Although embalming is traditionally considered an Egyptian custom, ancient sources suggest that in imperial Rome the practice was not employed by Egyptians or Egyptianized Romans alone. The mos Romanorum in funerary ritual encompassed both cremation and inhumation, yet embalming appears in Rome as early as the first century AD and evidence points to its limited use during the first three centuries AD. Within the social structure of Rome's dead these preserved corpses certainly occupied a distinct place. Yet who were they (...) and why were they embalmed? It is argued here that various factors allowed for the occasional use of embalming by Romans: an apparent shift in attitudes towards Egypt, the manipulation of death ritual for social distinction, and the flexibility of the traditional Roman funeral, which was able to incorporate deviations in methods of body disposal. Although embalming has been largely ignored as a significant aspect of Roman funerary history, its patrons come from the classes of highest status, including even the imperial household. This fact alone makes it worthwhile to examine this small corpus of evidence. For example, the emperor Nero embalmed his wife Poppaea; such a deviation from standard disposal methods reflects imperial fashion, but also requires us to re-evaluate Nero's reign and, especially, the societal constructs of Neronian Rome. This study attempts to contextualize embalming within Roman society and offer some likely causes and effects of its use. (shrink)

In ____Bodies That Matter,__ Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in _Gender_ _Trouble,_ Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers (...) a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in _Gender Trouble_ and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory. (shrink)

Clever Hans, the famous horse who was believed to be able to count, is generally cited as the paradigm of the influence of the observer. Psychologist Rosenthal has illustrated this phenomenon with his well-known experiment about ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ maze rats. Hans, however, achieved something much more interesting. Hecould not only read human minds through their bodies: he could also influence his questioners to produce gestures he could read as cues for finding the answer. Hans could make human bodies (...) be moved and be affected, and move and affect other beings and perform things without their owners’ knowledge. The question of ‘influence’ when we read this case becomes therefore far more complicated and interesting. It involves the question of the way bodies can attune, affect and transformeach other. We may follow carefully how scientists of ethological practices create access to the creatures they study, how they are moved by their subjects of interest, and how they give them a chance to be interesting andto articulate other responses. Doing so, we notice that the signs that define subject and object, what talks and what is talked about, subjectivity and objectivity, are redistributed in a new manner. These practices offer a new and pragmatic definition of the body, close to James’s theory of emotions: to have a body is to learn how to feel. (shrink)

Neither the lived body, taken up by Merleau-Ponty after Husserl, nor the libidinal body theorised by psychanalysts after Freud, can be reduced to the counted, measured, physical body, apprehended only from outside. Both phenomenology and psychoanalysis set forth the priority of a global subjective lived body, approached "from within". However, their perspectives seem to differ when it comes to the conception of the interiority of this lived body, which psychoanalysis deems as imaginary. This paper examines (...) the similarities and discrepancies between the Merleau-Pontyan phenomenological body and the Freudian erogenous body. It attempts to show how the very categories of perception and imagination are reversed when moving from one discipline to the other. It concludes by proposing some lines along which the comparison could be prolonged. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Taking its cue from sign languages, this paper pulls together a range of studies to support the proposal that the recruitment and composition of body actions counts as evidence for linguistic properties. Adopting the view that compositionality is the foundational organizing property of language, we find first that actions of the hands, face, head, and torso in sign languages directly reflect linguistic components, as well as certain aspects of compositional organization among them that are common to all languages, signed (...) and spoken. Work on emerging sign languages strengthens the approach by showing that the gradual recruitment of bodily articulators for linguistic functions directly maps the way in which a new language increases in complexity over time. While compositional communication is almost exclusively restricted to humans, it is not restricted to language. In the spontaneous, intense emotional displays of athletes, different emotional states are correlated with actions of particular face and body features and feature groupings, indicating a much more ancient compositional foundation for language. (shrink)

In her foreword to Science Next, Elizabeth Edwards wrote of science as a tool for social progress: "Innovation is not simply the abstract victory of knowledge [or] the research that gave me years to live; the next science can advance human flourishing and serve the common good. That's the kind of world I want to leave for my children, and for yours." With these words, she joined a tradition that goes back to America's founders, who saw America itself as a (...) "great experiment." Yet while no one can deny that science undergirds the American Dream, it has long been fertile terrain for the "culture wars." Along with arguing the pros and cons of abortion and healthcare, policymakers must now grapple with advancements that raise questions about what it means to be human: we've decoded the genome, but should we modify it to enhance certain "desirable" traits? If we can, should we prolong life at any cost? Will we soon be counting robots, cyborgs, and chimeras among our friends and family?The first book to unpack our love/hate relationship with science from our country's origins to today, The Body Politic is essential reading for science buffs and concerned citizens alike.Jonathan D. Moreno is editor of the Center for American Progress' online magazine Science Progress and professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Author and editor of many seminal books and articles on science and science policy, he divides his time between Philadelphia, PA, and Washington, DC. (shrink)

We believe we know our bodies intimately—that their material reality is certain and that this certainty leads to an epistemological truth about sex, gender, and identity. By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties. Considering questions of transgendered embodiment via phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud and Paul Ferdinand Schilder), and queer theory, Salamon advances an alternative theory of normative and non-normative gender, proving the value and vitality of trans experience for thinking about (...) embodiment. Salamon suggests that the difference between transgendered and normatively gendered bodies is not, in the end, material. Rather, she argues that the production of gender itself relies on a disjunction between the "felt sense" of the body and an understanding of the body's corporeal contours, and that this process need not be viewed as pathological in nature. Examining the relationship between material and phantasmatic accounts of bodily being, Salamon emphasizes the productive tensions that make the body both present and absent in our consciousness and work to confirm and unsettle gendered certainties. She questions traditional theories that explain how the body comes to be—and comes to be made one's own—and she offers a new framework for thinking about what "counts" as a body. The result is a groundbreaking investigation into the phenomenological life of gender. (shrink)

My dissertation focuses on the foundations of the mind-body problem: how we should think about the physical world, what the role of science is in arriving at a solution to the problem, and whether it is possible to answer metaphysical questions about the mind while admitting epistemic defeat. ;Many philosophers argue that the mind is physical, but few spend much time explaining what counts as being physical. This, I argue, is a mistake: if the mind-body problem is the (...) problem of explaining how the mind could be physical, we should have some understanding of what it means to be physical. In other words, in order to solve the mind-body problem, we must also solve the body problem. Surprisingly enough, however, a solution to the body problem is not forthcoming. ;Where, then, does this leave the mind-body problem? One might think that the impossibility of solving the body problem dissolves mind-body problem entirely. This, I argue, is not the case. Rather, the most troubling aspect of the mind-body problem does not dissolve in light of our inability to solve the body problem. For regardless of whether we understand what it means to be physical, we can still ask whether mentality is a fundamental feature of the world. Thus I propose that rather than thinking of the mind-body problem as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a world that is, at its most fundamental level, entirely nonmental. The crux of the mind-body problem, then, is whether mentality is fundamental. ;Finally, I argue that it is difficult to justify ontological-conclusions about the mind while holding that we will never understand the mind. A number of philosophers think that while we cannot explain how the mind is physical we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. I argue that given a commitment to the inexplicability of the mind, arguments for ontological physicalism are not persuasive and conclude that physicalists must strive to understand the mind. Anything less amounts to giving up. (shrink)

It is hard to do justice, in a short reply, to Eyal's excellent review. Accordingly, I will focus on what I take to be its central claim – namely that I fail to give proper consideration to the extent to which the forced extraction of body parts undermines individuals' opportunities for self-respect. According to Eyal, ‘body exceptionalism’ can be defended on the following grounds: ‘People usually see trespass into a person and into objects they associate with a person (...) – especially into a person's body – as utterly disrespectful towards that person and her autonomy’ . And later: ‘Whether or not organ confiscation is truly disrespectful . . . its widespread and intractable perception as a humiliating violation counts heavily against it, because it can thwart opportunities for self-respect’. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an increasing focus on a crucial aspect of the ‘meeting of minds’ problem :160–165, 2013), namely the ability that human beings have for sharing different types of mental states such as emotions, intentions, and perceptual experiences. In this paper I examine what counts as basic forms of ‘shared experiences’ and focus on a relatively overlooked aspect of human embodiment, namely the fact that we start our journey into our experiential life within the experiencing (...) class='Hi'>body of a second person, i.e. our mothers. For example, Zahavi and Rochat recently draw on phenomenological insights and developmental studies in order to support the idea that empathy must be considered a central precondition for experiential sharing. Here I suggest that the defence of the primacy of empathy over experiential sharing might reveal how we are often mislead in our understanding of more basic forms of shared experiences. I argue that while previous approaches mainly defined experiential sharing by using the case of visual experience as a paradigmatic example of ‘togetherness’, it is fruitful to consider the case of pregnancy and intersubjective touch in early infancy as a more basic model of experiential sharing in general. I conclude that shared experiences are phenomena emerging first and foremost from a ‘meeting of bodies’ rather than of minds and as such they precede rather than presuppose empathetic abilities. (shrink)

Donna Haraway's enduring question—“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” —is ever more relevant in the postmodern era, where issues of bodies, boundaries, and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. Critical Disability Studies has taken up the problematic of technology, particularly in relation to the deployment of prostheses by people with disabilities. Yet rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance is no longer the point; (...) instead, the lived experience of disability generates its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the embodied self. I look at what is at stake in the challenge to the Western logos that comes specifically from the capacities of the disabled body, understood not as a less than perfect form of the normative, but as figuring difference in a nonbinary sense. Feminist theory has long contested the isomorphism of the logos, but I go beyond simply setting out the grounds for revaluing multiple variant forms. The feminist turn to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze opens up the problematic to a celebratory positioning of difference and transcorporeality as the very conditions of life. (shrink)

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ (...) fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism. (shrink)

Objects which a human agent controls by efferent activities can be perceived by the agent as belonging to his or her body. This suggests that what an agent counts as “body” is plastic, depending on what she or he controls. Yet there are possible limitations for such momentary plasticity. One of these limitations is that sensations stemming from the body and sensations stemming from objects outside the body are not integrated if they do not sufficiently “match”. (...) What “matches” and what does not is conceivably determined by long–term experience with the perceptual changes that body movements typically produce. Children have accumulated less sensorimotor experience than adults have. Consequently, they express higher flexibility to integrate body-internal and body-external signals, independent of their “match” as suggested by rubber hand illusion studies. However, children’s motor performance in tool use is more affected by mismatching body-internal and body-external action effects than that of adults, possibly because of less developed means to overcome such mismatches. We review research on perception-action interactions, multisensory integration, and developmental psychology to build bridges between these research fields. By doing so, we account for the flexibility of the sense of body ownership for actively controlled events and its development through ontogeny. This gives us the opportunity to validate the suggested mechanisms for generating ownership by investigating their effects in still developing and incomplete stages in children. We suggest testable predictions for future studies investigating both body ownership and motor skills throughout the lifespan. (shrink)

Though Bernard Lonergan is often counted among the so-called “Transcendental Thomists”, this article offers a re-appraisal of his theory of understanding with a renewed emphasis on its a posteriori, rather than a priori, approach. For Lonergan, because understanding is experienced, it can be investigated empirically. It is the further conviction of the author that the experience in which understanding gives itself is a bodily experience. This is the case both in how the experience emerges from biological processes, but also appears (...) within the “phenomenological body” of human conscious awareness. Lonergan’s cognitional theory is compared with Maurice Blondel’s theory of embodied reason to elucidate the former and with Eugene Gendlin’s notion of a bodily “felt-experience” to elucidate the latter. A few final, exploratory comments are made with regard to the dynamics of symbolization, formulation, and expression by linking Gendlin’s work with Lonergan’s Verbum articles. (shrink)

I propose a distinction between two concepts: affliction and atrocity. I argue that an ethical position with respect to history’s horrors can be understood as a practice of refusing to permit affliction to be seen as atrocity. This is a practice of resisting the urge to quantify or qualify affliction in subjecting it to a count of bodies, which would be taken to totalize all the suffering in a given situation. We should, I contend, resist thinking that affliction qualified (...) as atrocity, subject to a count of bodies or the like, captures affliction itself. I then discuss several instances of the qualification of affliction as atrocity, including the Sétif and Guelma massacre, the crucifixion of Christ, and the biblical story of the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. I conclude by making a case that it’s ethically imperative that we recollect the self’s abnegation to those who aren’t counted, those who can’t be counted because they are afflicted without atrocity. (shrink)

In the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. the most significant paradigm change in Western intellectual culture occurred, later affecting Christianity and subsequently science. In the interest of personal empowerment over spontaneous stirrings, a private inner sphere, a so-called soul was ascribed to every conscious subject which was taken to contain their whole experience, like a house, conceived of as an inner world in which reason was to be the master of spontaneous impulses; the empirical external world between these inner spheres (...) was cleansed of all gripping forces and, for this purpose, ground down to a few elegantly selected types of features and their carriers : the remainder of this grindingdown was deposited in the souls or overlooked to nonetheless be found in the souls in changed form. Man was dissected into body and soul. In the transposition into the soul’s huge amounts of life experience were forgotten. Among them can be counted the felt body which disappeared between body and soul as in a crevasse, even though it is the closest thing to human experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese ReligionWhalen LaiBorrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Eric Reinders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 266 + xvi pp.For a long time, Sinology was dominated by scholars with direct or indirect missionary backgrounds, going all the way back to the founding of the discipline by James Legge. Legge occupied the first university chair in (...) the China field in Britain. Legge's vision of China has recently been placed into historical context by Norman Girardot (The Victorian Translation of China [2002]). There were other early figures whose records of Chinese beliefs and folk customs we still use. Beginning with Timothy Richard, more came around to seeing how China needed more than soul saving for the hereafter. China needed urgent sociopolitical reforms in the here and now. In time, the YMCA and the missionary schools would help chaperone in a whole generation of "modern Chinese"; some of them, though exposed to the Gospel, would, in the May Fourth Movement, pit science and democracy against any and all religions. For all that, scholars still do count on the missionary records for understanding the "old China." By exploring what the majority of these men of God saw in China—or thought they saw, since their perception could well be colored by cultural biases—this book by Eric Reinders proves quite refreshing. Instead of holding up those records as a mirror on a Chinese reality, Reinders (to wit) "reversed the light so that it would reflect upon" the Protestant missionaries themselves. For one thing, these Protestant evangelicals reported on China using rhetoric borrowed from their long-standing complaints against the Catholics. For another, they painted the Chinese "body language" in light of their own proud Victorian manners. These missionaries were no James Legge, who was tutored into classical Chinese by erudite Confucians and who then presented the Confucian Classics with appreciative classical (Latin and Greek) references. They were no Arthur Waley either, Waley being one who could "without leaving the door [as to live in China], know all the affairs of the (Chinese) world." By steeping himself in Chinese language and its written culture, Waley could render the Confucian "chun-tzu" into the familiar English "gentleman," and doing so with due sympathy for two land-owning gentry cultures. There is no such sympathy from the Protestant missionaries who lived among the common people. They purported to know the "real" (rural) China that was opened to the inland mission. The China they reported on was not found in library books, the Confucian classics, or some Mandarin's manicured garden. Theirs is not the Good Earth depicted later by Pearl Buck, either.These nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, flourishing in the heydays of the British Empire, held few illusions about the once fabled Cathay. Their reports sent home served, in the end, both God and country. As means for raising funds for their missionary efforts, the reports probably had to fan high hopes for the Gospel in relation to a very deprecating assessment of the pagan, heathen culture they encountered. The reports also reflected the hard times these zealous missionaries did have [End Page 226] to face. They were living in the backwater, among often illiterate peasants and in isolated enclaves surrounded by what they saw as a huddling mass of faceless humanity. Their frustration at learning the vernacular tongue well enough to communicate with the people led to the still popular joke about the inscrutable Chinese. But the conclusion the missionaries drew, about how the Chinese language is inherently "godless," is more theological than philological. That the many Chinese tongues (local dialects?) were deemed a living Babel assumes somehow that the Queen's English is divinely inspired. This book does not tell us often what China was really like, for so much of that reality is woefully "lost in translation."Above all, "Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies" is about how the Protestants transposed their endless bouts with Rome into seeing the errors of the Chinese way as copies of the Catholic way. The Chinese were mindless in their idolatry; they kept up blindly this ritualistic gesture with little or... (shrink)

In the domain of evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the early body ornaments from the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic are generally treated as mere by-products of an evolved brain-bound cognitive architecture selected to cope with looming social problems. Such adaptive artefacts are therefore taken to have been but passive means of broadcasting a priori envisaged meanings, essentially playing a neutral role for the human mind. In contrast to this epiphenomenalist view of material culture, postphenomenology and the Material Engagement Theory have been making (...) a case for the active role of artefacts on the count that they can actually shape and restructure the human mind. By bringing these dissenting voices together, the paper at hand employs an enactive way of thinking in order to challenge the epiphenomenalist take on early body ornaments. In fact, two variants of enactivism are presented, each advancing a unique explanation of how the engagement of early humans with body ornaments transformed their minds along the two postphenomenological categories of embodied and hermeneutic cognition. Our theoretical frameworks specifically seek to explore how early beadworks could have scaffolded the creation of semiotic categories and the development of cognitive processes. Despite relying on inherently different premises, both theories suggest that beads fostered the emergence of an epistemic apparatus which thoroughly transformed the way humans engaged with the world. Having concurred on the ornaments’ transformative effects, we ultimately conclude that the epiphenomenalist paradigm best be replaced with an enactive approach grounded on the dictates of postphenomenology and the MET. (shrink)

In the context of the mandated phaseout of methyl bromide, California’s strawberry industry has increased its use of chloropicrin, another soil fumigant that has long been on the market. However, due to its 2010 designation as a toxic air contaminant, the US Environmental Protection Agency and California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation have developed enhanced application protocols to mitigate exposures of the chemical to bystanders, nearby residents, and farmworkers. The central feature of these mitigation technologies are enhanced buffer zones between treated (...) fields and nearby buildings. Not only do buffer zones inherently privilege neighbors over farmworkers, but the determinations of the size of these buffer zones are also based on acceptable threshold levels and probabilities that allow significant exposures to those they are designed to protect. Moreover, these protocols require human monitors to detect sensory irritation. While the science and technology studies literature is highly useful for understanding the inextricability of science and politics in developing protective measures and is attentive to what counts as data in setting acceptable thresholds, it tends to overlook that social sorting is intrinsic to such regulation. We thus turn to Foucault’s biopolitics to make sense of regulations that are designed to protect but inherently allow some to become ill. Doing so illuminates how determinations of the bright line are at once technical–political as well as implicit decisions about whose bodies count. (shrink)

This paper explores moments of democratising disorderliness that interrupt a vision of the sublime as a particular ordering of subjectivity. Situated within the context of the Narmada movement against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India in the mid-1990s, it argues that sublime regimes and ‘counter-sublime’ insurgences draw their energies from the figures of the dam and the bund, respectively. Where the dam’s walls establish the horizons of visibility, of who counts as subject, the bund’s curved surfaces reveal (...) a pluralising depth that folds the visible with/in the invisible, constituting the possibility of novel modes of seeing/subjectification. Working through oral histories, films, images, archival materials and ethnographic studies alongside the work of Foucault and the later Merleau-Ponty, the paper argues that the Narmada movement enacts a counter-sublime that contests the invisibility imposed by the dam in favour of an imbrication of the human and non-human disclosing radically different constellations of visibility and subjectification. (shrink)

The Corpus Delicti Rule prohibits the introduction of the defendant’s confession to a crime to count as evidence against the defendant in the absence of independent evidence of the crime in question. The common law rule, designed to protect the defendant who confesses to the commission of a fictitious crime, has fallen out of favor with federal courts and a number of state courts. Moreover, the rule has its academic detractors. This essay is an attempt to investigate the value (...) of the rule, the academic criticisms of the rule and to analyze the federal substitute for the rule. If the analysis is not completely astray, the rule serves a most admirable social purpose. The academic arguments are not so telling as to justify jettisoning the rule. Finally, the federal rule is argued to be either completelyinadequate a protection or an adequate protection only to the extent that the federal substitute is coextensive with the rule it is designed to replace, namely, the original Corpus Delicti Rule. (shrink)

Colombia has been structured by war, and this situation has permeated the country’s art, with variations that go hand in hand with the transformations of violence. In this chapter, I delve into the work of filmmaker Nicolás Rincón-Gille. What I explore as remarkable in his films is how violence does not “monopolize everything else” but makes life count in the face of the brutal effects of devastation. What persists in these films is the capacity of those who have lived (...) through and been traversed by destruction to reposition themselves in what remains and their ability to give an account of what happened to them by finding everyday resources to deal with it. Thus, these films can break away from the identifications that bind victims to a place of impotence by exploring their capacities, perceptions of the conflict, and experiences of mourning and creating, through this exploration, dissensual works of memory. (shrink)

A jellyfish surrounds a plastic fragment, merging the synthetic material with its body; a water agency poster warns of dangerous plastic bottle ‘fish’ in the Mediterranean; marine organisms take shelter on and under synthetic materials. These are the denizens of a growing realm marine ecologists call the ‘plastisphere’, where sea life and plastics meet. Building upon multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies interrogations of nature/culture divides and the practical work of classification, this article explores the indeterminacy – the very (...) plasticity – of the category of ‘species’ as it is engaged in seriousness and irony, with living and nonliving bodies. First, I draw on participant observation at a nonprofit marine institute laboratory in California to trace the travels of plastic-creatures through attempts to disentangle them in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Here volunteers sort tiny plastic bits from animal ones under the microscope, enacting material boundaries as they decide what gets counted as life (not plastic) and what does not (plastic). Second, I follow movements of plastic-creatures through public education campaigns, paying particular attention to assumptions about belonging and agency enacted with assumptions about whether and when plastic-species should or should not meet. I argue that the ‘danger’ of plastic relationships lurks not in associations but in the very categories used to know and live with forms of plastic and forms of life, in the kinds of belonging that emerge with kinds of materials, and in the failure to recognize the impossibility of their separation. (shrink)

Gendered socialization has prompted numerous attempts to redefine what counts as an autonomous choice. However, there is strong disagreement among feminist theorists over the criteria to identify cases of autonomy impairment _vis-à-vis_ the embeddedness of individuals in patriarchal cultures. I argue that this focus on choice and autonomy has often neglected the costs of non-compliance to social norms and the trade-offs that women make to flourish within their community. Even if we were to find an effective way to determine whether (...) a self-regarding choice calls for state interference because of its socialized nature, we would still lack a sufficient justification for interfering with women’s choices. To justify political action, my claim is that we should also look at the effects that preference interference would have on women within their societal context. Consequently, I develop a non-ideal feminist account aimed chiefly at analysing the costs of proposed feminist change. I shall focus in particular on women’s engagement with practices of body modification for the sake of conforming to gendered standards of appearance, such as cosmetic surgery and hymen restoration. In both cases, I argue that blanket bans risk backfiring into a form of double-jeopardy for those who are already the most vulnerable to gendered oppression, hence they are not justified. However, this does not imply passively accepting the status quo but urges us to reconsider new ways to offset transition costs, making resistance to social norms a collectively shared endeavour rather than a burden that exclusively befalls the most vulnerable. (shrink)

Mark Johnson argues in favour of embodied experience as the basis for knowledge. An important implication of his analysis is that these experiences instigate pervasive metaphorical systems. Johnson 's argument involves reductionist problems, chicken-and-egg problems and, at times, unclear criteria for what counts as a basic experience and a metaphor.

This paper examines today's received scientific medical model with respect to its ability to satisfy two conditions: (1) its explanatory adequacy relative to the full range of findings in the medical literature, including those indicating a correlation between psychosocial variables and disease susceptibility; and (2) the fit between its physicalist patient and disease concepts and what today's basic sciences, so-called sciences of complexity, tell us about the way matter, notably complex systems (e.g. patients), behave and the nature of scientific explanation. (...) I conclude that the received (biomedical) model falls short on both counts and to satisfy these conditions is to articulate a formal successor model. This successor must be guided by premises consistent with the findings and methods of today's basic sciences on which an applied science like medicine depends for its validity. Additionally, the successor model must be able to explain (and predict) the full range of clinical findings, both those that its predecessors explains and at least some of those that it does not. The aim of the paper is to identify such a model. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hard on Everything but the BodyJillian GuizzottiIn the fall of 2011, my first year of college, I took a course on Asian religions at Alfred University. I became interested in different kinds of religions, especially Buddhism. I was lucky that the professor who taught Asian religions also offered an introductory class on Buddhism the following semester. It was an upper-level course, generally not open to first-year students, but the (...) instructor let me enroll. The class met twice a week for two hours. At first it did not seem different in any way from my other classes, but during the second half of the semester, we spent fifteen to twenty minutes at the beginning of every class in meditation.Before I came to college, I believed I had decent reasoning and interpretive skills; intellectually I knew I could go toe-to-toe with alien concepts and master them. But I had heard from my sister and my two eldest cousins that college was a different world from high school; I should expect my perceptions to change. Every time I was told something like this I shrugged it off. The suggestion that a class could affect my core beliefs seemed far-fetched. I did not think college would change me that much, but the Buddhism course and the meditation practice affected me in ways I did not expect: academically, spiritually, and emotionally. The process was gradual. By the end of the spring semester, there were big dents in my usual ways of thinking about the world and about myself.Buddhism is a complex religion and some of its core ideas, such as the nature of human suffering, are not so easy to explain. Unlike other classes where I learn in traditional academic ways, meditation gave me an opportunity to understand Buddhism in new ways, more challenging and personal ways. After it was incorporated into the class, everything developed more color: things I thought I knew no longer seemed so black and white. I stopped feeling that tests and homework were the most important things about my classes; what matters is what I learn. And what I learn depends on me.Unlike a straightforward academic class, in which I usually regurgitate what I read in books and hear in lectures, meditation caused me to focus on myself. I have not had a class before or since that has seeped into my life outside the classroom so much. (How often can people say that a class they took comes back to haunt them, in a good way?) None of my other classes has made me think so hard, either. I felt as though I was problem solving on a whole new level. [End Page 115]Because I was a first-year student and most of the other students were juniors and seniors, in the beginning I felt as though I was barely holding on to everyone else’s coattails; they seemed to be grasping the material so much better. Reviewing the text only helped a little. I needed something to “click” so I could understand Buddhism better. I did not see how meditation could help anyone, however. I just saw it as a time to sit still and collect swarming thoughts. I did not get how it was supposed to advance anyone along their “path.” I doubted it would help me learn anything about Buddhism, let alone help me pass the course. Although I was wary, I was willing to try. After I did experience it for myself, the lessons became more comprehensible, because I could relate them to my own life and experiences. This made the class feel less stressful as well.After about a week of doing meditation, a few friends asked me how it felt. I told them it felt very foreign to go to class and sit in front of a white wall for fifteen to twenty minutes and count my breaths. It was very different from immediately taking out paper and pen and starting to take notes. Sitting for those minutes was sometimes rather fun, relaxing. It made me want to go to class more because I had something to look forward to. I told... (shrink)

“Morphological computation” is an increasingly important concept in robotics, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of the mind. It is used to understand how the body contributes to cognition and control of behavior. Its understanding in terms of "offloading" computation from the brain to the body has been criticized as misleading, and it has been suggested that the use of the concept conflates three classes of distinct processes. In fact, these criticisms implicitly hang on accepting a semantic definition of what (...) constitutes computation. Here, I argue that an alternative, mechanistic view on computation offers a significantly different understanding of what morphological computation is. These theoretical considerations are then used to analyze the existing research program in developmental biology, which understands morphogenesis, the process of development of shape in biological systems, as a computational process. This important line of research shows that cognition and intelligence can be found across all scales of life, as the proponents of the basal cognition research program propose. Hence, clarifying the connection between morphological computation and morphogenesis allows for strengthening the role of the former concept in this emerging research field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back InTony E. JacksonAd Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In, by Brian Rotman; xii & 203 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, $39.50 cloth, $12.95 paper.Brian Rotman’s book attempts to pull mathematics—the last, most solid home of metaphysical thought—off (...) its absolutist foundations and into the roiling current of postmodernism. His argument works in what has by now become a rather standard manner. He shows how the grounding ideas of mathematics rest upon the insupportable assumption of a realm of absolute truth, “truth perfect, truth outside time, outside space, outside the material world of matter, energy, and entropy, truth somehow able to be discovered or apprehended but never invented” (p. 19). Rotman questions this Platonic grounding in a number of ways.First, with the help of linguistics (de Saussure, Benveniste, Wittgenstein, and Peirce) he provides a semiotic analysis of mathematical arguments as real-world linguistic events. Proof he looks at “not as a form of inference engaged in preserving eternal truths, but as an historically conditioned species of rhetoric” (p. 35). Secondly, Rotman argues that one idea has most secured the fortress-like solidity of mathematical Platonism: the idea of ad infinitum or infinite iteration. Mathematics takes off from the givenness of the natural numbers, our everyday 1, 2, 3 and so on to infinity. It is the “so on to infinity” that frames up the house of arithmetic as it has stood since Euclid. (Euclidean in this context is equivalent to Platonic in the context of philosophy.) But what is the referent of these numbers? Ultimately they are said to be the symbolic representation of the action of counting, which is the “mathematical ur-cognition” (p. 51). And yet we cannot imagine any material human situation in which counting could actually go on to infinity. Therefore, some impossible, supernatural agent (the ghost of the title) must be projected in order for this conception to exist. Similarly, Rotman argues against the assumption of “perfect repeatability” because this notion depends upon some purely imaginary, ideal identity of object or action that could possibly be repeated. Ad infinitum requires and assumes both a disembodied, metaphysical counter and a disembodied, metaphysical counted.So Rotman sets about putting the body back into this symbolic system by rejecting the idea of ad infinitum. Instead of assuming the existence of counting activities that run, in principle, out to infinity without changing their nature, Rotman posits what he calls “realizable iteration,” that is, counting that admits the necessary dissolution or change of whatever repetitive function you begin with. Put simply, he includes the fact that quantitative accumulation or repetition always eventually brings about a qualitative change: at some point in everyday life a difference of degree of the “same” thing or action inevitably becomes a difference of kind. The natural numbers and the ad infinitum [End Page 390] remain blissfully sheltered from this inescapable real world truth, but Rotman reformulates mathematics so as to include this truth in the very idea of numbering.In fact (and he acknowledges this) he theorizes counting after the model of chaos or complexity theory in the physical sciences. Realizable iteration, he says, will bring in the “qualitative differences” forgotten or repressed (the language of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud runs throughout) in the metaphysical version of number, and “display [the qualitative differences] as the emergent effects of repetition” (p. 131). Even numerical addition, for instance, which had been the most linearly continuous of activities, now will be linear beginning from some initial point, but will become increasingly nonlinear as quantitative increase tends towards some point of qualitative discontinuity with what had come before. The point of discontinuity, though certain to appear, is by its nature not specifiable beyond a horizon of probability, and in this, Rotman aligns his arithmetic not only with chaos theory, but also with quantum mechanics. In an appendix, Rotman elaborates at least to a degree the “pre-elements” of his non-Euclidean arithmetic.As chaos theory does not destroy everyday cause... (shrink)

This ambitious work puts forward a new account of mathematics-as-language that challenges the coherence of the accepted idea of infinity and suggests a startlingly new conception of counting. The author questions the familiar, classical, interpretation of whole numbers held by mathematicians and scientists, and replaces it with an original and radical alternative--what the author calls non-Euclidean arithmetic. The author's entry point is an attack on the notion of the mathematical infinite in both its potential and actual forms, an attack organized (...) around his claim that any interpretation of "endless" or "unlimited" iteration is ineradicably theological. Going further than critique of the overt metaphysics enshrined in the prevailing Platonist description of mathematics, he uncovers a covert theism, an appeal to a disembodied ghost, deep inside the mathematical community's understanding of counting. (shrink)

This piece is a response to Marilyn Strathern's article, “Binary License,” in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” Arguing that, across noncoherent practices, there is room for different natures, the essay suggests that modes of relating (the briefly invoked example given is of divergent counting practices) do not need a shared conceptual apparatus in order to be combined. What is held in the juxtaposition of acts and practices seems to be the sense in which acts are not affected by (...) how they are described. The main example given is of surgery, and the emphasis placed on how splitting open part of patient's body is never a matter of a point of view. But to know exactly what is going on in the operating theater, we might wish to ask how this act speaks to the act of intellectual bifurcation, splitting open what up to then had been a seamless argument. To know exactly what is going on in the operating theater, we might also wish to ask how this act speaks to persons cutting themselves off from one another. (shrink)

The distinction between “passive” and “active” euthanasia, though problematic and highly criticized, retains a certain intuitive appeal. When a patient is allowed to die, nature appears simply to be taking its course. Yet when a patient is killed by, say, a lethal injection, humans appear to be causing his or her death. Guilt seems to follow naturally from the latter act while not from the former. Yet this view only holds up if age‐old and vague ideasabout “nature” and “artifice” go (...) unscrutinized. Once examined more closely the functional relevance of particular machines to particular bodies becomes evident. And the innocence and guilt less clear. (shrink)

Although its title promises a discussion of such matters as prostitution, surrogate motherhood, and markets in blood and organs, this book by a professor of law at Stanford University is really a treatise on market rhetoric, not markets. Its target is the intellectual application of the tools of economic analysis to spheres of human life—such as sexual relations, family life, bodily integrity, and political commitment—that are purportedly structured by moral values and ideals rather than cold calculation of advantage. The “Chicago (...) School” of economics, the law-and-economics movement, and public-choice theory are the culprits here. Writers in these intellectual movements, on Radin’s characterization, think of children as commodities with “a price and a demand function”, explain laws against vote-selling as solutions to externality problems, and count rape as “no different from any other preference satisfaction”. They “want to extend the market to everything” as a tool of thought. (shrink)

The case of women radium dial painters — women who tipped their brushes while painting the dials of watches and instruments with radioactive paint — has been extensively discussed in the medical and historical literature. Their painful and abhorrent deaths have occupied the interest of physicians, lawyers, politicians, military agencies, and the public. Hardly any discussion has concerned, however, the use of those women as experimental subjects in a number of epidemiological studies that took place from 1920 to 1990. This (...) article addresses the neglected issue of human experimentation in relation to the radium dial painters. Although women’s medical examinations have been classified as simple, routine measurements of radiation burden on the body and presented as a great offer to humanity, for more than fifty years those women had been repeatedly used as experimental subjects without proper consent. I argue that through this case it becomes obvious that the issue of defining what counts as human experimentation shifts from an epistemological to a serious ethical and political question, concerning the making of scientific knowledge while issues of gender related to this process are also discussed. (shrink)

Business professions are increasingly faced with the question of how to best monitor the ethical behavior of their members. Conflicts could exist between a profession's desire to self-regulate and its accountability to the public at large. This study examines how members of one profession, public accounting, evaluate the relative effectiveness of various self-regulatory and externally imposed mechanisms for promoting a climate of high ethical behavior. Specifically, the roles of independent public accountants, regulatory and rule setting agencies, and undergraduate accounting education (...) are investigated. Of 461 possible respondents, 230 questionnaires (a 49.6% response rate) indicated that the profession's own rule setting body (The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) and the use of peer review were perceived as the most effective mechanisms, while government regulation was ranked least. Respondents also evaluated the extent to which ethics should be covered in the accounting curriculum. For every course, the CPAs believed a greater emphasis on ethics is appropriate than presently exists. Suggestions for more effectively integrating ethics into accounting courses are made. Finally, respondents were also asked whether in answering the questionnaire they used a definition of ethics as either the Professional Code of Conduct or a moral and philosphical framework for guiding beliefs. Those who viewed ethics as abiding by a professional code had more confidence in the mechanisms addressed in this study to aid the public accounting profession's ability to ensure high ethical standards of conduct. Methodological implications of this distinction for future studies in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

This paper considers Newton’s position on gravity’s cause, both conceptually and historically. With respect to the historical question, I argue that while Newton entertained various hypotheses about gravity’s cause, he never endorsed any of them, and in particular, his lack of confidence in the hypothesis of robust and unmediated distant action by matter is explained by an inclination toward certain metaphysical principles. The conceptual problem about gravity’s cause, which I identified earlier along with a deeper problem about individuating substances, is (...) that a decisive conclusion is impossible unless certain speculative aspects of his empiricism are abandoned. In this paper, I situate those conceptual problems in Newton’s natural philosophy. They arise from ideas that push empiricism to potentially self-defeating limits, revealing the danger of allowing immaterial spirits any place in natural philosophy, especially spatially extended spirits supposed capable of co-occupying place with material bodies. Yet because their source ideas are speculative, Newton’s method ensures that these problems pose no threat to his rational mechanics or the profitable core of his empiricism. They are easily avoided by avoiding their source ideas, and when science emerges from natural philosophy, it does so with an ontology unencumbered by immaterial spirits. (shrink)

According to the cohabitation account, all the persons that result from a fission event cohabit the same body prior to fission. This article concerns a problem for this account. Suppose Manuel and Jimena are suffering from an equally painful migraine. Unlike Jimena, however, Manuel will undergo fission. Assuming you have a spare painkiller, whom should you give it to? Intuitively, you have no more reason to give it to one or the other. The problem is that the cohabitation account (...) suggests otherwise. According to the account, there are two persons cohabiting Manuel’s body, in which case you should arguably give them the pill, since doing so alleviates the pain of more beings. One response argues that the two persons cohabiting Manuel’s body share one pain. Thus, giving them the pill alleviates no more pain than giving it to Jimena, and therefore you have no more reason to do one or the other. The goal of this article is to show that this response fails. (shrink)

The idea that form follows thought and feeling is not a new one to mystics, but quantum physicists have now shown this to be a scientifically proven reality. A massive shift in people's understanding is occurring to take the implications of this on board and integrate it into our lives. This book assembles the research from mainstream scientists and writers such as Gregg Braden and David Hawkins to create a convincing and inspiring case for the power of compassion and kindness (...) to make a difference in the world. (shrink)

Social death, central to the evil of genocide, distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

This article critically assesses a recent interpretation of Descartes’s physics, according to which he accepts a medieval account of the relation between God and physical creatures commonly called concurrentism. On this medieval view, God cooperates with creatures as efficient causes in bringing about change. If Descartes were to accept it, then it would entail that physical creatures (bodies) count as efficient causes in some way (otherwise God could not be said to cooperate with them), thus settling a long-standing debate (...) about whether Cartesian bodies are efficient causes in body-body interaction. I argue on two independent bases that he does not accept this view. First, I argue that there are metaphysical difficulties with reconstructing Cartesian physics on the concurrentist view. Second, I argue that the textual evidence is not only insufficient to establish that Descartes is a concurrentist, but furthermore it supports an occasionalistic interpretation of body-body interaction instead. (shrink)

John Rawls begins a Theory of Justice with the observation that "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought… Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override"1 (p.3). The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in lock-downs, the restriction of liberties, debate about the right to refuse medical treatment and many other changes to the everyday behaviour of persons. The justice issues it raises are (...) diverse, profound and will demand our attention for some time. How we can respect the Rawlsian commitment to the inviolability of each person, when the welfare of societies as a whole is under threat goes to the heart of some of the difficult ethical issues we face and are discussed in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. The debate about ICU triage and COVID-19 is quite well developed and this journal has published several articles that explore aspects of this issue and how different places approach it.2–5 Newdick et al add to the legal analysis of triage decisions and criticise the calls for respecting a narrow conception of a legal right to treatment and more detailed national guidelines for how triage decisions should be made.6 They consider scoring systems for clinical frailty, organ failure assessment, and raise some doubts about the fairness of their application to COVID-19 triage situations. Their argument seems to highlight instances of what is called the McNamara fallacy. US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara used enemy body counts as a measure …. (shrink)

In March of 2012, following a robust activist campaign, Arysta LifeScience withdrew the soil fumigant methyl iodide from the US market, just a little over a year after it had finally been registered for use in California. As a major part of the campaign against registration of the chemical, over 53,000 people, ostensibly acting as citizens rather than consumers, wrote public comments contesting the use of the chemical for its high toxicity. Although these comments had marginal impact on the outcome (...) of the case, these comments are of interest for what they say about public action at a time when efforts to address food and agricultural issues have been dominated by “voting with your fork.” Based on a qualitative textual analysis of approximately 3500 representative comments made available to us, we show that many of those taking action did not abandon consumer subjectivities associated with neoliberal governmentality. By threatening “personal boycotts,” some were acting in their capacity as individual consumers; in invoking their own and their children’s health many more were also acting on behalf of consumers, despite that the chemical in question is applied before strawberries are planted and thus leaves no residues. The emphasis that letter writers gave to their own bodies reinforces the idea that some bodies count more than others and thus reveals a biopolitical sorting. Having consumer lives matter is consequential in light of evidence that consumer concern about pesticides has historically led to formulations and regulations more protective of consumers than workers and neighbors. (shrink)

This chapter develops the hypothesis that social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide, not just when a genocide is primarily cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. It is social death that enables us to distinguish the peculiar evil of genocide from the evils of other mass murders. The evil of genocide falls not only on men and boys but also on women and girls, typically unarmed, untrained in defense against violence, and often (...) also responsible for care of the wounded, the sick, the disabled, babies, children, and the elderly. The damage of war and terrorism is commonly assessed in terms of its ruin of individual careers, body counts, statistics on casualties, and material costs of rebuilding. An injustice becomes an evil when it inflicts harms that make victims' lives unbearable, indecent, or impossible, or that make victims' deaths indecent. (shrink)

In this essay, we respond to Dustin Crummett’s argument that one cannot consistently appeal to body count reasoning to justify being a single-issue pro-life voter if one is also committed to the usual response to the embryo rescue case. Specifically, we argue that a modified version of BCR we call BCR* is consistent with the usual response. We then move to address concerns about the relevance of BCR* to Crummett’s original thesis.

The publication of this Black Book by a group of historians to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution has opened a heated debate, first in France and then abroad. Edited by Stéphane Courtois, who also wrote the preface (instead of François Furet, who died a few months before its publication), this work attempts to provide an accurate account of the human cost of communism in view of the documentary evidence available today. The estimate is around 100 million dead—four (...) times the body-count of Nazism. These figures are not really a revelation. From Boris Souvarine to Robert Conquest and…. (shrink)

This research aims to help create a systematic casualty recording database for the civilian casualties of the Russian aggression within Ukraine. It looks at the definitions surrounding casualty recording and human security to help create a baseline for the project. It examines the Register of the Holodomor Victims, the Bosnian Book of the Dead, the Kosovo Memorial Book, and the casualty recording of Iraq Body Count and the Bouderbala Commission, in terms of their recording systems and public databases. (...) The live project is also informed by the work of Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), the United Nations, Children of War, and the Memorial Platform. (shrink)

Scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies often emphasizes body counts and the number of biological deaths as a way of measuring and comparing the severity and scope of individual genocides. The prevalence of this way of framing genocide is problematic insofar it risks marginalizing the voices and experiences of victims who may not succumb to biological death but nevertheless suffer the loss of family members and other loved ones, and suffer the destruction of relationships, as well as (...) the foundational institutions that give rise to and sustain those relationships. The concept of social death, which Claudia Card offers as the central evil of genocide, marks a radical shift in conceptualizing genocide and provides space for recovering the marginalized voices of many who suffer the evils of genocide but do not suffer biological death. Here her concept of social death is explored, defended, and criticized. (shrink)

The work of Claudia Card has received far less attention in the field of genocide studies than it deserves. The atrocity paradigm, first introduced in her book by that title published in 2002, offers rich insights that can serve to enhance the understanding of genocidal violence. Her book Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, after offering revisions to her secular theory of evil, does speak directly to the evils of genocide, claiming "genocide is social death". This chapter shows that genocide scholarship (...) as well as accounts of genocide by journalists often frame genocide in terms of biological death and body counts. It argues that the atrocity paradigm and especially Card's conception of social death are better able to capture the complex realities of genocidal violence, particularly the experiences of women. The chapter describes that the idea of social death enriches the understanding of genocide but question whether her term has juridical implications. (shrink)