This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns. The book consists of _The Instant of My Death,_ a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and (...) an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness. Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II. (shrink)

The human subjects researchmodel is increasingly invoked in discussions ofethics for Internet research. Here we seek toquestion the widespread application of thismodel, critiquing it through the two themes ofspace and textual form. Drawing on ourexperience of a previous piece ofresearch, we highlightthe implications of re-considering thetextuality of the Internet in addition to thespatial metaphors that are more commonlydeployed to describe Internet activity. Weargue that the use of spatial metaphors indescriptions of the Internet has shaped theadoption of the human subjects research (...) model.Whilst this model is appropriate in some areasof Internet research such as emailcommunication, we feel that researchers, whennavigating the complex terrain of Internetresearch ethics, need also to consider theInternet as cultural production of texts. (shrink)

In ‘The ethics of consent during labour and birth: episiotomies,’ van der Pijl et al 1 respond to the prevalence of unconsented procedures during labour, proposing a set of necessary features for adequate consent to episiotomy. Their model emphasises information sharing, value exploration and trust between a pregnant person and their healthcare provider(s). While focused on consent to episiotomy, van der Pijl et al contend their approach may be applicable to consent for other procedures during labour and beyond pregnancy-related care. (...) One feature of their model for adequate informed consent is trust in the systems in which prenatal and labour and delivery care are provided. Yet, for some pregnant persons, mistrust in health systems is a reasonable sequela of experiences like racism and epistemic injustice. For a programme in which trust is central to adequate consent, it is important to identify—and counter—forms of mistrust toward pregnant persons within healthcare and acknowledge and rectify reasonable mistrust of pregnant persons toward healthcare. Like other kinds of healthcare disparities, van der Pijl et al note that ‘the burden of unconsented procedures is not evenly distributed over groups’ and tracks with ‘racial, socioeconomic and other disparities in maternity care’. They are drawing on data from a less diverse context than the one …. (shrink)

Communication, when defined as an act intended to affect the psychological state of another individual, demands the use of inference. Either the signaler, the recipient, or both must make leaps of understanding which surpass the semantic information available and draw from pragmatic clues to fully imbue and interpret meaning. While research into human communication and the evolution of language has long been comfortable with mentalistic interpretations of communicative exchanges, including rich attributions of mental state, research into animal communication has balked (...) at theoretical models which describe mentalized cognitive mechanisms. We submit a new theoretical perspective on animal communication: the model of inferential communication. For use when existing proximate models of animal communication are not sufficient to fully explain the complex, flexible, and intentional communication documented in certain species, specifically non-human primates, we present our model as a bridge between shallower, less cognitive descriptions of communicative behavior and the perhaps otherwise inaccessible mentalistic interpretations of communication found in theoretical considerations of human language. Inferential communication is a framework that builds on existing evidence of referentiality, intentionality, and social inference in primates. It allows that they might be capable of applying social inferences to a communicative setting, which could explain some of the cognitive processes that enable the complexity and flexibility of primate communication systems. While historical models of animal communication focus on the means-ends process of behavior and apparent cognitive outcomes, inferential communication invites consideration of the mentalistic processes that must underlie those outcomes. We propose a mentalized approach to questions, investigations, and interpretations of non-human primate communication. We include an overview of both ultimate and proximate models of animal communication, which contextualize the role and utility of our inferential communication model, and provide a detailed breakdown of the possible levels of cognitive complexity which could be investigated using this framework. Finally, we present some possible applications of inferential communication in the field of non-human primate communication and highlight the role it could play in advancing progress toward an increasingly precise understanding of the cognitive capabilities of our closest living relatives. (shrink)

Focuses on the encounters of feminist and queer theories, on the ways in which basic terms such as - sex, gender, and sexuality change meaning as they move from one body of theory to another. This book includes essays by Judith Butler, Evelynn Hammonds, Biddy Martin, Kim Michasiw, Carole-Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Weed.

This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose (...) for educational practice today. (shrink)

The Internet has been used as a place for and site of an array of research activities. From online ethnographies to public data sets and online surveys, researchers and research regulators have struggled with an array of ethical issues around the conduct of online research. This paper presents a discussion and findings from Buchanan and Ess's study on US-based institutional review boards and the state of internet research ethics.

All duties are either duties of right (officia iuris), that is, duties for which external lawgiving is possible, or duties of virtue (officia virtutis s. ethica), for which external lawgiving is not possible. – Duties of virtue cannot be subject to external lawgiving simply because they have to do with an end which (or the having of which) is also a duty. No external lawgiving can bring about someone's setting an end for himself (because this is an internal act of (...) the mind), although it may prescribe external actions that lead to an end without the subject making it his end. (shrink)

In this essay, Anscombe describes the Aristotelian account of how the intellect makes actually intelligible the forms of material particulars, and thereby is able to fashion concepts and think of those things. She identifies difficulties in it having to do with the differing “content” of concepts and of forms, and the generality of the former. She then contrasts that account with the Lockean theory of ideas as representations and with Hume’s development of the ideational view which holds that all we (...) can ever conceive of are ideas and impressions. She next compares the Aristotelian isomorphist account with that of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, showing that while both avoid the sceptical implication of the theory of ideas, a question arises regarding the relation of names to their bearers and how to understand ostensible names. Finally, Anscombe outlines Anselm’s treatment of “nothing” but notes its limits as a general treatment. (Ed. J.H.). (shrink)

Orations of the Fatimid Caliphs: Festival Sermons of the Ismaili Imams. Ed. and tr. Paul E. Walker. Ismaili Texts and Translations Series, vol. 10. London: I. B. Tauris, with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2009. Pp. xvii + 162 + 58. £29.50, $51.29.

Despite tremendous investment to promote gender equity, U.S. public accounting firms continue to be gendered organizations. Our archival study examines gender equity within the partnership of these large firms for a one-year period. We find female partners are clustered in lower prestige client types including investment funds, benefit plans, and single audits, rather than higher prestige public company clients. Second, we consider whether there is gender bias in prestige of client served by female partners who lead public company audits. In (...) these tests of those individuals who have already achieved the partnership and lead public company audits, we find no evidence of bias. This research contributes to the understanding of gender bias in U.S. public accounting firms and helps inform the societal narrative on where women continue to be marginalized even when they have achieved the highest levels in an organization. (shrink)

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany. Through discussion of a rich, varied selection of mystical and devotional texts, also translated into English, a fascinating regional "mystical culture" with a far-reaching impact is revealed.

Evolutionary biology and other fields presupposing humans as products of natural selection have much to contribute to philosophic inquiry. This seems especially true for American philosophy in a broad "pragmatist" or "naturalist" tradition. I examine sociality as a precondition of being human , embodied cognition, and culture as a product of ecological niche construction. I then make some suggestions, with Dewey in mind, as to the shape of our thinking about our moral lives once we recognize humans as squarely within (...) the field shaped by evolutionary forces. (shrink)

ArgumentMontpellier vitalists upheld a medical perspective akin to modern “holism” in positing the functional unity of creatures imbued with life. While early vitalists focused on the human organism, Jean-Charles-Marguerite-Guillaume Grimaud investigated digestion, growth, and other physiological processes that human beings shared with simpler organisms. Eschewing modern investigative methods, Grimaud promoted a medically-grounded “metaphysics.” His influential doctrine of the “two lives” broke with Montpellier holism, classifying some vital phenomena as “higher” and others as “lower” and attributing the “nobility” of the human (...) species to the predominance of the former. In place of Montpellier teaching that attributed health to the holistic equilibration of vital activities, Grimaud embraced spiritualist dualisms of soul and body, Creator and created. Celebrating the divinely-ordained “wisdom” evident in involuntary physiological processes, he argued that such life functions were incomprehensible to human investigators. While Grimaud's work encouraged inquiry into the division between the central and “vegetative” nervous systems that became paradigmatic in nineteenth-century neuroscience, it also opened Montpellier vitalism to charges of conservatism and obscurantism that are still lodged against it to the present day. (shrink)

2. In the first place, the term "power" is used to refer to processes which are held to go on at particular times, and to be accessible to direct experience. It is not clear to me why our experiences of activity are not "explicit", or why they are not to be regarded as manifested to the senses ; but possibly these assertions could be defended on the ground that the experiences in question are phenomenologically distinctive in some way.

Baudelaire's response to Delacroix's art and theories provides a particularly fruitful focus for a study of the new rapport between the former sister arts. There is little similarity between Delacroix's action-filled exotic subjects and Baudelaire's more intimate and private poetry; their arts must therefore be related in some domain apart from content. We are aided in deciphering this domain by Baudelaire's extensive commentary on Delacroix. Moreover, perhaps because of its subtlety, the relationship between these arts has not received the attention (...) it deserves.1 Yet no sooner is the possibility for such a study recognized than the problems it entails become apparent. Without the focus of common subjects, where does one begin? The dangers of impressionistic comparisons of study are readily apparent in the tendency of Geistesgeschichte studies to transfer stylistic terms from one art form to another, creating such bizarre transpositions as "the visible chamber music of the bent furniture" or the "Titian style of the madrigal" in Spengler's Decline of the West or Wylie Sypher's suggestion that a Shakespearean play is like a Renaissance painting because it makes use of "perspective" to create a real and believable world.2 And indeed it would be misleading to look for particular stylistic similarities between Delacroix and Baudelaire. Delacroix's dissolution of solid color masses into separate strokes of different colors, for example, would appear to be closer to Rimbaud's disjointed language than to Baudelaire's carefully interwoven sentences. Only by viewing the two art forms as interconnected systems can we determine their relationship. If the new affiliation of poetry and painting in the Romantic period derives from the expression of imaginative unity, a critical approach to their relationship must be attuned to different ways of expressing unity. The theoretical framework that accounts most completely for the kind of relationship existing between Delacroix and Baudelaire is provided by the structuralists, although, as we shall see, even this approach has limitations. · 1. There are several studies of Baudelaire's aesthetics and criticism, such as André Ferran's L'Esthétique de Baudelaire , Margaret Gilman's Baudelaire the Critic , and Jean Prévost's Baudelaire: essai sur l'inspiration et la création poétiques , which contain sections on the influence of Delacroix but do not extend their analysis into Baudelaire's poetry as a whole. More specific works, such as Lucie Horner's Baudelaire critique de Delacroix , provides a detailed study of their relationship based on their correspondence and references to one another, but no analysis of the relationship between their two art forms. Some studies of Baudelaire's poetry, such as Lloyd James Austin's L'Univers poétique de Baudelaire: symbolisme et symbolique and Martin Turnell's Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry , point out aspects of Baudelaire's poems that appear relevant to the relationship with Delacroix, but they do not make these connections themselves. Most commentary on the relationship of Delacroix to Baudelaire's poetry is limited to those few poems that Baudelaire wrote on Delacroix's paintings.· 2. Wellek and Warren quote the comments on Spengler in Theory of Literature, p. 131. Sypher's comments are in Four Ages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700 , pp. 79-80. Elizabeth Abel is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. A coeditor of Critical Inquiry, she is currently writing a book on literary and psychoanalytic representation of female identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Elizabeth Hanson-Smith AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS: THE CONCRETE REFERENT The chief problem facing critics who would consider the Confessions as both a literary work and a philosophical treatise remains the connection between the first nine books, the autobiography, and the last four, the metaphysical speculations on time, eternity, epistemology, and theology. A persistent desire to justify the work as an aesthetic whole has led critics on a search for thematic (...) and structural unity; they have been more successful in the former endeavor than in the latter. The interpretation of the work's plot as a peregrinatio animae, a pilgrimage of the soul, is now generally accepted as definitive; but attempts to find structural unity within that broad outline have not progressed beyond Marrou's characterization of the work as a "musical composition."1 His analogy to music has not been anchored to any concrete structural features of the Confessions and does not illuminate the connections between its content and its form. I shall attempt to prove that a unified structural model for the development of the soul in the Confessions does indeed exist and is outlined in Augustine's earlier discursive work, the De quantitate animae.2 The seven degrees or steps (gradus) of the soul's ascent to God, as sketched in the De quantitate, are deliberately fleshed out and translated into a mimetic, narrative version in the Confessions. Placing the two works side by side gives us a unique opportunity to examine a typically medieval literary form, the educative journey, in its relationship to its philosophical premises. Such a study reveals the inner formal unity of the literary work and, further, provides us with significant evidence for a re-examination of Augustine's Neo-Platonism, his supposed dualism, and his influence on later works, both literary and philosophical. In the Confessions we see one of the earliest Christian blendings of several models: first, the educative journey, the archetypal pattern familiar from the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and even The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Augustine's version, like later medieval cosmologies, also 176 Elizabeth Hanson-Smith1 77 includes a vision of the cosmic order and its relationship to human order, elements of significance in pagan philosophical works such as the Timaeus and the Dream of Scipio. But Augustine's journey also depends upon the Judeo-Christian conception of history as a series of figurae or types of the Messiah: the protagonist of the Christian educative journey joins thefigurae of the Biblical past. Christ's incarnation as Mansoul and his life on earth are the pattern of universal history from Fall to Apocalypse; Christ's life becomes a figurative pattern for the actions of Everyman.3 The Confessions is one of the earliest Christian works to apply this pattern in a narrative context. Augustine was also preoccupied with the Hexaemeron, the six days of creation and the seventh of rest. He views the exegesis of Genesis as an explanation of all subsequent life; the Ages of Man recapitulate the days of creation, as do the sacraments and the seven steps in the ascent of the soul. Thus, to the figurative pattern of Christ's "pilgrimage" from creating Logos to Incarnate God and finally to judge at the Second Coming, Augustine applies the schematic seven-fold ascent found in the De quantitate: the soul passes through the ascending steps of animation, sense, art, religion, tranquillity, initiation, and contemplation—each of which is figured by or patterned on a stage in Christ's life, as represented by the sacraments, and each of which, further, reflects a segment of universal history. The seven steps are not simply the movement of the individual soul, but the progress of Mansoul on its journey to Apocalypse. The stylistic differences between the two works—one an exposition written as Socratic dialogue, the other a metaphorical personal narrative —will no doubt give rise to differing interpretations; but one may, I think, object to certain details I suggest while still agreeing that the De quantitate provides the structuring model. Let me first define the major areas of difference between the two works. In the De quantitate, each of the levels or steps of the soul takes on a discrete, separate... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Elements of Tragedy and Its Definition Plot and Character Simple and Complex Plots Good and Bad Tragic Plots Conclusion Notes Bibliography.

Stress presents an interesting case for the application of medicalization theory. From the 1950s to the 1980s, stress became an established, if not fully deciphered, component of the matrix within which illness developed, as understood by physicians and patients, scientists, and laypeople alike. While the various iterations of the medicalization thesis are useful for analyzing the information flows between the multiplicity of actors engaged in the production and interpretation of the stress concept, they cannot account for all aspects of the (...) evolution of the incorporation of stress into both the medical lexicon and the popular vernacular. To account for the significance of physical explanations for the physiological and pathological effects of stress on the body, this essay expands the model of medicalization to include biologization. This modified model is further deployed as an analytical framework to develop the central argument of this essay: that the medicalization of stress allowed for an expansion of therapeutic options available to practitioners and recipients of mainstream medicine by opening up space for the legitimation of alternative healing practices. Biologization looks to the system of ideas on which medical approaches are based to explain how the reductionist project to find molecular mechanisms of disease causality brought stress and other social and psychological phenomena into the domain of medicine. This expanded model of medicalization can usefully characterize late twentieth and early twenty-first century attitudes toward a wide variety of human disorders whose causes have been found to be molecular in origin. By folding biology into the medicalization thesis, social scientists can train a fresh analytical lens on the role of medicine in recent and contemporary American life. (shrink)

Résumé — Dans cet article, je montre que l’une des fonctions de la tragédie est de procurer un entraînement au thumos , en l’habituant à devenir amical plutôt qu’agressif envers les philoi . Je donne d’abord un bref aperçu des thèses sur le thumos exposées dans les œuvres éthiques et politiques d’Aristote. Ensuite, j’étudie la relation entre le thumos et les actes de violence entre proches, qui constituent le sujet de la tragédie, en montrant comment la pitié et la crainte (...) ressenties en réponse à ces actions peuvent aider à restreindre la tendance, associée à un thumos excessif, à blesser ses propres philoi. Je conclus en étudiant une thèse défendue par John Cooper en 1996, selon laquelle l’objet des désirs du thumos d’une personne vertueuse est le kalon, ce qui est à la fois noble et beau en un sens esthétique, car possédant ordre, symétrie, et délimitation. En m’appuyant sur les thèses de Cooper, je soutiens que les propriétés formelles de l’intrigue tragique, son ordre, sa symétrie et sa délimitation, ne procurent pas seulement un plaisir esthétique, mais qu’elles aident aussi à habituer le thumos à désirer et à prendre plaisir à ce qui est noble.— I argue in this article that one function of tragedy is to provide training for the thumos , habituating it to become friendly rather than aggressive toward philoi . I first provide a brief survey of the views on thumos expressed in Aristotle’s ethical and political works. Next, I study the relationship between thumos and the violent acts among kin that are subject matter of tragedy, suggesting ways in which pity and fear felt in response to these actions can help to restrain the tendency, associated with excessive thumos, to harm one’s own philoi. I conclude by studying an argument made by John Cooper in 1996 that the object of the thumos desires of the virtuous person is le kalon, that which is noble and at the same time beautiful in an aesthetic sense, having order, symmetry and determinateness. Building on Cooper’s ideas, I contend that the format properties of the tragic plot, its order, symmetry and determinateness, not only give aesthetic pleasure, but also help to habituate the thumos to desire and take pleasure in what is noble. (shrink)

In this essay Elizabeth de Freitas follows Tim Ingold's groundbreaking anthropological work on lines and their cultural and material significance to argue that the line is the engine of theory, be it the drawn line of inscription or mathematical measure, the exclusionary line of delineation, or the undulating generative line of flight. De Freitas focuses on contemporary theories of perception that deploy the line — and mobilize the force of theory — so as to encode and reconfigure the student's (...) body. She draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze to develop a topological approach to the line, and argues that such an approach aligns with current philosophical approaches to social interaction that might be termed “topo-philosophy.”. (shrink)

Most readers of Louis Althusser first enter his work through his writings on ideology. In an important new essay Étienne Balibar, friend and colleague of Althusser, offers an original reading of Althusser’s idea of ideology, drawing on both recently published posthumous writing and Althusser's work on the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Balibar’s essay uncovers the intricate workings of interpellation through Althusser’s essays on the theater. If debates on dialectical materialism belong to a distant history, Balibar suggests, the question of ideology (...) remains crucial for thinking the present. The issue includes commentaries on Balibar’s essay from five influential scholars who engage critically with Althusser’s philosophy: Judith Butler, Banu Bargu, Adi Ophir, Warren Montag, and Bruce Robbins. This issue reanimates Althusser’s concept of ideology as an analytic tool for contemporary cultural and political critique. (shrink)

In the period 1800–1870, French physicians approached psychic illness (Philippe Pinel’s “neurosis”) within competing “cerebralist” and “visceralist” frameworks. Cerebralism, which dominated the specialty of mental medicine, sought the origins of psychic illness in lesions of the brain and central nervous system. “Visceralism,” upheld by generalists, clung to the view of the ancients that psychic disorder was seated in the abdominal viscera. The distinction enjoyed credibility thanks to widespread acceptance of Xavier Bichat’s “two lives” doctrine, which demarcated functions of the central (...) and the “vegetative” nervous systems. Once the “two lives” conception was undercut after midcentury, cerebralists sought to draw disturbances of appetite, digestion, and eating within the domain of the central nervous system. This essay suggests that historical study of “hysterical anorexia” and related disease entities that displaced “neuroses of the stomach” has overemphasized sociocultural determinants to the neglect of the internal dynamics of biomedical science. (shrink)