Used for everything from geographic evaluation to secret spy missions, aerial photography has a rich and storied history, ably recounted here in Photography and Flight. Aerial photography is marked by its dependency on technological developments in both photography and aerospace, and the authors chart the history of this photography as it tracked the evolution of these technologies. Beginning with early images taken from hot-air balloons, fixed platforms, and subsequent handheld camera technology, Denis Cosgrove and William Fox then explain how military (...) reconnaissance and governmental projects were instrumental in catalyzing these and other innovations in the field. They examine pivotal historical moments in which aerial photography began to establish itself as essential tool, such as in World War II military strategies, high-altitude photography taken from postwar rockets and aircraft, and the use of aerial photography during the cold war and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book also explores the advancement of geographic scholarship through aerial photography, ranging from military excursions into Antarctica to the images of the curvature of the earth taken during the Apollo space missions. While digital technology and remote sensing have changed the landscape of photography, Photography and Flight argues that they have not diminished the significance of aerial photography in providing images of the earth. Rather, new technologies and resulting innovations such as Google Earth have enabled the mass democratization of access to such information. Photography and Flight ultimately reveals how the camera lens from far away continues to unearth telling details about the land and those who live upon it. (shrink)

Ten years ago there was little talk about adding “professionalism” to the medical curriculum. Educators seemed to believe that professionalism was like the studs of a building—the occupants assume them to be present, supporting and defining the space in which they live or work, but no one talks much about them. Similarly, educators assumed that professional values would just “happen,” as trainees spent years working with mentors and role models, as had presumably been the case in the past. To continue (...) the metaphor, when educators did discuss ethics and values, they tended to focus more on external building codes than on the nature of construction materials. Building codes are designed to ensure the public's safety by establishing procedures and standards. Likewise, the “new” bioethics of autonomy and informed consent that entered the medical curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s was oriented primarily toward protecting human rights by codification. In fact, educators explicitly warned students against acting on their personal or professional values in a misguided way—that is, in the absence of adequate ethical constraints, a type of behavior that came to be labeled, pejoratively, as paternalism. (shrink)

The last half-century of religious studies scholarship has seen the diminishing importance of belief as a concept of analysis. The putative inaccessibility of beliefs and the concept’s Western Christian provenance has led many scholars of religion to reject the concept. Recent years have seen attempts to rehabilitate the concept of belief, including Kevin Schilbrack’s 2014 Philosophy and the Study of Religions. Schilbrack proposes that by engaging with contemporary philosophical reflection on belief—specifically dispositionalist and interpretationist theories—the traditional critiques of belief can (...) be overcome. The purpose of this paper is to further develop this approach by proposing an additional, currently overlooked, element of belief—its affectivity. This approach builds on current research from enactivist cognitive science and avoids the objections traditionally levelled at belief, while enabling a more sophisticated analysis of power dynamics in religion. (shrink)

Robert Coles' sentiment characterizes well the moral tenor of medical education today. Indeed, medical educators are frequently “seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness,” as they try to cope with the massive social and economic problems that face medical schools and teaching hospitals. The perception among educators that we currently fail to adequately teach several core aspects of doctoring, including professional values and behavior, constitutes one such spasm. In this case, the proposed remedy has generated considerable enthusiasm, but whether the (...) “core competencies” curriculum will make a difference, or simply “accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit,” remains to be seen. (shrink)

This chapter sketches some of the difficulties involved in defining analytic and continental philosophy, but begins to elaborate an argument for the centrality of methodology to the 'divide'.

ABSTRACTThis article uses Gadamer’s concept of play as a common lens through which both traditional church liturgy and imaginative evangelical practices of engaging with God can be understood. The category of play encompasses processes which exhibit a back-and-forth motion and functions in Gadamer’s aesthetics to describe the relationship between artwork and viewer. Through an aesthetics of play, Gadamer accounts for the presence of truth in art. As I demonstrate in this paper, liturgy displays the playful characteristics of artwork, allowing for (...) a theologically realist interpretation of divine presence. The final part of this paper considers the imaginative evangelical practices described by anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, which I refer to as God-play. I argue that there is an unexpected commonality between God-play and traditional liturgy in the form of a functional similarity between the two and propose that God-play may be regarded as liturgy-like practice that has not been traditionalised. My evaluati... (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue, "Belief, Reconsidered".

This important collection of essays details some of the more significant methodological and philosophical differences that have separated the two traditions, as ...

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American (...) evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice. (shrink)

Mastery imagery (i.e., images of being in control and coping in difficult situations) is used to regulate anxiety. The ability to image this content is associated with trait confidence and anxiety, but research examining mastery imagery ability's association with confidence and anxiety in response to a stressful event is scant. The present study examined whether trait mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and anxiety, and the subsequent associations on performance in response to an acute psychological stress. Participants (N= (...) 130; 55% male;Mage= 19.94 years;SD= 1.07 years) completed assessments of mastery imagery ability and engaged in a standardized acute psychological stress task. Immediately prior to the task, confidence, cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity, and interpretation of anxiety symptoms regarding the task were assessed. Path analyses supported a model whereby mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and cognitive and somatic anxiety interpretation. Greater mastery imagery ability and confidence were both directly associated with better performance on the stress task. Mastery imagery ability may help individuals experience more facilitative anxiety and perform better during stressful tasks. Improving mastery imagery ability by enhancing self-confidence may help individuals successfully cope with anxiety elicited during stressful situations. (shrink)

This article proposes a new approach to employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the philosophy of religion. Rather than finding a latent theology in Merleau-Ponty – as some interpreters do – this article argues that Merleau-Ponty's later ontology can provide the basis for a philosophical anthropology which can help us understand why human beings are drawn to religion and how this is expressed in affective and ritual practice. This ontology can help us to understand the notion of freedom as it applies (...) to affective, embodied, and ritual religious practices and begins to sketch out how freedom might be understood in light of embodiment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Philosophy of religion has recently made a turn to lived religion, an approach which seeks to understand lived religion as it is experienced concretely by individual practitioners. However, this turn to lived religion has seen limited engagement with the notion of belonging. Belonging here refers to the felt sense of being part of a group – of insidership – along with the development of positive social ties and mutual affective concern. It is my contention in this paper that reflection (...) on this experience of belonging can improve our understanding of lived religion. In particular, I argue that human beings have an affective need to belong – a fundamental and affective need for belonging and positive social relationship which is felt in the body and rooted in human biology and evolutionary history. This paper makes the case for the affective need to belong, before examining its implications for understanding religion. It finds that the affectivity of belonging is capable of raising the affective salience of certain in-group beliefs, as well as creating affective hurdles to dissent, and in so doing can help to explain processes of religion conversion, sustained religious adherence, and religious disaffiliation. (shrink)

Both bereavement and the loss of a religious faith can be deeply disorienting experiences which radically transform one’s experience of the world, sense of self, and relationships with others. Recently, grief has received increased philosophical interest – especially from a phenomenological perspective – as philosophers seek to understand what it is to experience grief and what understanding grief can teach us about human experience more broadly. Grief is most commonly associated with bereavement loss; however, there is growing awareness of the (...) possibility of grief for non-death losses. This paper argues that certain experiences of deconversion can be occasions for grief. The experience of losing one’s religious faith has had scant coverage in contemporary philosophical literature yet its effect on individuals can be comparable to that of bereavement. This paper analyses deconversion experiences according to four themes common to bereavement: world destruction, temporal disruption, personal loss, and the loss of possibilities. Using a range of deconversion narratives drawn from ethnographic literature, this paper argues that some experiences of deconversion closely resemble experiences of grief, and so some responses to deconversion can rightly be called grief. One key difference between deconversion and other forms of grief regards the future-orientation of the experiences. While grief is often directed towards the loss of future possibilities, many accounts of deconversion are more concerned with losses from the past and present a positive attitude towards the future. This positive outlook can be explained by interpreting the deconversion experience through the lens of grief. (shrink)

One major success of studying neural cell development in tissue culture has been the discovery of the O‐2A cell. This bipotential cell generates oligodendrocytes or, under certain conditions, a type of astrocyte. This essay considers the evidence that the characteristic properties demonstrated by the O‐2A cells in vitro are an accurate reflection of oligodendrocyte development in vivo.

It was easier to make a revolution than to write 600 to 800 laws to create a market economy.Jiri Dienstbier, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia (1990)[I]t would be as absurd to argue that the distribution of property must never be modified by law as it would be to argue that the distribution of political power must never bechanged.Morris Cohen (1927)The takings clause of the United States Constitution requires government to pay compensation when private property is taken for public use. When government (...) regulates, but does not physically seize, property, the Supreme Court of the United States has had trouble defining when individuals have been deprived of property rights so as to give them a right to compensation. The takings clause serves “to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens that, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.” To determine when a regulation amounts to a “taking” of property requiring compensation, the Court has rightly stated that the ultimate question is whether the burden of regulation has been unfairly placed on a small class of individuals rather than the public at large. To answer this question, the Court has identified a variety of factors to consider, including the character of the governmental action, (whether the regulation effects a permanent physical invasion, destroys a core property right, or is intended to prevent public harm), whether the regulation interferes with reasonable investment-backed expectations, and the extent of the diminution in value of the property (particularly whether the regulation deprives the owner of any economically viable use of the property). (shrink)

William James is remembered as the philosopher of pragmatism, but he was principally the founder of modern scientific psychology. During the period of his most intense scientific involvement James developed a trenchant critique of science. This was not a rejection of science but an attempt to identify limitations of the contemporary conceptualization of science. In particular, James emphasized the failure of science to understand its basis in human emotions. James developed a scientific theory of emotions in which the importance of (...) emotion in cognition and decision-making is central. James’ appreciation of the significance of emotions in science has continuing value. Nevertheless, his characterization of science in terms of its method introduces tensions in his account that an emphasis on the social dimensions of science, which he implicitly acknowledged, tends to resolve. (shrink)

At the core of pragmatism is the idea of an active projection of experience into the future. William James’s contribution to pragmatism included an emphasis on emotions in the apprehension of possible futures and related processes. After presenting a summary of Jamesian pragmatism, and especially the significance of emotions in it, the article notes the reception of James’s writings in Europe and their influence on European intellectual developments. Max Weber, for instance, studied James closely. He treated James’s approach to religion (...) as a negative example. While Emile Durkheim rejected the individualist approach of James, he nevertheless found much of value in James’s conceptualization of religious experience, including its emotional underpinnings. Discussion below explores the neglected Jamesian quality of Durkheim’s account of religion. It is noted in conclusion that the more recent sociological neglect of James and the failure to appreciate his particular approach in pragmatism, coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century. (shrink)

As a typical subject, you experience a variety of paradigmatically temporal phenomena. Looking out of the window in the English summer, you can see leaves swaying in the breeze and hear the pitter-patter of raindrops steadily increasing against the window. In discussions of temporal experience, and through reflecting on examples such as those offered, two phenomenological claims are widely – though not unequivocally – accepted: firstly, you perceptually experience motion and change; secondly, while more than a momentary state of affairs (...) is presented in your ongoing perceptual experience, that which is presented nonetheless seems to be of a quite limited temporal extent. These two claims are frequently tied to the notion of the specious present. However, there has recently been a push back against the supposed link between perceived motion and the specious present. I argue that there are two ways of understanding this link, and while one has recently been the target of criticism, the other withstands such criticism. My overarching aim is to clarify the notion of the specious present through a discussion of the notion’s origins, in addition to recent criticism directed at the notion, with the hope of reframing how contemporary debates proceed. (shrink)

Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing (res). Rather, he understands artifacts (...) as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than substances created by human artifice. (shrink)