matter is the most basic and fundamental term. And so, if Cartesian dualism is to be overcome at all, we need to try it the other way around. 3. We are in the position of Copernicus. Remember Copernicus? He was making his calculations on the assumption that the Earth was the center of the Universe until they became so unwieldy that he decided to try it all the other way around. To make the sun the center, the Earth revolving around it. And lo, all of his data fell neatly into place. I am proposing a whole new Universe picture. Evolution makes us continuous with every other being, Consciousness would not be in us if it were not in them also, and then, in the atoms and molecules and cells that make up living beings. I propose to make Consciousness the most basic term and see what follows. I am in fact, proposing a new Copernican Revolution, that Consciousness is the true basis for the Universe and the right fundamental term, for science itself all other disciplines as well, and the whole of the modern world. And I predict that every intractable problem in science or the modern world, will go down like a line of dominos before it. In a nutshell: Consciousness and not matter is “first and fundamental” in the Universe, it is there from the very “Beginning” everything has it and all of the true causalities, the explanatory principles belong to it. Not to matter. What then is matter? All matter is an Appearance of something much more real, Consciousness. All matter is an expression of Consciousness, even the least little bit of matter contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. And so, we revise the scientific image of nature. Science at present is two termed, matter/energy. It needs to become three termed: Matter/energy/Consciousness, with the recognition that all of the basic principles, the true causalities of events, and of the Universe belong to Consciousness. And now physics. To accommodate this new Universe picture physics needs to alter just one term, energy. All energy contains Consciousness, that idea alone will change our world forever. The animals the trees the plants are just as conscious as we are, as is the Earth herself, a continuum of many forms of Consciousness of which our own is one. The Earth consists of interacting and intersecting forms of Consciousness, Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness within Consciousness. A remarkable work has just appeared entitled “Beyond Words What Animals Feel and Think.” Describing in detail how like ourselves all of the animals are. And the more we can see how like us everything else really is, the harder it will be for us to do them all in, in the interest of turning them into consumer items. And so, here is a new principle of understanding, that entails completely new forms of explanation, and a whole new Universe picture to be spelled out in terms of Consciousness and its various properties. This is a Universe that is aware awake and Enspirited throughout. And so, there is only one principle, not two. And so, how does Consciousness work? There is “no mind/body problem.” My Consciousness is aligning the Consciousness of neurons in the brain, that aligns the Consciousness of all other cells in the body, that aligns the Consciousness of molecules and atoms themselves. Mainly from the top down, but also interactive, and not reduction to the purely physical forces. 4. And so, here is a radical new Universe picture, and with it a new way to think about the Universe itself, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. It requires a complete revision of both of the terms of modern science itself. The problem of the modern world owes in deep measure to Descartes concept of matter as something devoid of interior life. But he is only the most powerful and simple expression of a whole tradition of thought that predates him, that goes back to the very dawn of thought itself. It owes to the conviction of both Plato and Aristotle that the Earth was something devoid of reason, or mind, and therefore something to be held in complete contempt. We are emerging from a civilization based on contempt for the Earth, and down the road, it will become contempt for the body, sex, women, the Native people, and people of color everywhere. And so, this entire tradition is now up for us, it has brought us to the brink of our own extinction, and we need to get beyond it. I am proposing that this term Consciousness is the way out. The missing piece of the puzzle and the idea whose time has come. And it will enable us to move into a completely new civilization based on respect for the Earth, women, sex, people of color, that honors everyone and has a place for all. Revolutions in science occur when new data show up that cannot be accounted for by existing paradigms (Thomas Kuhns: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Consciousness, and all the properties and problems of Consciousness are just such data, and they compel a new scientific revolution. But we are a scientific age. A new Copernican revolution in science is such as revolution everywhere. And Consciousness is the key to getting every other reality at all levels and depths right as well. It will enable us finally to get the Earth right, get ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. Archimedes: Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world. I am proposing a new synthesis among our fundamental terms in which this term Consciousness is the new lynchpin. And so, I return once more to Descartes. Descartes in the Mediations was a dualist, they were two realities interacting in the pineal gland mind and body. But Descartes age was high on “Cartesianisms,” on Descartes concept of matter. Animals were simply cleverly wired machines (Hobbes called them automata). Rumor had it that Descartes followers went about kicking dogs reasoning that their howls were not due to any feelings of pain, but simply the wiring of the machine. We have been doing this to the Earth ever since, and now the Earth is not going to stand for it any longer. It is time we all woke up. There is no matter in Descartes sense of it, or in Plato and Aristotle’s sense of it. This old concept of matter is embedded in all of the crisis and catastrophes---fires, drought, pandemics, over population, the disintegrating economies, our ways of life, capitalism and consumerism themselves. All matter is Enspirited, contains Consciousness, and is an expression of Consciousness. Now I tell you something about Descartes you may not know. In the Mediations was a dualist, there are minds and bodies. But by the end of his life, he knew the truth. Descartes guided his whole life by these vivid dreams, and toward the end of his life he had this dream: He saw the Universe as a giant machine and in the heart of the machine propelling the whole, was Consciousness. And so, out of the shades and shadows and into the light of day. Here is a renewed and a new science, a new cosmology. And with it, a revolutionary new metaphysics. The whole of the modern world is in the grip of a false metaphysics, based on Descartes theory of matter. Here is a new, and finally true metaphysics based on the single term, Consciousness. 5. And in all my works, I spell out this new metaphysics based on Consciousness, and what it means for how we think about virtually everything: The Universe, the Earth, Ourselves, and Spirit. Of who, what and where Spirit is, that we may connect with Spirit everywhere. There is only one term for the Universe, and not two, this single term Consciousness, that manifests itself in two modes: Consciousness in Form, Consciousness Formless. And so, here is a sketch of what this new term Consciousness really means. For four great aspects of the real, four new cornerstones for a whole new civilization on Earth, based on Love and Truth. A. For the Universe: New causalities, all matter is an expression of Consciousness, awake and aware, Enspirited throughout, which has a place for the causalities of love ideas intent plan and purpose, what Aristotle called final causality, that for the sake of which. And it has a place for subjectivity, the greatest mystery in the whole of the Universe, knowable only in ourselves, but there in everything else as well, bedrock in the chain of causalities. The buck stops here. Here are two very different Universe pictures. The Cartesian Universe consists of things, pushed, and pulled around by the physical forces that function blind. The true Universe consists of selves and not things. Selves at least in ourselves, are organized and focused about an I, an I am, or a sense of self in everything, ever other being dear to itself. Just one aspect of subjectivity. And so, it is Consciousness all the way down, and subjectivity all the way down. Science proceeds on the basis of the negligible of what it can leave out as unimportant. Subjectivity is the ultimate animating principle of the Universe. What Descartes really did was to strip from nature what is most essential about it, its animating principle Consciousness. And so, we come out of a long history of “clunk.” The great male thinkers have killed creation. First in concepts and now in the lived life. And so, after centuries of fruitless search, not all of it in vain, finally, and just in time the true basic principle for the Universe has shown up in virtually all disciplines, this term Consciousness. B. And so, the Earth: What does this term Consciousness really mean for the Earth? It means that all of the bright array of beings around us have Consciousness. And the more we can realize how like us they are, the harder it will be to do them all in. Is this what it really means to be “made in the image of Spirit?” To destroy ever other living being? The god of Genesis is a creator god who has created billions and billions of living forms. Man, taking himself to be made in the image of Spirit has destroyed virtually all of it. The Earth is not things, not commodities and resources, not an endless array of consumer goods. The Earth consists of conscious living spiritual beings like ourselves, who need to be honored and respected, nurtured and cared for, to be Loved. And if the human race can finally pull it off and bring Love here and start helping the Earth rather than destroying her, even our vast numbers now at 8 billion, may not matter. Deeply embedded in the modern world is a false cosmology based on the hitherto useful but ultimately false metaphysics of Descartes. In particular it owes to Descartes concepts of matter, and of the Earth, as something devoid of Consciousness. And now this concept is up for us. If there is a single idea enabling and driving the destruction of the planet, it is the conviction that the Earth is something devoid of Consciousness. And we all have a vested interest in keeping this false concept in place. When you intend to ravage and savage the Earth, to turn it into consumer items, and money in the bank, first pretend she has no Consciousness that way we need not have any conscious about it. We are in deep trouble with the planet. Virtually all human economies are based on the destruction of the Earth, and we are now at a place in our history where we can foresee if we continue on as we are, our own extinction. And so, here are a few new guiding principles for the planet, based on Consciousness. Consciousness has field properties. The Earth is Consciousness throughout, connected and interconnected throughout, intersecting and interacting fields of Consciousness of which our own is one. To harm one is to harm all. Only this understanding of the Earth can set our destructive technologies, and capitalism, their goals, and their limits. The real problem with capitalism, and with civilization itself is it has no true understanding of the Earth, all the exquisite networks and webworks that connect all beings with one another. Nor it is about to admit that the Earth is our “life support system,” reason gone insane in the modern world. We are destroying our life support system, capitalism is the full expression of the human death wish in the modern world, and it needs to change. And now, let the barriers between ourselves and all other beings go down. C. And so, Ourselves. This new Universe picture based on Consciousness opens into and has a place for new concepts of human identity. In particular, it has a place for reincarnation, a process whereby one Consciousness dons’ bodies again and again and lays them down. This is a process wholly impossible on materialistic theories. This new view of things puts a higher perspective on Freudian determinism, which is a partial knowing in a greater account. We are something more than the victims of genes drives and childhood. We are immortally eternal evolving spiritual beings who take on a cycle of earthly lives in order to achieve certain goals and abilities, and then, our earthly cycle complete, we depart the Earth plane for other areas of the Universe physical or purely spiritual, to continue our evolution elsewhere. The scientific evidence for reincarnation is increasing on all sides, see for example the work of Michael Newton, a mainstream scientist forced to confront the fact of reincarnation. A completely new reincarnational picture is now emerging everywhere. We choose our parents for abilities we could acquire through them. We all come here with reasons for being here, and we all have free will, an original property of Consciousness, and we work out our issues accordingly. We all come here with the same reason for being here. It is to experience the Earth plane and human society at all levels and depths, in every social role, every climate, both sexes male and female and in all races. We are all here to acquire a deep understanding of the Earth plane with all its challenges and all of its present problems. We are not here to devour and consume the Earth, but to honor her for the learning experience she makes available for us. And so, reincarnation is the great equalizer, the fundamental basis for any bill of rights. Many of the problems of the modern world owe to the fact that reincarnation has not been taught in the West. Reincarnation was the center piece of Jesus teachings. It was banned by a fourth century council that decided the populous could best be controlled through fear. They edited all mention of reincarnation from the scriptures, and inserted fear terms instead, a judgmental god, and so on. If reincarnation had been taught, there would have been no suppression of women, but the gift of both sexes would have been honored and developed. And there would have been no reason for contempt for people of color because who they are, we have been or will be. There is no reason to look down on anyone when we know that our own identity includes membership in theirs. The truth of reincarnation needs to be the foundation for getting ourselves right with the Earth, and with one another. D. And so, Spirit. This new Universe picture, based on Consciousness, has a place for Spirit as simply Infinite Consciousness. All universes all worlds are formed out of this Consciousness, divine and sacred throughout. And Spirit is everywhere in the Earth and can be connected everywhere. And the Native North American people had things right. Everything has its own Spirit, and without contradiction is also an expression of Spirit. And what I am really doing in terms of concepts of modern science is presenting the Native North American version of the Real. And this new Universe picture has a place for the essential insight of all religions almost smothered by church tradition: Love. Not an emotion but a great Oneness, that can be found everywhere, even in a busy city street. But especially in the Earth, that is levels and depths of Oneness everywhere. And so, for the first time in their long and bitter antagonistic history, science and religion now share a common base with this term Spirit, the lynchpin in a new conceptual framework. And I offer an interpretation of where we are in our history, this present moment of historical grace, and these tumultuous times in which we live, the return of the Goddess and the Divine Feminine, the Reappearance of the Feminine in history, the Advent of Women, this great Awakening, as of Springtime after a long dark Winter, the Awakening, the Second Coming. And so, stay tuned! (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo) is a vibrant area of contemporary life science that should be (and is) increasingly incorporated into teaching curricula. Although the inclusion of this content is important for biological pedagogy at multiple levels of instruction, there are also philosophical lessons that can be drawn from the scientific practices found in Evo-devo. One feature of particular significance is the interdisciplinary nature of Evo-devo investigations and their resulting explanations. Instead of a single disciplinary approach being the most explanatory or (...) fundamental, different methodologies from biological disciplines must be synthesized to generate empirically adequate explanations. Thus, Evo-devo points toward a non-reductionist epistemology in biology. I review three areas where these synthetic efforts become manifest as a result of Evo-devo’s practices (form versus function reasoning styles; problem-structured investigations; idealizations related to studying model organisms), and then sketch some possible applications to teaching biology. These philosophical considerations provide resources for life science educators to address (and challenge) key aspects of the National Science Education Standards and Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture in two large international CPA firms, auditors'' personal values and the ethical orientation that those values dictate, and judgments in ethical dilemmas typical of those that accountants face. Using an experimental task consisting of multiple judgments designed to vary in "moral intensity" (Jones, 1991), and unique as well as tried-and-true approaches to variable measurements, this study examined the judgments of more than three hundred participants in our study. ANCOVA and path analysis (...) results indicate that: (1) Ethical judgments in situations of high moral intensity are affected by personal values and by environmental variables, such as the professional code of conduct (direct and indirect effects) and previous ethics instruction (direct effect only). (2) Corporate ethical culture, and a relatively strong firm rules-orientation, affect auditors'' idealism but not relativism, and therefore indirectly affect ethical judgments. Jones'' (1991) moral intensity argument is supported: differences in the characteristics of specific judgment tasks apparently result in different decision processes. (shrink)

This chapter describes the theoretical implications of Extended Synthesis and addresses the methodological options available for determining aspects of theoretical structure. It uses a “bottom-up” approach focused on evolutionary theory in particular, as opposed to a “top-down” strategy that attempts to characterize the structure of all scientific theories. The chapter shows that there are multiple stable components contained within a broad representation of evolutionary theory. It suggests that the philosophical analysis offered in the chapter regarding the structure of evolutionary theory (...) assists attempts to recover coherence through the vehicle of an Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

Idealization is a reasoning strategy that biologists use to describe, model and explain that purposefully departs from features known to be present in nature. Similar to other strategies of scientific reasoning, idealization combines distinctive strengths alongside of latent weaknesses. The study of ontogeny in model organisms is usually executed by establishing a set of normal stages for embryonic development, which enables researchers in different laboratory contexts to have standardized comparisons of experimental results. Normal stages are a form of idealization because (...) they intentionally ignore known variation in development, including variation associated with phenotypic plasticity (e.g. via strict control of environmental variables). This is a tension between the phenomenon of plasticity and the practice of staging that has consequences for evolutionary developmental investigation because variation is conceptually removed as a part of rendering model organisms experimentally tractable. Two compensatory tactics for mitigating these consequences are discussed: employing a diversity of model organisms and adopting alternative periodizations. (shrink)

Schelling’s masterpiece investigating evil and freedom.

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or data gathering) and epistemology (explanatory evaluation or data interpretation).

Did Joel do the right thing when he saved Ellie? Are those infected by the Cordyceps conscious? Are communities necessary for human survival and flourishing? Should Ellie forgive Joel? Is Abby’s revenge morally justified? Is Ellie’s? The Last of Us franchise includes two of the best video games ever created and the critically acclaimed HBO series. Renowned for brilliant gameplay and world-class narrative, The Last of Us raises timeless and enduring philosophical questions. Beautiful, thrilling, and tragic, Ellie’s story of survival (...) is as philosophical as it is profound. The Last of Us and Philosophy brings together an international team of philosophical experts and fans exploring the timeless questions raised by the video games and the show. Drawing insights ranging from Aristotle and Abby to Buddha and Bill, this book elucidates the roles that trust, community, love, justice, and hope play in The Last of Us. Twenty-four original essays cover both The Last of Us Part I and II and the HBO series, offering accessible and nuanced philosophical analysis of Naughty Dog’s amazing world. Whether you’re a fan of the video games or of the HBO series, The Last of Us and Philosophy will take you on a philosophical journey where you look for the light. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:684 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Megan Kaminski This Century This century is full-on burning the past past carrying back lost to re-memory the year brings millennial want: a bright new coat red shoes an end to oil pipelines and student loans encase us all in warmth not waged labor drab curtains pulled aside reveal window onto window echo us many permutations bring (...) responses wrought and metaled down empty that treasury steal back from church coffers there is something that binds more than moth-eaten sweaters more than stripped-soled shoes we wanting we to mean banks burning profits redistributed we holding the soft hands of we Megan Kaminski 685 This Century This century is not so good filled with tsunamis and snowstorms people displaced by capital and rising waters threaten to make even Kansas beach-front I’d like to stick a fork in the eye of the governor and the Koch brothers too help liberate people from bad shit minimum wage jobs and medical bills give all of us something real to be happy about like city parks clean water and a few fewer grams of rocket fuel in the arugula cats sunning themselves on warm days no old dudes wanting to mess with my uterus and a new sundress trimmed with ribbon This Century This century makes me say things about burning and baddies and whether poetry can really do much of anything unacknowledged legislator or just a lady ass atrophying perched in front of a laptop this century makes me write about changing and loving all of you and getting closer with warm-nosed nudges under your chin embraces while wearing my softest of sweaters these poems want to get out of my chair out of the house and the neighborhood out of capital and with people in favor of all of us animals and plants 686 Megan Kaminski This Century This century takes place in the streets in living rooms of friends in shared words exchanged across borders bridging the distance between you and me and we and ours and taking from board rooms and markets this century is full of things eroding making way for bodies for gardens for libraries for a commoning a burning of gates and fences and debts we spring forth in multitudes occupy more than street corners cordoned off we singing we and the streets the open fields... (shrink)

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