The Andalusi Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī, one of the great figures of the Mālikī tradition, gained his scholarly credentials through a journey to seek knowledge in the East. He commemorated his journey in a travelogue so widely admired that it initiated a new genre of Arabic travel writing. This article examines both the journey and the travelogue as strategies Abū Bakr employed to regain his family’s elite status and property, both lost when the Almoravids overthrew the ṭāʾifa of Seville that (...) his father served as a vizier. (shrink)

The notion that it is possible to construct intelligent machines out of nonorganic material is as old as Greek mythology. Vulcan, the lame god of fire, fabricated young women out of gold to assist him in his labours. He also made the bronze giant Talus, who guarded the island of Crete by running around it three times a day and heaving huge rocks at enemy ships. A single vein of ichor ran from Talus's neck to his heels. He bled to (...) death when he was wounded in the ankle or, according to another myth, when a brass pin in his heel was removed. (shrink)

This introduction provides an overview to a special issue on Critical Healing, which draws on queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial theory, and literary studies to theorize productive engagements between the clinical and cultural aspects of biomedical knowledge and practice. The essays in this issue historicize and theorize diagnosis, particularly diagnosis that impacts trans health and sexuality, homosexuality, and HIV/AIDS transmission. The essays also address racialization, disability, and colonialism through discussions of fiction, film, theoretical memoir, and comics, as well as biomedical (...) discourse and knowledge. (shrink)

By acquiring an understanding of the cultural meaning of deafness and acting as a bridge to resources and opportunities, clinicians.

This essay discusses critical approaches to culture, difference, and empathy in health care education through a reading of Junot Diaz’s “Wildwood” chapter from the 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I begin with an analysis of the way that Diaz’s narrative invites readers to imagine and explore the experiences of others with subtlety and complexity. My reading of “Wildwood” illuminates its double-edged injunction to try to imagine another’s perspective while recognizing the limits to—or even the impossibility of—that (...) exercise. I draw on post-colonial theory and feminist science studies to illuminate a text that is created and interpreted in a post-colonial context—the Dominican diaspora in the United States. The essay offers a model of historical and critical analysis that health care educators can use to frame the concept of empathy in the classroom and the clinic. (shrink)

The nursing profession’s emphasis on empathy as essential to nursing care may undermine nurses’ power as a collective and detract from perceptions of nurses’ analytical skills and expertise. The practice of empathy may also obscure and even compound patients’ suffering when it does not fully account for their subjectivity. This essay examines the relation of empathy to women’s agency and explores the role empathy plays in obscuring rather than empowering the suffering other, particularly people who are disabled, through a close (...) reading of Edith Wharton’s 1907 novel, The Fruit of the Tree, and through discussions of empathy and sympathy from literary and disability studies. (shrink)

While organ transplantation has been established in the medical imagination since the 1960s, this technology is currently undergoing a popular re-imagination in the era of global capitalism. As transplantation procedures have become routine in medical centers in non-Western and developing nations and as organ sales and transplant tourism become increasingly common, organs that function as a material resource increasingly derive from subaltern bodies. This essay explores this development as represented in Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s 2002 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, focusing (...) on the ethnic and class characteristics of the global market in organs and possible modes of counter-logic to transplant technologies and related ethical discourses. (shrink)

People with disabilities (PWD) comprise a significant part of the population yet experience some of the most profound health disparities. Among the greatest barriers to quality care are inadequate health professions education related to caring for PWD. Drawing upon the expertise of health professions educators in medicine, public health, nursing, social work, and physician assistant programs, this forum showcases innovative methods for teaching core disability skills and concepts grounded in disability studies and the health humanities. Each of the essays offers (...) practical guidance for developing curricular interventions appropriate for students at various levels of training and familiarity with disability to be implemented in classroom discussions, case-based learning, lectures, panels, and clinical simulations across the full spectrum of pre-health and health professions education. (shrink)

BackgroundDespite rapid growth of the scientific literature, no consensus guidelines have emerged to define the optimal criteria for editors to grade submitted manuscripts. The purpose of this project was to assess the peer reviewer metrics currently used in the surgical literature to evaluate original manuscript submissions.MethodsManuscript grading forms for 14 of the highest circulation general surgery-related journals were evaluated for content, including the type and number of quantitative and qualitative questions asked of peer reviewers. Reviewer grading forms for the seven (...) surgical journals with the higher impact factors were compared to the seven surgical journals with lower impact factors using Fisher’s exact tests.ResultsImpact factors of the studied journals ranged from 1.73 to 8.57, with a median impact factor of 4.26 in the higher group and 2.81 in the lower group. The content of the grading forms was found to vary considerably. Relatively few journals asked reviewers to grade specific components of a manuscript. Higher impact factor journal manuscript grading forms more frequently addressed statistical analysis, ethical considerations, and conflict of interest. In contrast, lower impact factor journals more commonly requested reviewers to make qualitative assessments of novelty/originality, scientific validity, and scientific importance.ConclusionSubstantial variation exists in the grading criteria used to evaluate original manuscripts submitted to the surgical literature for peer review, with differential emphasis placed on certain criteria correlated to journal impact factors. (shrink)

This paper introduces an innovative curricular approach—the Health Humanities Portrait Approach —and its pedagogical tool—the Health Humanities Portrait. Both enable health professions learners to examine pressing social issues that shape, and are shaped by, experiences of health and illness. The Portrait Approach is grounded in a set of “critical portraiture” principles that foster humanities-driven analytical skills. The HHP’s architecture is distinctively framed around a pressing social theme and utilizes a first-person narrative and scholarship to explore how the dimensions of the (...) personal and the structural are mutually constituted. We argue that when creator-educators adopt the Portrait Approach and its critical portraiture principles to design and teach the HHP, they enable learners to become proficient in synthesizing and analyzing—with both depth and breadth—the human and social dimensions of patients’ lives. This inventive curricular intervention provides a needed contribution to health professions education in that it utilizes health humanities methodologies to elucidate the multiple aspects of health, illness, disability, and healthcare. (shrink)

Western art gardens have enjoyed a chequered relationship with philosophical aesthetics. At different times, they have been both lauded and rejected as exemplars of art, and, for most of the last 150 or so years, they have been largely ignored. However, during the last 25 years, there has been a welcome resurgence of philosophical interest in such gardens. This study situates the work stemming from this revival of interest in its historical context and assesses its adequacy in accounting (...) for gardens in accordance with a range of pan-art criteria. The study argues that contemporary philosophical accounts of gardens are inadequate in some important ways, particularly with respect to gardens’ temporality, ontology, and arthood, and the ways in which gardens are experienced. In response to the arguments of Amie Thomasson, Dominic McIver Lopes, and some other contemporary philosophers, which advocate philosophical accounts of individual arts rather than pan-art accounts, the study develops a partial, new account of gardens that aims to remedy the perceived inadequacies in existing accounts. The new account claims that gardens are singular, not multiple, artworks and that they have an identity not unlike that possessed by humans and other animals; that, metaphorically speaking, our garden experiences may be helpfully illuminated by the application of theories developed in the context of contemporary, improvisatory dance; and that the “ordinariness” of many of gardens materials may be better understood in terms of Arthur Danto’s claim that esse est interpretari, that is, that meaning and value derive from the interpretative process. The new account also proposes personhood as a potentially useful heuristic for understanding how gardens are experienced and understood. The concept of “garden,” and the related constitutive garden aspects, features, and issues are established at the opening of the study with reference to an actual garden. Thereafter, the sources on which the study draws, and which it critiques, are all archival. They include recent philosophical monographs by Mara Miller (The Garden as Art), Stephanie Ross (What Gardens Mean), and David Cooper (A Philosophy of Gardens), and a range of historical and other contemporary monographs and papers written by philosophers, garden historians, and landscape architects and theorists. (shrink)

In this book Miller challenges contemporary aesthetic theory to include gardens in an expanded definition of art.

This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the (...) world in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

An introduction to slow gardening -- Garden psychology -- Carving out your space -- Plants: the real deal -- Nuts and bolts: universal garden practices -- Getting slow in the garden.

Creating and caring for a garden is a long-term project whose success requires commitment and devotion and love and proper performance of a range of activities that involve virtues and sensibilities like attentiveness, carefulness, humility, imaginativeness, and sensitivity to the natures and needs of plants and animals. In this chapter, I elaborate this conception of gardens and explore its relationship to artistic activities, like composing poetry or performing music. My focus are Confucianism and Daosim and their accounts of the (...) relationships between cultured practices, ethics and the arts, and garden-practices. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Education as Gardening: An Image of Natural Growth Do We All Possess Fertile Souls? The Gardener: What is His Contribution to the Growth of the Seeds? Gardening: Labor and Reward Plato as Gardener Dialogue Between Text and Reader: Cultivating the Seeds Teaching Us to Become Gardeners of Our Souls Plato's Literary Garden: A Corpus of Works Gardeners of Souls Notes.

A rhetoric of refuge and escape is a consistent feature of the world’s great garden traditions. The connections between a desire for escape, need for refuge and disquieting sense that life is no longer what it ought to be gestures to a complex conception of garden appreciation. I explore these connections using Christian, Islamic, and Chinese garden traditions. In them one finds a conception of certain gardens as places of moral refuge from the corruption and failings of the mainstream (...) world. (shrink)

This examination of gardens--particulary English gardens of the eighteenth century--offers possible links between garden design and the arts.

Why do gardens matter so much and mean so much to people? That is the intriguing question to which David Cooper seeks an answer in this book. Given the enthusiasm for gardens in human civilization ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, it is surprising that the question has been so long neglected by modern philosophy. Now at last there is a philosophy of gardens. David Cooper identifies garden appreciation as a special human phenomenon distinct from both from (...) the appreciation of art and the appreciation of nature. He discusses the contribution of gardening and other garden-related pursuits to "the good life." And he distinguishes the many kinds of meanings that gardens may have, from their representation of nature to their spiritual significance. A Philosophy of Gardens will open up this subject to students and scholars of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural and environmental studies, and to anyone with a reflective interest in things horticultural. (shrink)

The garden, the fire, and Islamic origins -- Visions of the afterworld -- Material culture and an Islamic ethic -- Other worldly landscapes and earthly realities -- Humanity, servants, and companions -- Individualized gardens and expanding fires -- Legacy of gardens -- Epilogue.

The Garden of Reality addresses urgent questions around the relativity of religious truth, religious pluralism, transreligious discourse, postmodern cosmology, and interspiritual mysticism in order to argue that relativity and multiplicity are inevitable for the multireligious conviviality and peace of the humanity of the future.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Aztecs and Their Kings Nezahualcoyotl: Renaissance Man of Aztec Culture The Uses of Nezahualcoyotl: Bridging Spanish and Aztec Cultures Nezahualcoyotl's Place, and the Place of Gardens, in Aztec Political History Texcotzingo Notes.

For nearly 80 years Biblical gardens have been present in the natural and cultural landscape. The first gardens came into existence in the US. The idea to create such gardens spread from the US mainly across Europe, Australia and Israel. These gardens are being made all the time; recently we have observed their dynamic development. This study is to show the effects of the 20 years long scientific work to formulate the original genesis of the Biblical (...) garden idea. The characteristics of 64 facilities situated in 14 countries has been presented for the first time so widely. This enabled us to show both the history of these gardens and how they are situated in the cultural and social context. The effect of various factors inspiring people of various professions to create Biblical gardens both near sacral buildings and within the secular areas has been evidenced. Biblical gardens exercise the principles of gardens of senses and learning gardens. And it is the highly developed semantic layer that makes them stand out. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Change and the Arts Time and the Arts Time and Change in Gardens Music Makes the Passage of Time Audible Gardens Make the Passage of Time Visible Notes.

The Garden of Leaders explores two related questions: What is leadership? And what sort of education could prepare young people to be leaders? Paul Woodruff argues that higher education--particularly but not exclusively in the liberal arts--should set its main focus on cultivating leadership in students. Woodruff advances a new view of liberal arts education that places leadership at the root of everything it does, so that students will be prepared to lead in their lives and careers--and not necessarily in management (...) roles. Woodruff views the contemporary university as sorely lacking an emphasis on leadership, and presents three core sets of recommendations for how they can and should foster it. First, Woodruff posits co-curricular groups, activities, and projects as essential activities for students to gain confidence and leadership skills. Administrations should encourage students to engage in activities outside the classroom, convert coached sports teams into student-led clubs as far as possible, and discourage social organizations that are segregated by race or sex. Second, Woodruff advocates for a different curriculum for all undergraduates, no matter their major-arguing that they need to be taught leadership in the forms of key skills including communication, as well as exposure to key material in history literature, social science, and ethics. Students should be asked to consider the hardest ethical dilemmas that leaders face, toggling between Machiavelli and great ethical thinkers such as Confucius and Socrates. Third, Woodruff calls for the teaching methods used by instructors to re-orient themselves around the question of leadership, particularly by emphasizing teamwork. Professors should respect their students' independence, avoid tyrannical teaching, and remember that all teachers teach ethics simply by the examples they set in dealing with students. Whether in engineering, music, or classics, The Garden of Leaders advances leadership as a core value that should be at the heart of the educational enterprise-contending that while a college campus can be many things, it should at the very least be a ground upon which new leaders can grow. (shrink)

Sinking organic particles transfer ∼10 gigatonnes of carbon into the deep ocean each year, keeping the atmospheric CO2 concentration significantly lower than would otherwise be the case. The exact size of this effect is strongly influenced by biological activity in the ocean's twilight zone (∼50–1,000 m beneath the surface). Recent work suggests that the resident zooplankton fragment, rather than ingest, the majority of encountered organic particles, thereby stimulating bacterial proliferation and the deep‐ocean microbial food web. Here we speculate that this (...) apparently counterintuitive behaviour is an example of ‘microbial gardening’, a strategy that exploits the enzymatic and biosynthetic capabilities of microorganisms to facilitate the ‘gardener's’ access to a suite of otherwise unavailable compounds that are essential for metazoan life. We demonstrate the potential gains that zooplankton stand to make from microbial gardening using a simple steady state model, and we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

This essay discusses ways of thinking about botanic gardens that pay close attention to their particularity as designed spaces, dependent on technique, that nonetheless purport to present (and preserve) natural entities (plants). I introduce an account of what gardens are, how botanic gardens differ from other gardens, and how this particular form of garden arose in history. After this I contrast three ways of understanding the function of botanic gardens in the present time: as sites (...) of recreation, of conservation or of encounter with nature. Finally I develop the idea that these gardens may serve as archetypes of collaboration with nature. I conclude that, in principle, botanic gardens can model alternative, creative new ways for human beings to relate to the natural environment. (shrink)

Following the suggestion expressed in the title of this essay, I deal with the idea which allows for considering landscape garden as a paradigmatic indicator of our relationship with nature. Focusing on the idea of landscape garden and its aesthetics I analyze two aesthetic notions: the picturesque and sublime, which are the background of the kind of experience accompanying a perception and participation of and in the landscape and environment. I analyse the kind of experience, which captures all the aspects (...) that situate the human in the environment instead of opposing it. The analysis will be conducted within the framework of aesthetics. (shrink)

What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living from the inert? Does life evolve along a predestined path, or does it suddenly emerge from what appeared lifeless and programmatic? In this easily accessible and wide-ranging survey, Claus Emmeche outlines many of the challenges and controversies involved in the dynamic and (...) curious science of artificial life. Emmeche describes the work being done by an international network of biologists, computer scientists, and physicists who are using computers to study life as it could be, or as it might evolve under conditions different from those on earth. Many artificial-life researchers believe that they can create new life in the computer by simulating the processes observed in traditional, biological life-forms. The flight of a flock of birds, for example, can be reproduced faithfully and in all its complexity by a relatively simple computer program that is designed to generate electronic "boids." Are these "boids" then alive? The central problem, Emmeche notes, lies in defining the salient differences between biological life and computer simulations of its processes. And yet, if we can breathe life into a computer, what might this mean for our other assumptions about what it means to be alive? The Garden in the Machine touches on every aspect of this complex and rapidly developing discipline, including its connections to artificial intelligence, chaos theory, computational theory, and studies of emergence. Drawing on the most current work in the field, this book is a major overview of artificial life. Professionals and nonscientists alike will find it an invaluable guide to concepts and technologies that may forever change our definition of life. (shrink)

Stephen Mason lived quietly in southern California, raising his family and pursuing his own spiritual path. Over the years he worked out a personal philosophical and religious worldview. In his last years he wanted to pass down to his children and grandchildren the essence of what he had found on his life quest. Rather than a long monologue on the meaning of life, he adopted the use of aphorisms, in the style of Chinese sages or Sufi mystics, to share his (...) lifetime of wisdom. The result is this book. A gem of a book that helps us navigate the complex road of life by understanding we are on a journey of self-development, linked to our connection with the Divine. Mason weaves a kaleidoscope of provocative quotes by famous writers, thinkers, and artists into his philosophy. He offers not only the practical suggestions of simplicity, solitude, meditation, and prayer, but also compelling advice. He speaks to us of our completeness, while clearing the path toward personal evolution. Mason helps you enter the heart of your life, into the Garden of Life, where you experience 'the cultivation of your soul'. (shrink)

Examines eighteenth-century French and English landscape gardens as representations of nationalist expression.

The educational use of daily-life contexts is considered a valuable strategy to promote meaningful science learning, since it facilitates the establishment of connections between previous knowledge, personal interests, and new learning. The aim of this work is to provide evidence to support the presence of gardens at educational centers, by assessing key science topics whose learning is promoted at the pre-school, primary, secondary, and university stages. To this end, we analyzed the paired graphic representations of “a garden” that students (...) drew both before and after their participation in a garden-based learning program. Firstly, we obtained the frequency of appearance of every represented element, and afterward characterized the level of change between paired graphic representations. Sample size was of 24–19–25–29 pairs per stage, respectively. Across all stages, an overall improvement in students’ graphic expression was observed, which can be attributed to their experience in the space. At the pre-school stage, the garden favored the establishment of some simple cause-effect relationships which were consolidated at the primary stage, and provided a climate of motivation and affectivity that was evident in the final drawings, given the enormous quantity of details represented, the level of the finished product, and the careful combination and variety of colors. The presence of elements related to water notably increased in final graphic representations from pre-school, primary, and secondary education, thus evidencing that the use of gardens facilitates an approach to responsible water management. At the university stage, students initially demonstrated good knowledge of conventional agriculture, while the gardening experience -which was based on permaculture practices- helped evolve their ideas toward an alternative model of cultivation. The most prevalent science learning across all stages was related to plant knowledge, particularly to their anatomical traits and diversity. Finally, the role of educational gardens as models for students was evidenced, which suggests the importance of teachers and institutions carefully considering which model to offer. Overall, our results support the legitimacy of incorporating gardens to educational centers, particularly for promoting contact with live plants and plant knowledge, and potentially for promoting contact with garden fauna and activities oriented toward learning about it. (shrink)

Kingdom of God is a familiar and dominant discourse in religion, society and the world. It is also a dominant framing for thinking about a good society here on Earth. But the discourse of Kingdom of God is many a time locked in a discourse of power. In dominant versions of political theology, it is linked to violence. In this essay, an attempt is made to rethink Kingdom of God as Gardens of God. There is also an interlinked attempt (...) to rethink the discourse of Ramrajya to Ramvana where there is an attempt to transform violence to non-violence. (shrink)

While, as the author notes, working class was not used until 1790, the book begins in the sixteenth century. And while there are no direct references to utopias or utopianism, there are a number of themes and topics discussed in the book that are related to utopianism and the way gardens and gardening have appeared in utopias. And gardens and gardening have been important in utopias from the very beginning.1 Gardens, for example, are central to life in (...) More’s Utopia and were the only area of life in which competition was not merely allowed but encouraged, albeit among areas not individuals. Margaret Willes mentions More only in connection with his critique of the enclosure movement, being... (shrink)

This study is an examination of gardens from the perspective of philosophy of art. Since gardens combine natural and constructed elements, utilize both existing and newly created environments, and engage visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and kinesthetic senses, they provide an opportunity to explore the concept of art and to test the boundaries, usefulness, and general validity of the concept of art. ;In many cultures, gardens are works of art on a par with painting, architecture, and poetry. Twentieth-century (...) Western philosophies of art, however, ignore gardens completely. This study locates the reasons for this dismissal in theoretically generated preferences for arts which are unique and permanent, with a single final form, and under the control of one artist. Since gardens change constantly and involve interaction with nature rather than the simple assertion of the artist's control, they prove awkward for such theories. Moreover, since they are environments, gardens do not function as aesthetic objects, and violate the Kantian principle of aesthetic disinterest. This work considers several versions of disinterest with reference to gardens and other arts, and concludes that disinterest is neither specific to art nor adequate to its power to affect thought, feeling and action. In this light it is the theory which is inadequate to the full range of arts, including gardens. ;Relying on Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms and Langer's notions of significant form and semblance, the study turns to the question of the garden as "great art," that is, art with "significant human content." As vehicles for structuring thought, art in general and gardens in particular differ from language in important ways, and thus bear unique capacities for signification. In one case study, Renaissance knot gardens are shown to have had an important role in the clarification and dissemination of the newly-emerging scientific conception of space. (shrink)