Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S18-S21, March‐April 2022.

We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues (...) how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination. (shrink)

Fabi and Goldberg raised important considerations regarding both research and funding priorities in the field of bioethics and, in particular, the field’s misalignment with social justice. W...

Quite fittingly derived from proficient and attack, coming onto the market in late 20-th century, being associated with protocol-abiding clinical psychiatry and gender-based postmodern discourse, Prozac is seen in what follows as a generic name for serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI-s) and, under its various names, it is further associated with creativity or rather poetic input. While providing the sense of a postmodern notion of subjectivity, the case studies in support of our analysis are found to experience a restoration, even if (...) partial and temporary, of the hyperthemic or rather sanguine temperament. (shrink)

This paper finds its origin in a debate between Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) on what is central to the idea of eroticism. Bataille posits that violence and transgression are fundamental to eroticism, and without prohibition, eroticism would cease to exist. Paz, however, views violence and transgression as merely intersecting with, rather than being intrinsic to, eroticism. Paz places focus on imagination, and transforms eroticism from a transgressive, to a ritualistic act. Eroticism thus functions as an intermediary, turning (...) animal sexuality into ceremony and rite. In this paper, I argue that Paz and Bataille are not fundamentally at odds in their conceptualisation of eroticism. Instead, Paz redefines the locus of eroticism by subverting its unsettling aspects. His conception of eroticism gives precedence to the imagination, which in itself is an act of violation. Imagination transgresses normal life, but this transgression – the violation of the habitual world – also introduces a glimpse of the numinous that Paz associates with belongingness. The paper further explores eroticism, as this is perceived today, and argues that it ultimately eliminates the threshold marked by transgression. The rise of the contemporary pornographic society is marked by a loss of imagination and transcendence, which ultimately reduces the subject into a mere automaton that demands instant gratification. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of emotion and its relevance to education via character education through the medium of poetry. The objective is to demonstrate the potential implementation of character education through poetry, and to show the intrinsic link between poetry and virtue, knowledge and reasoning. It is argued that poetry serves as a bridge between emotion and character education. The philosophy of emotions is explored through the works of Aristotle, Karin Bohlin and David Carr. Character (...) education is understood in terms of a Neo-Aristotelian approach, drawing on Kristján Kristjánsson, Bohlin and Carr. My position is that, through exercising the craft of poetry, children and young students are provided with tools for exploring emotions, and for discerning and deliberating about virtues and moral contextual nuances in the broader context of human experience. (shrink)

The study aims to help characterize the sort of structures about which people can acquire unconscious knowledge. It is already well established that people can implicitly learn n-grams and also repetition patterns. We explore the acquisition of unconscious structural knowledge of symmetry. Chinese Tang poetry uses a specific sort of mirror symmetry, an inversion rule with respect to the tones of characters in successive lines of verse. We show, using artificial poetry to control both n-gram structure and repetition (...) patterns, that people can implicitly learn to discriminate inversions from non-inversions, presenting a challenge to existing models of implicit learning. (shrink)

Se trata de hacer explícita la tesis de Heidegger de que el pensamiento anda por caminos vecinos a la poesía, para lo cual se sirve de un poema de Stefan George, La palabra, con el que se puede ver, según él, que la indicación de una experiencia poética con el habla nos pone en la situación inminente de una experiencia pensante con el habla.

Since Descartes, mathematics has been dominated by a reductionist tendency, whose success would seem to promise greater certainty: the fewer basic objects mathematics can be understood as dealing with, and the fewer principles one is forced to assume about these objects, the easier it will be to establish a secure foundation for it. But this tendency has had the effect of sharply limiting the expressive power of mathematics, in a way that is made especially apparent by its disappointing applications to (...) the social sciences. We should move in the opposite direction: toward a mathematics that deals in general with constructed objects, and whose scope includes fictional, poetic characters as much as numbers and sets. (shrink)

Beş sanattan şiir felsefe tarihi boyunca kendini sürekli gündemde tutmayı başarmıştır. Platon şiire daha çok politik/dini kaygı çerçevesinde yaklaşarak onun dönüştürücü gücünü ideal devleti bağlamında kontrol altına almaya çalışırken Aristoteles şiir sanatına büyük önem vermiş ve bu bağlamda Poetika adlı müstakil eserini kaleme almıştır. Daha sonraki süreçte bu eser öğrencileri tarafından Organon (alet) isimli mantık külliyatının içine dâhil edilmiştir. Platon’un muhteva kritiği diyebileceğimiz yaklaşımından farklı olarak şiiri daha çok form bağlamında ele alan Aristoteles’in söz konusu politik kaygıyı gütmediği anlaşılmaktadır. Ancak (...) şiir, tüm bu geleneklerden beslenen Fârâbî’ye kadar mantık ile doğrudan ilgisi kurulan bir sanat olarak ortaya çıkmaz. Fârâbî’nin özgünlüğü şiiri edebi bir tür olmanın yanında mantıksal ilgisi bağlamında ele almış olmasıdır. Bu makalede şiir ile mantık ilişkisinin Fârâbî’de biri şiirin felsefe öğreniminde ve kıyas türleri bağlamında işlevselliğine diğeri ise mantığın şiirin beş sanat içerisinde tanınmasını ve ayrıştırılmasını sağlayan yönüne işaret eden iki veçheli bir şekilde tasarlandığı savunulacaktır. (shrink)

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

On Sir Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938, Urdu poet.

There are two problems discussed in the article. The first one is the phenomenon of mass literature and semiotic approach to it. According to Lotman, mass literature of the 20th (and 21st) centuries is not so much an object of semiotics as of sociology. However, it is possible to consider mass literature of earlier times as an object of semiotics of culture. Lotman discusses Russian mass literature of the 18th and 19th centuries as such an object in the article “Massovaya (...) literatura kak istoriko-kulturnaya problema”. Considering mass literature a dynamic factor of the semiotic system, Lotman distinguishes its main features: a high degree of automatization and syndrome of retardedness. In the second part of the article the author discusses the phenomenon of mass poetry in contemporary Lithuania. This kind of mass literature is much more similar to the phenomenon discussed by Lotman than to the mass literature of the postmodernist epoch. Lithuanian mass poetry employs the codes of national romanticism (the end of 19th century) and considers itself an ignored part of high culture. This sort of poetry unknown to Western societies exhibits archaising tendencies in the modern postsoviet culture. (shrink)

This essay retrieves the meaning and importance of renga, or linking poetry. Long forgotten, even in Japan, it was the form of which the great Bashō was the mater (not haiku as is now believed). When examining renga poetry, one can see that it is based not on authorial vision, but rather the trans-subjective mood that guides the different links made by the various poets who collaborate in the “rolling” of a renga. The radical implications of this form (...) for both aesthetics and ethics will be considered. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the thought of Hannah Arendt and the work of Osip Mandelstam from a unified conceptual stance. Arendt provides the grounds for this in her remarks about Mandelstam (alongside Rilke and Auden) in two major fragments from her final work “The Life of the Mind.” Arendt (here following on from Heidegger) speaks of the unity of poetry and praise, which, in turn, illustrates the affinity between thought and gratitude. However, the great modernist (...) poets that Arendt mentions perform their praise within an existential and historical context in which praise proves a kind of impossible, paradoxical event. We attempt to discern Mandelstam’s poetic thought through the optics proposed by Hannah Arendt and to describe several aspects of his “poetics of praise.”. (shrink)

: In the poetry of Daud Kamal, water figures as an image of mercy, as in the Quran, and as a mirror that reflects divine hidden presence. The rock pool evokes the memory of Gandhara and other foundational civilizations born in love and creative ferment. Conversely, the images of drought, heat, and dust symbolize a parched spiritual order. The river, a recurring archetypal image in Kamal’s poetry, represents the fluid self that is subsumed into collective identity to become (...) a poetic distillate of history. Key words: Daud Kamal, water imagery, drought imagery, Pakistani poetry in English, Gandhara civilization, Islamic poetry. Resumen: En la poesía de Daud Kamal, el agua figura como una imagen de misericordia, como en el Corán, y como un espejo que refleja la presencia divina oculta. El estanque evoca la memoria de Gandhara y otras civilizaciones fundamentales nacidas en el amor y el fermento creativo. Por el contrario, las imágenes de sequía, calor y polvo simbolizan un orden espiritual reseco. El río, una imagen arquetípica recurrente en la poesía de Kamal, representa el yo fluido que se subsume en la identidad colectiva para convertirse en un destilado poético de la historia. Palabras clave: Daud Kamal, imágenes de agua, imágenes de sequía, poesía paquistaní en inglés, civilización de Gandhara, poesía islámica. (shrink)

In 1853, two decades after Goethe’s death, Hermann von Helmholtz, who had just become professor of anatomy at Königsberg, delivered an evaluation of the poet=s contributions to science.1 The young Helmholtz lamented Goethe=s stubborn rejection of Newton =s prism experiments. Goethe=s theory of light and color simply broke on the rocks of his poetic genius. The tragedy, though, was not repeated in biological science. In Helmholtz=s estimation, Goethe had advanced in this area two singular and “uncommonly fruitful” ideas.2 The poet (...) recognized, first, that the anatomical structures of various kinds of animals revealed a unity type underlying the superficial differences arising from variability of food, habit, and locality. His second lasting achievement was the related theory of the metamorphosis of organisms: the thesis that the various articulations within an organism developed out of a more basic kind of structure—that, for instance, the different parts of plants were metamorphosed leaves or that the various bones of the animal skull were but transformed vertebrae. These two general morphological conceptions, according to Helmholtz, grounded the biology flourishing at 1 mid-century. Goethe came to these ideas, Helmholtz shrewdly maintained, as the result of a poetically intuitive conception.3 He described, for instance, Goethe=s immediate recognition, while playfully tossing around a sheep=s skull on the Lido in Venice, that the fused bones of the battered cranium consisted of transmuted vertebrae. This experience resulted in the poet=s vertebral theory of the skull, which became a standard conception in later morphology.4 Poetic intuition thus liberated an idea initially embedded in matter and made it available to the analytic understanding of the scientist. Forty years later, in 1892, at the meeting of the Goethe Society in Weimar, Helmholtz returned to reexamine the poet=s scientific accomplishments, and, it would seem, implicitly his own; for by the end of his career, Helmholtz himself had achieved a position in German culture only a few steps below that of Goethe.5 His evaluation of Goethe=s achievements in physical science was now more complex than his earlier assessment had been. (shrink)

In 2009 the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil established a conflict resolution mechanism to help rural communities address their grievances against palm oil companies that are RSPO members. This article presents the broadest ever comprehensive assessment of the use and effectiveness of the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism, providing both overviews and in-depth analysis. Our central question is: to what extent does the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism offer an accessible, fair and effective tool for communities in Indonesia to resolve conflicts with (...) companies? Our aim is not only to provide a ‘reality check’ of this mechanism but also to contribute to the wider debate on how communities can seek access to justice when engaged in intractable conflicts with palm oil companies. For data collection, we took three steps. First, we used our own database of 150 conflicts between communities and companies in Indonesia. We identified 64 conflicts that involved RSPO member companies, of which 17 prompted communities to convey their grievances to the RSPO’s conflict resolution mechanism. Second, we used the database of the RSPO, which handled 85 complaints against companies in Indonesia in the period 2009–2020. Third, we conducted fieldwork, in total, about 6 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews on three conflicts involving RSPO companies to identify mechanisms leading to both failed and successful instances of conflict resolution. For our assessment, we used three criteria to assess the conflict resolution mechanism of the RSPO: accessibility, procedural justice, and the outcomes of the process. We conclude that—on all counts—the conflict resolution mechanism is biased in favor of companies. The result of these biases is that the actual capacity of the RSPO’s mechanism to provide a meaningful remedy for rural communities’ grievances remains very limited. This unequal access to justice sustains conflicts between companies and communities over land. (shrink)