This essay proposes that Newman’s developmental methodology, as presented in his Fifteenth Oxford University Sermon, has a contemporary relevance for advancing insights into revelation by encouraging believers to engage with the theo-Logos. Since the word of God is embodied in doctrine and understood through symbol and ritual, doctrinal propositions should be considered “living ideas” which become embodied in the believer and so deepen the believer’s relationship with Christ and the community of believers through a liturgical symbolic order.

One of the early propositions on the nature of Southeast Asia comes from George Coedes’ 1968 The Indianized states of Southeast Asia, which assumes that Southeast Asia and its identity construction resulted from the region’s passive acceptance of culture from India and China. Such is the case that that the cultural landscape of the region becomes a mere accumulation of external influences. Robert Redfield’s notion of “great and little traditions” that Southeast Asian historians used in examining and understanding Southeast (...) Asian identity and history influenced these ideas. Zeus Salazar’s 1988 The Malayan connection, challenges this framing of Southeast Asian history. -/- This study aims to evaluate Salazar’s historiographical contributions to Southeast Asian studies, especially in terms of his efforts to problematize and establish the pan-Malayan identity of insular Southeast Asia. This will be undertaken through a critical review of his works such as Kabihasnang Asyano: Isang pangkasaysayang introduksyon [Asian civilization: A historical introduction] (1990); The Malayan connection (1998); Ang Pilipinong banua/banwa sa mundong Melano-Polynesiano [The Philippines in the Melano-Polynesian world] (2006); and, Asya: Kasaysayan at kabihasnan [Asia: History and civilization] (2010), as well as the works of some scholars in Southeast Asian Studies who have been influenced by Salazar and his works. The research will also show that the nationalist historiography that Salazar advocates emphasizes and highlights the Southeast Asian region’s Austronesian roots as the basis of the region’s cultural identity. (shrink)

Normative-based distributional comparisons across countries and over time build upon the assumption that individuals are selfish. However, there is a consolidated evidence that individuals also care about what others have. In this paper, we propose a framework for comparing and ranking distributions that includes non-individualistic possibilities. Specifically, we consider ranking criteria that account, in one case, for the feeling of compassion and, in the other case, for the feeling of envy. These feelings are generated respectively by those having lower resources (...) and those having higher resources. We illustrate our framework using CNEF data for Australia, Korea, Germany, Switzerland, and the US and show that accounting for the presence of compassion and envy might lead to different welfare rankings. (shrink)

Objective: Gait adaptation to environmental challenges is fundamental for independent and safe community ambulation. The possibility of precisely studying gait modulation using standardized protocols of gait analysis closely resembling everyday life scenarios is still an unmet need.Methods: We have developed a fully-immersive virtual reality environment where subjects have to adjust their walking pattern to avoid collision with a virtual agent crossing their gait trajectory. We collected kinematic data of 12 healthy young subjects walking in real world and in the VR (...) environment, both with and without the VA perturbation. The VR environment closely resembled the RW scenario of the gait laboratory. To ensure standardization of the obstacle presentation the starting time speed and trajectory of the VA were defined using the kinematics of the participant as detected online during each walking trial.Results: We did not observe kinematic differences between walking in RW and VR/A-, suggesting that our VR environment per se might not induce significant changes in the locomotor pattern. When facing the VA all subjects consistently reduced stride length and velocity while increasing stride duration. Trunk inclination and mediolateral trajectory deviation also facilitated avoidance of the obstacle.Conclusions: This proof-of-concept study shows that our VR/A+ paradigm effectively induced a timely gait modulation in a standardized immersive and realistic scenario. This protocol could be a powerful research tool to study gait modulation and its derangements in relation to aging and clinical conditions. (shrink)

Examines the findings of scientific research into the thought processes of animals and argues that animals are capable of conscious thought.

In delineating a trajectory of human history, anthropology and other social sciences have tended to describe traditional life in particular geographic terms while leaving modem experience universal in scope. Studies of science and technology, while helping to locate and describe centers of modern practice, have less frequently explored their edges. Using a case study of the location of the primary French/european space launch site in French Guiana, this article examines technologies associated with the development of space beyond the atmosphere by (...) evaluating the impact of rockets and satellites on the construction of human space on the ground. Exploring the social significance of a modem sky and its transformation of one tropical margin into a technical center, the question of where things are becomes one of how they are defined. The modem appears less a placeless universal center and more a moving boundary, one dividing humans, nature, and technology into less stable domains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionMarc Redfield (bio)In recent years, and particularly in the United States, the concept of addiction has come to operate as one of those rhetorical switching points through which practically any discourse or practice or experience can be compelled to pass. As Eve Sedgwick points out in a well-known essay, one can, in contemporary parlance, claim to be addicted not just to illegal or dangerous substances, but also to (...) forms of activity or consumption—work, eating, exercise—that constitute officially approved ways to pursue happiness in middle-class society. It would seem that what matters is not the self’s particular wishes or activities, but the integrity of its will or being. “We do not object to the drug user’s pleasure per se,” Jacques Derrida comments, “but to a pleasure taken in an experience without truth” [236]. Sedgwick, for her part, suggests that “so long as ‘free will’ has been hypostatized and charged with ethical value, for just so long has an equally hypostatized ‘compulsion’ had to be available as a counterstructure always internal to it, always requiring to be ejected from it” [133–34]. The thought of addiction thus spreads to the point of infecting the founding tropes of Western philosophy. The logos becomes hooked on itself: always already it becomes the pharmakon, the remedy that poisons.Yet as Derrida, Sedgwick, and many other critics have also pointed out, the notion of addiction is in certain crucial respects a nineteenth- and twentieth-century invention. Though inscribed within a sequence of representations of human agency that goes back to the Odyssey, the “addict” as such becomes possible only within a political and medico-social regime capable of rewriting identity as pathology. (Hence, in part, the persistent overlap between the addict and the “homosexual” in twentieth-century Western culture.) This is also to say that the addict emerges as part of the development of consumer capitalism, disciplinary society, and the modern state. Like the question of technology from which it is inseparable, the thought of addiction returns us to the West’s most ancient topics and texts only to confront us with some of the most prosaic, specific, and in certain cases disastrous characteristics of our own modernity. 1When addiction is at issue, in other words, metaphysical complications acquire empirical importance. Like “diction” or “dictation,” the term “addiction” derives from the Latin dicere (“say, relate”), which returns to the Greek deiknunai, “show, point out, bring to light”; in Roman law, however, the word addicere had the more prosaic job of signifying a giving or binding-over of something or someone by sentence of a court: the assignation of slave to master, debtor to creditor. The modern recasting of addiction as pathology has occurred as a massive institutional and sociohistorical articulation of [End Page 3] metaphysical values, tensions, and contradictions. In what Mark Seltzer has termed “machine culture,” the figure of the addict channels anxieties about the uncertain differences between machines and bodies; about the “nature” of technology; about the ways in which identities and desires get produced within a consumer economy that represents subjectivity both as inalienably natural and as compulsively iterative and artificial. In such contexts, as Seltzer shows, seemingly abstract paradoxes, such as the psychoanalytic notion of primal identification—where the subject forecloses and reiterates the act of mimesis that enables it to be (other than) itself—can no longer be dismissed as merely “theoretical” figures: they bleed irretrievably into sociohistorical reality. The subject is always already the addicted subject, ready at any moment to become the “addict”; the addict, in turn, becomes a (medical and juridical) “case” or case history only by becoming a frightening, alluring mirror image of the normative subject of consumer society.The discourse of addiction not only disciplines and deconstructs the subject of consumerism; as enacted in drug policies and politics, this discourse has violently reshaped the day-to-day operations of local governments and societies and left its mark on the global economies of the new world order. Hong Kong, the earliest drug spoil of the British Empire, may have returned to China, but the postcolonial world remains more hooked than ever on narcopolitics. From the vertically integrated cocaine... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 58-83 [Access article in PDF] Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning Marc Redfield Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that "'the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight" [IC 3], and the intervening (...) years have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as "globalization" operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital--forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations--is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, "the particularism of [nationalism's] contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general" ["Nationalisms" 178]. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative--halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace--accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge "the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity" ["Nationalisms" 177]. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. 2Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of "nationalism" for an emphasis [End Page 58] on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. 3 This valuable body of work has sought to recover the particularity of cultural and socioeconomic circumstance, stressed the fundamental role of racism in colonialist contexts, and noted ways in which nationalist movements draw on or unleash forms of resistance that challenge representationalist politics. The pages that follow, however, remain focused on the nationalist fantasy proper to the discourse of modernity. Cultural critique can only profit from knowing as much as possible about the favored turns of the universal-historicist model, particularly since, as Lloyd and others have emphasized, this model is an aesthetic one that grants a world-historical role to "culture." The state, in a tradition that in its main lines runs from Schiller through Hegel and Matthew Arnold and is still very much alive today, represents the community to itself, thereby giving the community form and in a certain sense giving it an ethical imperative and a future: the state represents "our best self" [Arnold 99, passim], "the archetype of a human being" [Schiller 17], because it signifies the formal unification both of the citizen with the community and of the community with universal humanity. Because this unification is ideal rather than actual, it can be projected as the ethical terminus of history (that is, as the ideal of an accomplished modernity). The state's core mission thus becomes pedagogical: its job is to acculturate its subjects into citizens. The production of a docile citizenry thereby obtains an ethical aura and an aesthetic character, insofar as the artwork and the domain of aesthetic or "cultural" experience generally become... (shrink)

Abstract This paper proposes a new phenomenological approach to social history by clarifying, critiquing and developing key insights from Husserl’s late work. First, it clarifies how Husserl began to refute phenomenology’s so-called solipsism and ahistoricality by advancing a concept of history that integrates subjective, intersubjective and communal organizations of experience. This concept, his “history of presence”, can be called a “temporal mode of oriented constitution”. Its value is to show how a single recursive series of determinations organizes a diverse set (...) of epistemic norms, personal memories, and intersubjective apperceptions. As we analyze each moment of this series, the history of presence emerges as highly relevant to social inquiry, inasmuch as it highlights the roles of intersubjective awareness and shared “world-time”. Second, however, the paper shows that Husserl grounded his history, not in this self-other-world triad, but in metaphysical foundations. By falling back on an atemporal principle of identity, Husserl’s thirst for Cartesian certainty obscured some of his insights. To develop these, the paper concludes with a new look at Les maîtres fous, a famous and controversial ethnographic film by Jean Rouch. Much of Rouch’s film echoes Husserl’s own problems, but Rouch’s use of montage replaces metaphysics with rhythm, identity with alterity, hegemony with mimicry, harmonious perception with dissonant yet generative apperception. Thus, Rouch dramatizes Husserl’s relevance to the phenomenology of social history. This paper’s internal critique and cross-cultural juxtaposition of Husserl’s late work portrays such relevance more accurately than Derrida’s uncharitable “metaphysics of presence” critique. (shrink)

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism.

Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus or the globus pallidus is an established treatment for Parkinson’s disease that yields a marked and lasting improvement of motor symptoms. Yet, DBS benefit on gait disturbances in PD is still debated and can be a source of dissatisfaction and poor quality of life. Gait disturbances in PD encompass a variety of clinical manifestations and rely on different pathophysiological bases. While gait disturbances arising years after DBS surgery can be related to disease progression, (...) early impairment of gait may be secondary to treatable causes and benefits from DBS reprogramming. In this review, we tackle the issue of gait disturbances in PD patients with DBS by discussing their neurophysiological basis, providing a detailed clinical characterization, and proposing a pragmatic programming approach to support their management. (shrink)

John McDowell and Hubert L. Dreyfus are philosophers of world renown, whose work has decisively shaped the fields of analytic philosophy and phenomenology respectively. Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate opens with their debate over one of the most important and controversial subjects of philosophy: is human experience pervaded by conceptual rationality, or does experience mark the limits of reason? Is all intelligibility rational, or is there a form of intelligibility at work in our skilful bodily rapport with the (...) world that eludes our intellectual capacities? McDowell and Dreyfus provide a fascinating insight into some fundamental differences between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, as well as areas where they may have something in common. Fifteen specially commissioned chapters by distinguished international contributors enrich the debate inaugurated by McDowell and Dreyfus, taking it in a number of different and important directions. Fundamental philosophical problems discussed include: the embodied mind, subjectivity and self-consciousness, intentionality, rationality, practical skills, human agency, and the history of philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty. With the addition of these outstanding contributions, Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World is essential reading for students and scholars of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. (shrink)

Wide-ranging and astutely argued, Talmud /and/ Philosophy examines the intersections, partitions, and mutual illuminations and problematizations of western philosophy and the Talmud. Among its devoted students or "learners," the Talmud - both as text and mode of thought - is a constantly unfolding truth about humans in their relationship to God in the world. Among many philosophers, the Talmud has been at best an idealized and remote object, and at worse, if noticed at all, an object for curiosity. The contributors (...) to this volume collectively turn on and probe a new mode of inquiry by approaching the very question of partitions, conjunctions and disjunctions between the Talmud and philosophy as the guiding question of their inquiry. Rather than using the Talmud and its modes of argumentation to develop existing philosophical themes, the essays probe the question of how the Talmud as an intellectual discipline sheds new light on the unfolding of philosophy in the history of thought. (shrink)

The trilingual author Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky is widely known as a literary modernist and a rebel against Jewish socio-religious conventions. Yet he also developed an original dialectical way of thinking about Jewish tradition. Berdichevsky’s theory of tradition is partly elaborated in his undeservedly obscure Yiddish stories. In order to reconstruct this theory, we undertake a typology and thematic analysis of their signature literary trope: the unrealized wedding.