This note uses an analysis of Broussais's objection to medical ontology to suggest why Broussais's neologism οντοι is derived not from οντα but from a conflation of οντα and the plural of ογκος. For Broussais medical ontology, in contrast to philosophical ontology, always refers to abstract entities alleged to explain sensible symptoms, ογκοι, in the sense of indivisible particles in the writings of Lucretius and Epicurus, are such particles; οντα are not.

This note uses an analysis of Broussais's objection to medical ontology to suggest why Broussais's neologism o o is derived not from o but from a conflation of o and the plural of o o. For Broussais medical ontology, in contrast to philosophical ontology, always refers to abstract entities alleged to explain sensible symptoms, o o, in the sense of indivisible particles in the writings of Lucretius and Epicurus, are such particles; o are not. Keywords: Broussais, disease, medical ontology (...) CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper describes ongoing work towards a rich analysis of the social contexts of neologism use in historical corpora, in particular the Corpora of Early English Correspondence, with research questions concerning the innovators, meanings and diffusion of neologisms. To enable this kind of study, we are developing new processes, tools and ways of combining data from different sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus, and contemporary published texts. Comparing neologism candidates across these sources is complicated by (...) the large amount of spelling variation. To make the issues tractable, we start from case studies of individual suffixes and people. By developing tools aiding these studies, we build toward more general analyses. Our aim is to develop an open-source environment where information on neologism candidates is gathered from a variety of algorithms and sources, pooled, and presented to a human evaluator for verification and exploration. (shrink)

The earliest instance of φωτιστήριον « baptistery » in Antioch appears in the year 517, in a Syriac gloss to one of Severus’s homilies, perhaps in connectionwith his pastoral policies. Even if φωτιστήριον was formed according to same pattern as βαπτιστήριον, both nouns seem independent. John Chrysostom and an Antiochian Pseudo-Chrysostom do not mention at all the baptistery, but only the font (κολυμβήϑρα). The evidence indicates that during the 5th century φωτιστήριον was almost exclusively used in Constantinople and might have (...) been created there. Some texts indicate that the word might have been the preferred name for the baptistery of a « cathedral » church, at least in Constantinople. (shrink)

As phenomenology rose to prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, several aestheticians tried to establish the Husserlian method of “phenomenological reduction” in the field of aesthetics. These ventures were met with resistance from psychological aesthetics, which was the predominant form of aesthetics in the German-speaking world at the time. This paper examines, first, practical attempts to apply the method of “phenomenological reduction” in aesthetics. Using Waldemar Conrad and Moritz Geiger as examples, I try to trace what aestheticians actually (...) did when they applied this method in their investigations. Secondly, I reconstruct the four central objections with which psychological aesthetics reacted to such attempts. I have identified four central counterarguments in the work of Johannes Volkelt and Oswald Külpe, who were among the most eminent critics of phenomenological aesthetics: the transcendental argument, the susceptibility-to-errors argument, the constructivism argument, and the non-normativity argument. Finally, I also discuss the refusal of psychological aesthetics to acknowledge that a genuine phenomenological method even existed and the consequences of this refusal. (shrink)

The neologism ‘sexist’ has gained entry to an Oxford Dictionary, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, third edition , where it is defined as ‘derisive of the female sex and expressive of masculine superiority’. Thus ‘sexpot’ and ‘sex kitten’, which are still defined in exclusively feminine terms in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary , have finally met their lexicographical match. This point about current English usage has of course a serious, and general, application. For language (...) reflects, when it does not direct, prevailing social conceptions. Thus it is not accidental that there is no masculine counterpart to the word ‘feminism’. ‘Male chauvinism’, the nearest we have come to coining one, is more emotive than descriptive and so involves ambiguity; while ‘sexism’, even when it is given an exclusively masculine connotation, is still, formally, sexually neutral. ‘Feminism’, by contrast, unequivocally denotes the striving to raise women to an equality of rights and status with men. It has been suggested, it is true, that there were inchoate feminist movements or tendencies in the ancient Greek world, for example in the Classical Athens of Aristophanes and Plato . But feminism in the modern sense did not really emerge before the eighteenth century; and in Britain, for instance, it was only with the passage in 1975 of the Employment Protection, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that women raised themselves on to an all but equal footing with their male fellows — at any rate in the technical, juridical sense. (shrink)

The neologism ‘extremism’ indicates a nexus of ideas intrinsic to the way in which contemporary culture imagines the figure of the violent woman. First, it identifies the sexism visible in react...

“Neologism” refers to new meanings that are given to old words (which we might call “paleologisms”). This chapter deals with neologisms in the first sense. Neologisms run the gamut from the atrocious to the sublime. On a more theoretical plane, as every word was a neologism at some point, figuring out how words become words at all—how something becomes a meaningful word in a language—will enrich our understanding of language in general, of what it means to mean. The (...) chapter explains how words get to have the meanings that they do, and how they become the words they are. New words run from the merely cute to the hilarious, and they remind us of two important things: one, an individual's power to create words, to create meaning, is much greater than is often supposed, and two, because of this, it's essential to use that power wisely and sparingly. (shrink)

The neologism post-truth is commonly used to characterize a polity in which false and biased beliefs have corrupted public opinion and policymaking. Simplifying and broadening our use of the adjective beyond its current narrow meaning could make post-truth a useful addition to the lexicons of history, politics, and philosophy. Its current use, however, is unhelpful and distracting (at best), and experienced as demeaning and humiliating (at worst). Contemporary polities are better characterized as post-trust. A polity becames post-trust when testimony (...) from either a community of knowledge workers or a social group of complainants—such as women who give testimony of sexual assault—loses influence upon public opinion and policymaking. (shrink)

Paraesthetics' is a neologism invented by David Carroll to unlock the extra-aesthetic relationship between art and literature in the work of Michel Foucault, ...

This article introduces the neologism ‘odegeology’ to encompass theological discussion concerning divine guidance, a significant issue for spiritual formation and discipleship in the church. Jesus’ promise of power and his commission to be witnesses in Acts 1:8 establish the theme for the book called Praxeis in the Greek text. Acts is replete with examples of guidance for completing that mission, particularly in the ministries of Peter and Paul. Can Paul’s experiences with guidance, whether natural or supernatural, be considered a (...) matter of praxis for Christians today? In answering that question, this study will use Paul’s missionary journeys in Acts as a heuristic model for decision-making. The article will discuss the place of divine guidance in publications by Pentecostal/charismatic publishers and whether it is a subject addressed in the faculties of practical theology in their theological schools. The article closes with a discussion whether odegeology as practised in Acts should be normative for Christians today. (shrink)

“Genethics” is a neologism probably best kept within scare quotes. Yet now that genethics has a Companion—Companion to Genethics, edited by Justine Burley and John Harris, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, 489 pages, £65—it would appear that we can no longer keep our gloves on when handling the term. Burley and Harris’s enormous collection contains 34 articles, an introduction and an afterword.*Most of the contributions are short , many are new, a few are lifted from earlier work and some are lightly (...) revised versions of earlier pieces. Topics range from the genetics of old age, to the Darwin wars and biotech patenting. The collection’s length and scope make it impossible to review comprehensively. In brief, many of the contributions are excellent. The pieces towards the end of the volume—Sorrell’s on insurance, Munzer’s on patents and property rights, Steiner’s on self ownership, to mention a few—are especially good at bringing serious philosophical analysis to questions of immediate political concern. A high proportion of the essays are devoted to issues of commercialising the genome and genetic research, and these are all good. The guides to further reading that come at the end of each article are also useful, although it is hard not to grin at an astonishing guide at the end of Dawkins’s piece on genetic determinism that includes all and only books by Richard Dawkins.Rather than arbitrarily selecting an article or two for in depth treatment, or saying something intolerably brief about each of the contributions, let me instead use this essay to offer some reflections on the existence of the volume. What, exactly, is genethics, that it requires a companion? The obvious answer to that question is that genethics is the study of the ethical issues that arise out of the science of …. (shrink)

The Ethical Matrix was developed to help decision-makers explore the ethical issues raised by agri-food biotechnologies. Over the decade since its inception the Ethical Matrix has been used by a number of organizations and the philosophical basis of the framework has been discussed and analyzed extensively. The role of tools such as the Ethical Matrix in public policy decision-making has received increasing attention. In order to further develop the methodological aspects of the Ethical Matrix method, work was carried out to (...) study the potential role of the Ethical Matrix as a decision support framework. When considering which frameworks to apply when analyzing the ethical dimensions of the application of agri-food biotechnologies, it is important to clarify the substantive nature of any prospective framework. In order to further investigate this issue, reflections on the neologism “ethical soundness” of an ethical framework are presented here. This concept is introduced in order to provide more structured evaluations of a range of ethical tools, including ethical frameworks such as the Ethical Matrix. As well as examining the philosophical dimensions of the method, theoretical analysis and literature studies were combined with stakeholder engagement exercises and consultations in order to review the Ethical Matrix from a user perspective. This work resulted in the development of an Ethical Matrix Manual, which is intended to act as a guide for potential user groups. (shrink)

The speech act of bragging has never been subjected to conceptual analysis until now. We argue that a speaker brags just in case she makes an utterance that is an assertion and is intended to impress the addressee with something about the speaker via the belief produced by the speaker's assertion. We conclude by discussing why it is especially difficult to cancel a brag by prefacing it with, ‘I'm not trying to impress you, but…’ and connect this discussion with Moore's (...) paradox and the recent neologism ‘humblebrag’. (shrink)

According to Bikas Chakrabarti (2005, p. 225), the term econophysics was neologized in 1995 at the second Statphys-Kolkata conference in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India by the physicist H. Eugene Stanley, who was also the first to use it in print (Stanley, 1996). Mantegna and Stanley (2000, pp. viii-ix) define “the multidisciplinary field of econophysics” as “a neologism that denotes the activities of physicists who are working on economics problems to test a variety of new conceptual approaches deriving from the (...) physical sciences.” The list of such problems has included distributions of returns in financial markets (Mantegna, 1991; Levy and Solomon, 1997; Bouchaud and Cont, 1998; Gopakrishnan, Plerou, Amaral, Meyer, and Stanley, 1999; Sornette and Johansen, 2001; Farmer and Joshi, 2004) the distribution of income and wealth (Drăgulescu and Yakovenko, 2001; Bouchaud and Mézard, 2000; Chatterjee, Yarlagadda, and Charkrabarti, 2005), the distribution of economic shocks and growth rate variations (Bak, Chen, Scheinkman, and Woodford, 1993; Canning, Amaral, Lee, Meyer, and Stanley, 1998), the distribution of firm sizes and growth rates (Stanley, Amaral, Buldyrev, Havlin, Leschhorn, Maass, Salinger, and Stanley, 1996; Takayasu and Okuyama, 1998; Botazzi and Secchi, 2003), the distribution of city sizes (Rosser, 1994; Gabaix, 1999), and the distribution of scientific discoveries (Plerou, Amaral, Gopakrishnan, Meyer, and Stanley, 1999; Sornette 1 and Zajdenweber, 1999), among other problems, all of which are seen at times not to follow normal or Gaussian patterns that can be described fully by mean and variance. The main sources of conceptual approaches from physics used by the econophysicists have been from models of statistical mechanics (Spitzer, 1971), geophysical models of earthquakes (Sornette, 2003), and “sandpile” models of avalanches, the latter involving self-organized criticality (Bak, 1996). An early physicist to assert the essential identity of statistical methods used in physics and the social sciences was Majorana (1942). A common theme among those who identify themselves as econophysicists is that standard economic theory has been inadequate or insufficient to explain the non-Gaussian distributions empirically observed for various of these phenomena, such as “excessive” skewness and leptokurtotic “fat tails” (McCauley, 2004).. (shrink)

This entry investigates the connections between neo-populism and neo-conspiracism in the USA. One central thread is the rhetoric of purity that fosters rigid dichotomies of thought about identities, contributing to both populism and conspiracism, eliciting a neologism: conspirapopulism.

The classical Greeks give us a substance ontology grounded in ‘being qua being’ or ‘being per se’ (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. With the combination of eidos and telos as the formal and final cause of independent things such as persons, this ‘substance’ necessarily persists through change. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being, and is defining of the ‘what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind’ of any particular thing in setting (...) a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that.In the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology, and provides the interpretive context for the Confucian canons by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’. (shrink)

A prevalent political narrative is that we are facing an epistemological crisis, where many citizens no longer care about truth and facts. Yet the view that we are living in a post-truth era relies on some implicit questionable empirical and normative assumptions. The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. It is (...) epistemically dubious in being largely insensitive to the problem of complexity in politics; it is morally dubious because “post-truth” is often a derogatory label for individuals or groups that are deemed stupid, irrational, or morally compromised; and it is a politically toxic neologism because it purports to use the language of ‘truth’ as a weapon against power, yet these truth-claims are often themselves attempts to exert power over others by delegitimizing their perspectives. While it may seem as if truth and democracy are on especially bad terms lately, politics and truth have long had a vexed relationship, and moral panics about the value of truthfulness in politics are as old as politics itself. (shrink)

PETRIVERSE. Noun.A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden.Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers, from Latin versus a furrow]The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a xeriscape in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach, California, where many residents have taken advantage of a city program that subsidizes the conversion of grass lawns into drought-tolerant landscapes. The garden was conceived in 2009 when Pierre Jardin coined the neologism 'petriverse' (...) to denote both a world composed of rocks and words composed of rocks. The site has become known for two distinctive features: it presents constantly changing, eye-catching displays of... (shrink)

In this paper, we defend two main claims. The first is a moderate claim: we have a negative duty to not use binary gender-specific pronouns he or she to refer to genderqueer individuals. We defend this with an argument by analogy. It was gravely wrong for Mark Latham to refer to Catherine McGregor, a transgender woman, using the pronoun he; we argue that such cases of misgendering are morally analogous to referring to Angel Haze, who identifies as genderqueer, as he (...) or she. The second is a radical claim: we have a negative duty to not use any gender-specific pronouns to refer to anyone, regardless of their gender identity. We offer three arguments in favor of this claim (which appeal to concerns about inegalitarianism and risk, invasions of privacy, and reinforcing essentialist ideologies). We also show why the radical claim is compatible with the moderate claim. Before concluding, we examine common concerns about incorporating either they or a neologism such as ze as a third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun. These concerns, we argue, do not provide sufficient reason to reject either the moderate or radical claim. (shrink)

This article offers a revision of the history of Vincent de Gournay’s neologism bureaucracy. The author shows that it was designed as a polemical tool against a tendency to multiply customs, tax-collecting and controlling bureaus, which “strangled commerce” in France. The origin of the term had more to do with the pre-physiocratic theory of liberal economy than with political philosophy. More than just a pun, it emerged in the wake of a long tradition of anti-office discourse and formed part (...) of a new rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimizing the merchant estate, which suffered from a lack of prestige in France. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Border CrossingEllen T. ArmourAs a philosophical theologian deeply formed by a long apprenticeship in continental philosophy, I find more points of entry into Kalpana Seshadri's HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language than I can possibly pass through in the space available to me here. Inevitably, whichever point of entry I take will violate what I take to be a core responsibility of a respondent: to hew closely to the text in (...) question, to trace in one's own words its outline in order to open it up to those who have not had the privilege to devote time and attention (those most valuable of assets for academics, it seems) to the project in question. Such a model of a responsible response itself bespeaks the central problematic of the project: the relationship between speech and silence, language and law, ethics and politics.And so I begin with a de-cision that is, simultaneously, an in-cision; I enter this text through this opening, not that, and in doing so, I relegate to a spectral silence of not-saying what other (in/de)cisions would bring to speech and/or to the invisibility of not-writing what other (in/de)cisions would render legible. In the spirit of a Derridean supplément, I hope to productively open and extend for you, if not precisely retrace, Seshadri's project.HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (Seshadri 2012) is a brave book in many respects, but particularly in its attempt not just to delineate but to map out certain contested yet liminal spaces. In addition to those I've already mentioned, [End Page 175] let me add those between literature and philosophy, theology and philosophy, work and play, Agamben and Derrida, deconstruction and biopolitics, human and animal. (Any one of these alone would have been plenty for one book.) I take my mark from the site where these last two (or perhaps three) liminal spaces meet. First, allow me to indulge in a bit of intellectual autobiography: I began my career as a Derridean (and may yet end it that way … that remains to be seen), but have in the last few years, taken a decidedly more Foucauldian turn. Reading HumAnimal made me keenly aware of how profound a reorientation I have undergone in the process. And yet I entered into that process of reorientation (perhaps quite naively) sensing that, for all that separated Derrida from Foucault, deconstruction from biopolitics, they were not unconnected (please note the double negative). Thus, I found myself in deep sympathy with Seshadri's project in many ways. Whatever separates projects that foreground the machinations of power (as constitutive of knowledge, and vice versa) as object of analysis and those that foreground language (as constitutive of knowledge, and vice versa) as object of analysis,1 Seshadri's detailed readings suggest they share important points of overlap (which is not to say sameness). To a degree, then, HumAnimal undoes the very delineation between these kinds of projects that I just articulated. To be sure, Seshadri is aided a great deal in this by the fact that Agamben's own work invokes (though not uncritically) both Derridean and Foucauldian antecedents framed largely though not exclusively in and through the relationship between sovereignty and (bare) life.The book's title, HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language, names both the stakes of and framework for Seshadri's incision into this shared but contested space. Her neologism humAnimal marks a boundary integral to sovereignty's exercise, that between human and animal. The subtitle marks the forces at play in sovereignty's construction and its deployment. Race has often figured as the border demarcating those served by the law and those served up by it; those granted access to language and those denied it. Consignment to the nether side of law and language entails as well consignment to the nether side of the human/animal divide. The American practice of chattel slavery serves as one constitutive exemplar of a biopolitical and legal/linguistic regime in HumAnimal, as it will in my comments. But Seshadri seeks out the possibilities for resistance from this nether side; of possibilities opened up by and in silence, the suspension of law, and even... (shrink)

I. Language is a witness of change in the field of the knowledge. In its system of signs, also the “traces” that show “the movement of the signs” are conserved, meaning those dynamic signs that indicate problems and solutions of problems, and sometimes even the invention of new problems, which modify the paradigms of knowledge. In the case of the creativity problem, if we take language as the witness, we see the following: 1. In the first half of the 20 (...) th century, the term used to denote the innovatory phenomena is that of creation. This notion refers, most often, to the artistic works, but is step by step extended also to denote the great scientific discoveries or technical inventions and, more seldom, other types of activities which bear the mark of novelty or originality, generally with an “out of the ordinary character” . The word has an obvious value content and exactly by its evaluative significance, it is disseminated in the current cultural vocabulary. It can have more general meanings, due to the fact that it keeps, in its semantic memory, the archaic layers of the myths of creation, but also because it can be resignified metaphysically, as a cosmogony principle or one of the evolution of life . But its established place in the philosophical discourse is found mostly in the area of the philosophy of culture or in that of the philosophy of value and especially in the philosophy of art. From here, it is overtaken by the art sciences, as the psychology of art, the history of art or the sociology of art. The term creation means both the works, the products of the creation process, and the processes through which these works are accomplished. In the analysis of the creation process, the significance of the term become more psychological, and the rationalization to which it is subjected to seems to furthen it both from its religious origin as well as from the Romantic mythology of the genius. However, if we regard more attentively, we see that terms as “inspiration”, “incubation” or “invention”, from the so called explanations of the creation process, preserve the magic obscurity of the enigma. Generally, the idea of creation, even totally transferred to the human sphere, secularized, rationalized and psychologized, still keeps something from the history of a notion charged with “mystery”, “heroic admiration” and a sort of “sacred terror”, which can be understood by considering the religious origin of the idea of creation; because about creation, in the human sphere, it has been commenced to be talked at first by analogy to the divine creation, in the discourse about art of the Renaissance, and the semantic evolution of the notion has not, for a long time, furthen itself from it spiritual root. Creation – even when it denotes the human products- still remains a metaphor- which transports to something difficult to comprehend, rather than facilitates the understanding of what it denotes. 2. After the middle of the 20 th century, a new term, creativity, makes its way in the discourse, replacing the word creation. It comes from the vocabulary of the humanistic sciences, firstly from psychology and afterward by the other sciences which adopted it. It becomes, in a short period, a frequent term of the cultural world and of public communication. The discourse in which this neologism appears has completely changed suppositions: a). Firstly, it is a discourse of scientific nature ; b). Secondly, its notions are descriptive: creativity denotes the capacity to produce innovative works in any domain and is seen as a generally human dimension ; the creative products are described following criteria such as novelty, originality, relevance, adequacy or utility, attributes that are intelligible but also rationally computable. c). Thirdly, the suppositions of the discourse on creativity contains the idea that the creative phenomena can be understood rationally, described, analyzed, explained and measured, and their knowledge can be applied in the so called techniques to stimulate creativity or transferred in the methods of learning and education. The notion of creativity indicates thus a discourse articulated on a type of representations which we could call positive, to mark this way the change in knowledge on which they are based. 3. In the last decades of the 20 th century, in the vocabulary of the sciences on creativity appears a new notion: creatology . According to the significance that results from the terms which compose this linguistic invention, creatology can denote, in a general sense, the study or the theory of creation or creativity, accomplished in a discipline or other from the sciences which assumed it as a research problem. Still, the discussions on creatology have requested more - the constituting of an autonomous discipline of creativity. These three notions – creation, creativity and creatology - have an obvious “family resemblance”, although, as we have seen, the semantic differences are significant. Through these notions we can reconstruct not only the history of a problem which appeared as important to the knowledge of the 20 th century, but perhaps even the history of some ideas which have accompanied the understanding of the cultural history or, wider, the history of the mentalities of the 20 th century. It is exactly why the emergence of creatology can be researched from the perspective of cultural analysis. (shrink)

It is in 1965 that, as well known, Derrida publishes in Tel Quel one of his most important writings on Antonin Artaud : La parole soufflée. In what follow, however, the deep meaning of such an essay is not immediately related to the specifically Artaudian questions it arises, but to the fact that Derrida’s most famous neologism – différance – makes between its pages (for three times) the first appearance. It is in any case important to keep in mind (...) the distinction between its two different ed... (shrink)

Through the lens of a neologism, sociocide, the killing of society, Keith Doubt provides persuasive evidence of the social, political, and human consequences of today’s wars, focusing on war crimes, scapegoating, torture, and capitalism.

This is a shot at expressing a few of the problems that arise when you try to understand how novels are read. I shall be trying to formulate them in very ordinary language: the subject is becoming fashionable, and most recent attempts seem to me quite unduly fogged by neologism and too ready to match the natural complexity of the subject with barren imitative complications. Of course you may ask why there should be theories of this kind at all, (...) and I can only say that they are needed because of what we have missed by always meditating on what we have read and can survey, as it were, from a distance which allows us to think it's keeping still, rather than upon the ways in which, as we read, we deal with the actual turbulence of a text. Much of what I say will seem obvious enough, but it may throw some light on a fact that we all know so intimately that we don't bother to ask questions about it: the fact of plurality, of which the plurality of our own interpretation is evidence. There are interesting side issues: why do some novels seem to be more plural than others, and why, on the whole, do the ones that seem most plural so often turn out to be fairly recent, not to say modern? Also, perhaps, how do interpretations alter in time? And what's wrong with the sorts of theories we already have? . . . For the natural or naive way of reading - a matter of recognition, the medium being a virtual transparency - is neither natural nor naive. It is conditioned and arbitrary, a false return to "story" - to the "wisdom", as Benjamin calls it, of folklore, a pretence that everybody can agree on a particular construction of reality. It is, however, no more apposite to condemn this on moral grounds than to condemn texts that reject narratives, that reject story, theme, closure, authority, that trap us into contemplation of their own opacity, on the ground that this is deceptive. It seems right to allow into the plurality of readings the naive among the rest, though such a text as Ford's is so evidently not naive that naive readers of it would probably soon grow impatient. It calls for virtuosity elaborately built on the basis of naive competence, a development on productive capacity. Even to think of what that virtuosity entails is to encounter novel problems. It is harder to describe it than to do it, like riding a bicycle. But it is worth trying, because of the errors that accumulate in the absence of serious discussion - false notions of plurality, a too simple view of the history of interpretation, even culpable negligence in the reception of new and difficult work. These are problems that arise from problems native to novels - they are the problems of modern criticism, its scope and responsibilities. We know them about as well, as Dowell knew the Ashburnhams. But that is another sad story. Frank Kermode is King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge University. He is the author ofThe Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, Modern Essays, andShakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" , "A Reply to Joseph Frank" , and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence". (shrink)

Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that surrogacy, uterine transplantation (UTx) and ectogestation belong to a genus of ‘assisted gestative technologies” (“AGTs”).1 These technologies are conceptually distinct from assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in that they support gestation rather than conception. Romanis argues that they also raise some overlapping ethical and policy issues that are best appreciated by ‘considering these technologies together’, thus placing the issues that AGT’s share at the forefront of ethical analysis. The neologism ‘AGTs’ picks out a distinctive and (...) important category of technologies, and there is value in considering the ethical parallels between various AGT’s. However, the category of AGTs should provide neither the only nor the main level of ethical analysis. Surrogacy, UTx and ectogestation share important parallels not only with each other but also with other practices; indeed, some of these parallels are stronger than those AGT’s share with each other. Consider ectogestation. One striking implication of ‘artificial placentas’ is that they may make it possible to terminate a pregnancy without causing the death of the fetus. This is noteworthy in part because it threatens to disrupt one influential defence of abortion rights: that they are protected by something like a moral right to bodily integrity. Once fetuses can be transferred to artificial wombs, bodily integrity would no longer support a …. (shrink)

This dissertation challenges two myths about Leibniz' Theodicy: that it is primarily concerned with the problem of evil, and that its ethical implications are reactionary. ;Leibniz' neologism "theodicy" connotes not the justification of God, but the justice of God, a justice Leibniz is at pains to make us realize is no different from our own; we are "little gods." This makes God's world-choice a models for an ethics and politics of imitatio dei, and undermines the unspoken "theodicy or ethics" (...) assumption of much modern thought. The purpose of the Theodicy is "edification"--the encouragement of active piety in charity. Not evil but "mistaken notions of liberty, necessity and destiny" are Leibniz' main concern. ;The "best of all possible worlds" argument is a priori, thus insusceptible to empirical confirmation, rejection--or application. Any knowledge of the nature of the actual world is a posteriori, incomplete and fallible. This applies also to our knowledge of "evil" which, while no more than privation, is experienced as real. Language of "privative beings" has its place not in philosophical reflection on evil but in ethics, where the perception of privations defines the sites for action. ;The model for just choice is God's choice of worlds, and the contours of our ethics may be discerned in the way God's antecedent will to produce all goods and prevent all evils results in the consequent will to produce the goods and permit the evils of the best possible world. All antecedent wills survive in the consequent will, so all permission of evil must be attended by regret; only God in His omniscience can transcend regret. We must anticipate God's antecedent wills, not the consequent, and cannot escape regret. ;Leibniz' anti-voluntarist ethics forces us to think of goods in the context of possible worlds, while his understanding of freedom as "indirect" means that action must be understood in concrete and necessarily social ways with reference to the actual world. As I explore in an epilogue, this makes necessary a particular politics. (shrink)

The article focuses on past epidemics and previous confinements, looking for the art of journeying through immobility. It rekindles the plague that ravaged the city of Turin in the 1630s, as well as Xavier de Maistre who, confined in the military citadel in 1790, wrote the Voyage autour de ma chambre, perhaps the first example of modern ‘anodeporics’, a neologism to designate immobility travelogues. The essay then explores other pandemics and subsequent attempts at imitating De Maistre. First, it concentrates (...) on Wilkie Collins, the author of the 1852 short story “A Terribly Strange Bed”, who remained stranded with his father William, the painter, at the frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont because of the cholera that broke out there in 1836. Second, it bears on Almeida Garrett, who resisted the siege of typhus-struck Oporto in 1832-3 and, ten years later, penned another classic of ‘anodeporics’, Viagens na minha terra, also inspired by De Maistre. After consideration, from the perspective of semiotics, of what is needed to “journeying throughout immobility”, the essay ends with a study of the most famous anodeporic tale in world literature, also containing ironic quotes by De Maistre: Jorge Luis Borges’ El Aleph, named after a fictional device for mystical travel confined in a basement of 1940s Buenos Aires. The conclusion of this semiotic exploration through pandemics, lockdowns, and immobility travelogues is simple: in case of forced immobility, the practice of exploring space through time can be replaced by the alternative practice of exploring time through space. (shrink)

This article examines the textual afterlives of Utopia in China and Taiwan by surveying titles published between 2016 and the first half of 2017. We are dealing with a massive array of titles pertinent to Utopia related to multiple disciplines. Indeed, not only has the sixteenth-century neologism Utopia become "a term of common parlance" that has taken on its own life,1 but the concept of Utopia representing the ideal has also been extensively adapted and appropriated.2 Since any articulation expressing (...) a particular ideal can be considered "utopian" in its own right, it is not my intention to take into account all the titles that border on the articulation of or the desire for an... (shrink)

Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. ‘Affect’, as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that ‘affect’ to emotion is being curated online by users particularly of social media as they learn to structure how they are perceived in online culture by others. It (...) also investigates how the specific correlating of affect to emotion is one of the essential algorithmically generated activities of social media and online corporations. To discern this flow of affect and emotion, the article works to identify how this online cultural pandemic has intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic and produced a new level and intensity of affect and emotion curation as greater parts of our connected cultures are being managed and moderated by ourselves as well as governments, corporations and institutions. The neologism ‘covidiquette’ is used to describe this new form of online curation of cultures, and a further pandemic expansion of this movement of affect into attribution – transnationally, governmentally and commercially. Key pathways for investigating this correlation – and curation – of affect are analysed in this paper during 2020 and 2021 and the ever-presence of COVID-19 and its unique capacity to produce a proliferation of sharing, connection and – critically – surveillance. (shrink)

This article heeds previous calls for revitalized feminist accounts of gender and religion. Having identified post-secular female pilgrimages as practices that actuate a ‘third space’, we claim that it is a space that cannot be adequately theorized from within secular feminist perspectives and attendant conceptions of subjectivity, agency and autonomy. Nor do perspectives from religious studies and its conceptions of piety as expressions of subjectivity, agency and autonomy do justice to the spatialities and subjectivities of post-secular female pilgrims. The article (...) aligns itself with the budding field of critical feminist studies of post-secularism. We argue that, in general, both the protagonists and the detractors of post-secularism fail to recognize feminist theorizations of religion, the post-secular debate in feminist studies, and the place and role of women in the emergence of the post-secular. Whence, our neologism post-sexularism. (shrink)

Who would have thought twenty-five years ago that the term “bioethics,” a neologism coined by an American biologist, would have met with such success, becoming one of the cornerstones of philosophical and juridical reflection at the end of the twentieth century? For it was in 1970 that the biologist and oncologist Van Rensalear Potter published his book, Bioethics, Science of Survival.

For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate life and the search for liberation represent an enigma. The Vedic religion, centered on the married household, had no place for such a figure. Much has been written about the Indian ascetic but hardly any scholarly attention has been paid to the married householder with wife and children, generally referred to in Sanskrit as grhastha: "the stay-at-home." The institution of the householder is viewed (...) implicitly as posing little historical problems with regard to its origin or meaning. This volume problematizes the figure of the householder within ancient Indian culture and religion. It shows that the term grhastha is a neologism and is understandable only in its opposition to the ascetic who goes away from home (pravrajita). Through a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a wide range of inscriptions and texts, ranging from the Vedas, Dharmasastras, Epics, and belle lettres to Buddhist and Jain texts and texts on governance and erotics, this volume analyses the meanings, functions, and roles of the householder from the earliest times unti about the fifth century CE. The central finding of these studies is that the householder bearing the name grhastha is not simply a married man with a family but someone dedicated to the same or similar goals as an ascetic while remaining at home and performing the economic and ritual duties incumbent on him. The grhastha is thus not a generic householder, for whom there are many other Sanskrit terms, but a religiously charged concept that is intended as a full-fledged and even superior alternative to the concept of a religious renouncer. (shrink)

This article focuses on ‘Love Jihad,’ the neologism that Hindutva, or Hindu Extremism, has invented to incite suspicion and violence against Indian Muslims. I begin with a brief discussion of several characteristics of the Hindutva organisational and ideological apparatus. Then I discuss anti-Love Jihad campaigns as a strategy to assert Hindu extremism in interpersonal relations. I go on to highlight specific episodes of ‘Love Jihad’ attacks by the Hindu Right that have targeted and made a political spectacle of love (...) and marriage across community boundaries. I suggest that Love Jihad campaigns become a mode of producing docile, submissive subjects who will not question regimes of power, be it neoliberalism, religious majoritarianism or social hierarchies and injustice. (shrink)

This special issue brings together some of the highlights from the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Utah Valley University hosted the conference on October 20–22, 2016, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The title of this issue, "Placing Transcontinental Philosophy," attempts to capture a sense of the expanding diversity and depth of continental philosophy in the new millennium as it is practiced and advanced by SPEP. The neologism transcontinental philosophy signifies not only the growing (...) global reach but also the profound developments of continental philosophy as it has been taken up through other cultural standpoints and linguistic orientations. The articles... (shrink)

The general topic of my remarks concerns the place, or basho in Japanese, of transcontinental philosophy within the context of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the philosophical profession in general. I introduced the term transcontinental when as director of the thirty-fifth Collegium Phaenomenologicum in 2010 I formulated the theme of that year's meeting: "Transcontinental Philosophy: Interpreting Philosophy Across Borders and Idioms." Marking what was a historic first for the Collegium Phaenomenologicum—namely, engaging non–North American and European perspectives on (...) continental philosophy—the neologism transcontinental philosophy signified not only the growing global reach but... (shrink)

The concept of facticity denotes conditions of experience whose necessity is not logical yet whose contingency is not empirical. Although often associated with Heidegger, Fichte coins ‘facticity’ in his Berlin period to refer to the conclusion of Kant’s metaphysical deduction of the categories, which he argues leaves it a contingent matter that we have the conditions of experience that we do. Such rhapsodic or factical conditions, he argues, must follow necessarily, independent of empirical givenness, from the I through a process (...) of ‘genesis.’ I reconstruct Fichte’s argument by tracing the origin of his neologism, presenting his Jena critique of Kant’s rhapsodic appeal to the forms of judgment, and illustrating the Jena period’s continuity with the Berlin period’s genetic method, while noting a methodological shift whereby Fichte directs his critique against his own doctrine of intellectual intuition in order to eliminate its ‘factical terms.’. (shrink)

The arguments for redistribution of wealth, and for prohibiting certain transactions such as price-gouging, both are based in mistaken conceptions of exchange. This paper proposes a neologism, “euvoluntary” exchange, meaning both that the exchange is truly voluntary and that it benefits both parties to the transaction. The argument has two parts: First, all euvoluntary exchanges should be permitted, and there is no justification for redistribution of wealth if disparities result only from euvoluntary exchanges. Second, even exchanges that are not (...) euvoluntary should generally be permitted, because access to market exchange may be the only means by which people in desperate circumstances can improve their position. (shrink)

This paper is about paradigmatic slurs, i.e. expressions that are prima facie associated with the expression of a contemptuous attitude concerning a group of people identified in terms of its origin or descent, race, sexual orientation, ethnia or religion, gender, etc. Our purpose is twofold: explaining their expressive meaning dimension in terms of a version of stereotype semantics and analysing their original and most typical uses as insults, which will be called with a neologism ‘insultive’, in terms of a (...) speech act theory. (shrink)

This essay examines how eighteenth-century naturalists selected, read, and used textual and visual sources of the past to construct chronologies of the aurora borealis from antiquity to their present. Frequent sightings of the northern lights in Europe from 1707 onward prompted investigations into not only their physical properties but also their historical patterns. These searches encountered a twofold problem. Because the term “aurora borealis” was a seventeenth-century neologism, the recovery of auroras avant la lettre required discerning them amid the (...) various aerial spectacles described in older records. Further complicating the task was the eighteenth-century authors’ suspicion of these documents as tainted by the superstitions of an “unenlightened” past. Nevertheless, these self-proclaimed “enlightened” commentators relied on the very sources they criticized in their search for lost auroras. The essay investigates how different Enlightenment auroral observers fashioned their own criteria for identifying “true” auroras through practices of extricating verbal and visual descriptions in older sources from their original contexts of portentous interpretation. (shrink)

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell's name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. "Miocene" and "Pliocene," "uniformitarian" and "catastrophist," "anode" and "cathode," even the word "scientist" itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another word (...) he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to pronounce. This word, "palaetiology," was the name Whewell gave to the class of sciences that are concerned with historical causation: the class we might today refer to as historical sciences. Although the disciplines Whewell included under the heading of palaetiology might seem to cut across conventional academic boundaries of his day and ours—his exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology—all these fields may be examined together, Whewell argued, because of their common interest in reconstructing the past. ¶ This paper is an essay in the palaetiological sciences, dedicated to Whewell on the bicentennial of his birth, an essay that examines some of the principles, maxims, and rules of procedure that these sciences have all in common. Its first purpose is to demonstrate the continuing validity of Whewell's classification of these sciences through a study of historical representation in three different palaetiological fields: systematics, historical linguistics, and textual transmission. Its second purpose is to continue the development of an extended analogy between historical representation and cartographic representation that I began in an earlier paper (O'Hara, 1993, Systematic Biology), an analogy that makes especially clear the common representational practices that are found throughout palaetiology. (shrink)

This study divides some of the philosophical anthropologies developed after the Holocaust into three frameworks. To do this the author shows how the present modern crisis is an anthropological one and unites the sum of the different crisis dimensions mankind is currently facing. The article approaches the postmodern journey from its two routes—the relativistic and the metaphysical. The second is presented as “status quo-oriented” or as a form of modernized democracy. Because of its popularity, the neologism “transhumanism” is here (...) examined togeth er with the hypothetical coming of a post-human era. This in turn is viewed as a revival of the illustrated myth of the happy world. The author first offers a “status quo” criticism “transhumanism” from the metaphysical anthropology viewpoint and then proposes an approach to a “third way, that is, the convergence of other anthropologies revolving around a person’s dignity born of his or her metaphysical roots together with a recovery of the value of human carnality. The article concludes by putting the different philosophers’ viewpoints face-to-face with the Person of Jesus Christ. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the content and features of the concept of "society" in the Tuvan culture, which is formed in a syncretic worldview. Features of the historical development of the Tuvan culture led to the formation of an authentic picture of the world, in which man is an integral part of nature. It was revealed that social aspects are not isolated from nature either. It is shown that the limitations of thinking did not require the development of (...) abstract and universal concepts of man and society. The fundamental role of the family in the implementation of social relations in the Tuvan society is determined. In addition, the verbal form of transmitting traditions enhanced the importance of the family in the social system of the Tuvans. As a methodology, a combination of cultural-anthropological and socio-cultural approaches in various aspects is used. In addition, a conceptual and historical method is used to identify the essence of the transformation of Tuvan society. The main conclusions of the authors are the definition of the Tuvan word "niitiel" as a neologism formed in the course of modernization of the Tuvan culture. The logic of its formation differs from the etymology of the concept of society in Russian and English. The concept of "society" contains syncretic and naturalistic aspects. It is emphasized that the individual did not single out individual political, economic, cultural and social interests. In his thinking, he operated only with family and clan interests. The authors found that the syncretism of the Tuvan culture not only led to the fusion of various spheres of human existence, but also the inseparability of the subject and object in thinking. In this regard, the individual did not separate himself from the family and social structure. (shrink)