Bioethics case reports generally treat aspects of moral fathomability, characterised and addressed in different ways. This paper reads the case as a textual model of scenarios and draws attention to its structure, narrative shape, linguistic register, and the effects of tone and temporality on reader expectation and responsiveness. Such textual elements of case composition reflect authorial purpose and influence the interpretation, including moral and ethical interpretation, of bioethics cases.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 189-193 [Access article in PDF] Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture. By Anne M. Blackburn. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. x + 241 pp. Buddhist Learning is an important study of the emergence of the Siyam Nikaya (monastic order) in eighteenth-century Kandy, Sri Lanka's last Buddhist kingdom (which fell to the British only in 1815). Blackburn focuses on educational (...) institutions in her account, but frames it also to address larger issues in the study of Buddhist and non-Buddhist texts and history.An introductory chapter sets forth Blackburn's three central arguments (4): colonial and postcolonial scholarly constructions of Sri Lankan Buddhist "tradition" obscure the eighteenth-century phenomena that she reconstructs; the idea of "textual communities," developed in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on medieval European Christianity, provides a useful tool for analyzing those phenomena; [End Page 189] thus analyzed, the early Siyam Nikaya turns out to represent an innovative "reformulation" of Sri Lankan Buddhism, made possible by the establishment of the order itself, its systematization of monastic education, and the development of a bilingual commentarial genre for use within that system.Chapter 2 provides nonspecialists "at least a glimpse of the larger social context in which the emerging Siyam Nikaya participated" (23), with brief sketches of Sri Lankan Buddhist history, the structure and politics of the Kandyan court, the organization of monasticism prior to the rise of the Siyam Nikaya, and the presence of non-Buddhist religious leaders in Kandyan society. Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of Sri Lankan monastic education prior to 1730, then analyzes three stages in the emergence of distinctive Siyam Nikaya educational institutions (the early career of founder Valivita Saranamkara [1698-1778]; the late 1730s creation of a prototypical educational institution at Niyamakanda; and the 1753 importation of higher ordination [ upasampada ] from Thailand/formal establishment of the Siyam Nikaya, respectively), the history of royal patronage of these institutions, their new curriculum, its implementation and administration, its impact on monastic identity and lay-monastic relations, and the relationship of monastic erudition to prestige and patronage.Chapter 4 surveys Siyam Nikaya histories to argue that the order's rise was attended by "an innovative discourse on monasticism" that bolstered its authority by depicting its education-based interpretation of monastic virtue as "natural and desirable Buddhist practice" (105). Though these histories employed the rhetorical trope of decline and revival, their emphasis on Buddhist learning "signals a moment of profound change in Lankan Buddhism" (76-77), because they provided a charter for the new Nikaya while creating a perception that Siyam Nikaya monks practiced the best form of Buddhist monasticism. When imbibed by members of the royal court, this assured these monks steady patronage and prestige over their rivals, called ganinnanses, whom they directly and indirectly attacked. Chapter 5 zeroes in on Saranamkara and his Sararthadipani, a bilingual (Sinhala and Pali) commentary on the "four recitation sections" (catubhanavara) of protective (paritta) texts in Pali. This monumental work and the genre of bilingual commentaries (called sutra sannayas ) that it inspired, Blackburn maintains, were central to Saranamkara's claim to authority and created a distinctive monastic identity for Siyam Nikaya monks. Through close analysis of selected passages from Sararthadipani, Blackburn reveals the inner workings of bilingual commentary, particularly insofar as it allowed Saranamkara and his disciples to demonstrate their proper command of the classic Pali texts.In chapter 6 Blackburn argues that the sutra sannayas produced "a new Buddhist textual community" united in its reading and/or hearing of them. Exploring the ways in which Sararthadipani and the other sutra sannayas "constrained" readers to accept Saranamkara's vision of proper monasticism (such as direct instructions to readers and rhetorical structures), but recognizing that they also left open (in their use of simile, metaphor, and illustrative stories) the possibility of "less constrained" and "resistant" readings, Blackburn suggests that the genre extended the Siyam Nikaya's program beyond the small circle of Saranamkara's disciples to transform Sri Lankan monasticism [End Page 190] more generally. Moreover, she argues that given... (shrink)

Philosophy is typically identified with the textual practices of reading and writing and oral dialogue. It has also claimed to be an entire way of life, an art of living dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom and thus to the practices that such pursuit should entail. This chapter probes to what extent philosophy as a practice or art of living requires a literary or more generally textual form. It also considers why it should not confine itself (...) to the limits of discourse. It argues that if philosophy requires more than words, there is a twofold challenge for philosophy as a way of life. It is not enough to compose texts and refine our language with logical and literary skill; we must also take real pains, in practicing philosophy, to give careful composition to our character, behavior, and bearing, and to refine them through harmonizing grace and attractive style. (shrink)

What texts did Buddhists of South Asia and beyond read? How did they read, interpret, and use these texts? This essay focuses primarily on the first of the two questions and examines in this connection instances of citation found in the early Mūlamadhyamakakārikā commentaries and in a related Tibetan work as evidence of the uses of Buddhist texts. The collected samples indicate two major shifts in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist textual practices. The first transition occurred in the sixth (...) and seventh centuries when Indian commentaries on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā began to cite scriptural passages with greater frequency, especially from the Mahāyāna sūtras. The example of Tsong kha pa’s Madhyamaka work represents a later trend in which Tibetan writers repeated sūtra passages previously cited in the Indian texts that were the main objects of their study and attention. What emerges here is the pivotal role played by the middle-period Indian Mādhyamikas. Writers such as Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti contributed very substantially to the collection of core scriptural citations that were deployed in the Madhyamaka texts. While some of the sūtra passages these Indian Madhyamaka authors used were circulated outside the circle of their own philosophical tradition, others appear to have been newly collected through their private reading experience. (shrink)

In this article I scrutinize the question whetherclinical medicine, in order to be considered ahermeneutical enterprise, must be thought of as areading of different texts. Three differentproposals for a definition of the concept of text inmedicine, suggested by other hermeneuticians, arediscussed. All three proposals are shown to beunsatisfying in various ways. Instead of attempting tofind a fourth definition of the concept of textsuitable to a hermeneutics of medicine, I then try toshow that the assumption that one needs to operatewith the (...) concept of text in order to develop ahermeneutics of medicine is false. Clinicalinterpretation can be shown to essentially consist ina dialogical hermeneutics, the pattern of which can befound in the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thiskind of hermeneutics is not a methodology of textreading, but an ontological, phenomenologicalhermeneutics in which understanding is a necessaryfeature of the being-together of human beings in theworld. This being-together in and through languagetakes on a peculiar form in the clinical encounter,since the medical meeting is typically characterizedby an asymmetrical enstrangement and has a specificgoal – health for the patient – absent in other formsof hermeneutics. Central issues of Gadamer''sphilosophy, e.g. fusion of horizons, are shown tofit the structure of clinical practice. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida and by Paul de Man . And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? (...) Is it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction’s “others”? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives. The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices. (shrink)

"Textual Reasoning" is the name a family of contemporary Jewish thinkers has given to its overlapping practices of Jewish philosophy and theology. This collection represents the most public expression to date of the shared work, over a period of 12 years, of this society of "textual reasoners." Although the movement of textual reasoning is diverse and pluriform, it is characterized at bottom by the pursuit of the claim that there are significant affinities between Jewish forms of (...) reading and reasoning and postmodern thought. These affinities are presently being pursued by scholars throughout Jewish studies, in fields such as Bible, Talmud, Midrash, medieval philosophy, Kabbalah and the Jewish penomenology of Rosenzweig and Levinas among others. As the essays here convey, the work of these scholars has stimulated a lively and creative re-engagement with the philosophical dimensions of Jewish texts and, even more, the textual dimensions of Jewish reasoning. In large part this new energy has come from a conception of the postmodern as a place where some of the most distinctive features of Jewish reasoning can be elucidated as well as challenged. Nancy Levene is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Williams College. Peter Ochs is Edgar M Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. (shrink)

In this paper, we wish to explore the role that textual representations play in the creation of new mathematical objects. We do so by analyzing texts by Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) and Évariste Galois (1811–1832), which are seen as central to the historical development of the mathematical concept of groups. In our analysis, we consider how the material features of representations relate to the changes in conceptualization that we see in the texts.Against this backdrop, we discuss the idea that new (...) mathematical concepts, in general, are increasingly abstract in the sense of being detached from material configurations. Our analysis supports the opposite view. We suggest that changes in the material aspects of textual representations (i.e., the actual graphic inscriptions) play an active and crucial role in conceptual change.We employ an analytical framework adapted from Bruno Latour’s 1999 account of intertwined material and representational practices in the empirical sciences. This approach facilitates a foregrounding of the interconnection between the conceptual development of mathematics, and the construction, (re-)configuration, and manipulation of the materiality of representations. Our analysis suggests that, in mathematical practice, distinctions between the material and structural features of representations are not permanent and absolute. This problematizes the appropriateness of the distinction between concrete inscriptions and abstract relations in understanding the development of mathematical concepts. (shrink)

Nursing and nursing practice both construct and are in turn constructed by the context in which they operate. Texts play a central part in that construction. As such, nursing and nursing practice can be considered to represent a reality that is textually mediated. This paper explores the notion of nursing as a textually mediated reality and offers the reader the possibility of engaging in reflection on what implications this has for nursing and their own nursing practice. The analyses provided draw (...) on aspects of die work of both Foucault and Derrida. Foucault's notion of discourse provides a vehicle for die exploration of nursing as textually mediated, as does Derrida's concept of binary oppositions. The paper thus illustrates some of die possibilities afforded nursing by poststructural analyses. In particular it does this by exploring one of the central textual constructions, impacting on die way that nursing and nursing practice are conceptualized, the mind/body binary opposition. (shrink)

‘Text’ has been a frequent notion in analytical conceptualizations of landscape and the city. It is mostly found in analyses of textual representations or suggestions concerning a metaphor of “reading” an (urban) landscape. In the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics the idea of the text of St. Petersburg has also been applied in analysing particular cities as organizing topics in literature and in culture more widely, but it has not happened to an equal degree in studies of actual urban spaces. (...) The understanding of text as a semiotic system and mechanism is, however, more promising than revealed by these conceptions. Some potential can be made apparent by relating this textual paradigm to a more pragmatic understanding of the city and its planning. My project in this paper is to uncover an analytical framework focusing on the concepts of ‘text’, ‘textualization’ and ‘texting’ in studying the planning of urban environment. The paper observes the case of the urban planning process of the Tartu city centre in Estonia during 2010–2016, and is particularly concerned with the roles that urban nature has acquired in the process of this “textualization” of the local environment, societal ideals, practices and possible others. (shrink)

Procedure manuals and textually mediated deathThe procedure manual as a document represents the practice of nursing care. Analysis of such manuals allows us to explore discourses of nursing and the ways in which they frame nursing practice. A critical analysis of a hospital procedure manual using discourse analysis was undertaken. A specific excerpt concerning ‘Last offices’ is used as an example of the institutionalisation of organisational values and beliefs as these influence nursing care. ‘Last offices’ directs nursing practices related (...) to the death of a patient, and the laying out as preparation for the funeral director or coroner. The analysis shows that procedure manuals reproduce hegemonic ideologies of nursing. The analysis also shows how nursing practices are constituted by intersecting forces of differing locations such as the hospital as an organisation, the healthcare system and the wider society within which these function. (shrink)

The article examines the role of discourse in organisational sensemaking. By building links between the theorising undertaken within organisational studies and the empirical analysis of multimodal social interaction, it argues for a relational view of sensemaking and investigates how sense is made in and through social interaction in real organisational situations where language use intertwines with embodied actions and the manipulation of artefacts. In particular, the article studies the use of discourse technologies of textual artefacts in sensemaking processes. The (...) data come from training workshops of a Finnish workplace organisation, conducted in order for the employees to delineate the history and future of their organisation with the help of writable papers. The results show how the papers exert agency in the situation by facilitating three specific discursive practices and by enabling and restricting the actions employed in constructing a shared understanding of the organisational reality. (shrink)

Self-plagiarism requires clear definition within an environment that places integrity at the heart of the research enterprise. This paper explores the whole notion of self-plagiarism by academics and distinguishes between appropriate and inappropriate textual re-use in academic publications, while considering research on other forms of plagiarism such as student plagiarism. Based on the practical experience of the authors in identifying academics’ self-plagiarism using both electronic detection and manual analysis, a simple model is proposed for identifying self-plagiarism by academics.

Socially and politically significant Muslim communities are posing a challenge to the public spheres of Western Europe: can public reason in a liberal democracy be so conceived as to accommodate the religious reasons of Muslims and other religiously motivated citizens? This question, often discussed from the perspective either of political philosophy or of particular religious traditions, is addressed here instead by drawing on the theory and practice of inter-religious dialogue. The dialogue movement known as ‘scriptural reasoning’ is analysed for its (...) potential to provide a way of conceptualising the nature of reasoning in the public sphere. ‘Reasoning with texts’, it is argued, is a way of describing much of the reasoning that takes place within the public sphere and not just religious reasoning. This approach to understanding public reasoning is established through a combination of example and theory. A model of communicative hermeneutics as public reason based on an textual rationality is proposed. As well as providing space for textually based religious arguments, this textual imagination can be situated alongside and complement postmodern developments of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. Whilst this approach to reasoning in the public sphere initially appears very different from the classic statement of the idea of public reason in John Rawls’s political liberalism, it is shown to have significant continuity with Rawls’s theory when this is viewed through the lens of the Supreme Court as exemplar of public reason. This highest level of public reason involving legislation is also a form of reasoning with texts. But in order for religious and more popular levels of public discourse and deliberation to impact on the political and legislative processes, these too must be conceived as modes of reasoning having some continuity with higher levels of public reasoning. It is such continuity that this thesis seeks to theorise. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish (...) four kinds of textual-context error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically. (shrink)

For most commentators, the universality of Descartes’s method goes hand in hand with the uniformity with which it must be applied to any problem in any science. I will henceforth refer to this as the Uniformity Thesis. Finding themselves unable to identify such a uniformly applied method in any of Descartes’s extant treatises, many readers of Descartes have been led to conclude that Descartes’s method played little or no role in Cartesian science. My principle argument will be that Descartes did (...) not, in fact, accept the Uniformity Thesis, and that the relevant textual evidence strongly suggests that he denied it. For Descartes, the method is universal, and can be employed to discover scientia, not because it can or ought to be uniformly applied to any problem in any science, but rather because practice in the method habituates the human ingenium to be sensitive to diff erent kinds of problem, such that the procedure for constructing and resolving a problem can, within definable limits, vary from application to application. (shrink)

This paper analyses the discussion between Foucault and Derrida on the subject of Cartesian doubt. In order to find a solution, the methodology applied retains some aspects of Foucault's analysis of discursive practices and, at the same time, goes beyond the intra-textual Derridian exegesis. In particular, the relevance of the Cartesian evil genius allows to read Cartesian philosophy in terms of baroque thought, instead of the classical rationalist reading of his works.

The article is an exploration of online reading from the perspective of theories of reading and interpretation based on literary theory and the phenomenology of reading literary text. One of its aims is to show that such theories can make a contribution to our understanding of reading and to our design of online reading spaces. The precursor of this stance is the form of hypertext theory originally proposed by George Landow, which predicted radical changes in reading practices with an (...) impact not only on literature but on education in general. The prediction has been slow to be verified and has been criticized by empirical and psychological studies. In this article, hypertext theory is compared to the phenomenology of reading linear literary text, with particular attention paid to the role played by the notion of a text, work or ‘whole’ which is constructed or produced during the course of reading. I show that the active and engaged reading predicted by hypertext theory is available in reading linear literary text, and to a higher degree than in reading hypertext, and consider ways in which the kinds of reading process which occur in reading literature can be generalized to reading for other higher education purposes. Finally, I speculate as to the range of online technologies that could be used to encourage these reading processes, and propose an alternative online reading space. (shrink)

Beginning by offering an overview on legal aesthetic humanisms as a specific embodiment of critical discourse, and discussing the ways the recreation of juridical experience, rationality, and culture underpinning such a criticism, leaving behind monolithic views on textuality, judgment, and subjectivity, positively contributes to unsettling the main assumptions underlying typical understandings of law’s autonomy—mostly those of formal specification of juridical “sources” and “scientific” isolation of legal thought—, this paper argues that simply reproducing aesthetic heterodoxy as the epitome of a humanist (...) ‘alternative to law’, without first debating the very orthodox-heterodox binomial, ends up overlooking the discursive and methodological specificity of law, as a particular experience of practical and normative validity. In this way, it introduces, from an axiological-normative and juridically oriented standpoint, a different—jusaesthetic—argument for re-examining the relationship between law’s praxis, nomos, and community. (shrink)

In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like (...) contemporary historians of science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry. (shrink)

In a recent article I drew attention to the fact that the well-known fable of the improvident cicada and the industrious ant has a close resemblance to the story of the twin brothers Amphion and Zethus and their classic debate on the respective merits of the artistic and practical life in Euripides' Antiope, which is reflected not only in the argument of Callicles and Socrates in the Gorgias and Horace, Ep. i. 18.

‘Text’ has been a frequent notion in analytical conceptualizations of landscape and the city. It is mostly found in analyses of textual representations or suggestions concerning a metaphor of “reading” an (urban) landscape. In the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics the idea of the text of St. Petersburg has also been applied in analysing particular cities as organizing topics in literature and in culture more widely, but it has not happened to an equal degree in studies of actual urban spaces. (...) The understanding of text as a semiotic system and mechanism is, however, more promising than revealed by these conceptions. Some potential can be made apparent by relating this textual paradigm to a more pragmatic understanding of the city and its planning. My project in this paper is to uncover an analytical framework focusing on the concepts of ‘text’, ‘textualization’ and ‘texting’ in studying the planning of urban environment. The paper observes the case of the urban planning process of the Tartu city centre in Estonia during 2010–2016, and is particularly concerned with the roles that urban nature has acquired in the process of this “textualization” of the local environment, societal ideals, practices and possible others. (shrink)

In February 2010, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched their DSM-5 website with details about the development of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The APA invited “the general public” to review the draft diagnostic criteria and provide written comments and suggestions. This revision marks the first time the APA has solicited public review of their diagnostic manual. This article analyzes reported speech on the DSM-5 draft diagnostic criteria for the classification Posttraumatic Stress (...) Disorder. It demonstrates how textual standardization facilitates the cultural portability of the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria such that a community of speakers beyond the borders of the APA come to be seen as exemplary speakers, writers, and revisers of the professional style. Furthermore, analysis shows how co-authoring practices recontextualize the “voice” and persona of putative patient reported speech on Criterion D2. As a consequence of textual standardization, spoken discourse becomes recontextualized as the product of scientific inquiry and the organization of psychiatric knowledge. (shrink)

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco essentially presents an educative vision of some basic semiotic principles that infuse the textual form of a popular fictional genre—the detective story. In effect, it characterizes the postmodernization of the traditional “whodunnit” moving the genre from the realm of “the real” or the plausible into the realm of “the metaphysical” or the unthinkable. The Name of the Rose is a practical application in semiotics. Or, how the aesthetics of textual production (...) as generated through the lexical signs and codes manifest the discursive text of a novel work. The semiotic twists and turns of the detective story facilitate this educational function and the purposeful transformation of the reader into an individual capable of appreciating and grasping the conflicting ideological viewpoints expressed through its dialogical structure. The detective genre enables the Umberto Eco to produce an educational narrative via the intricacies of plot in the detective story while teaching main aspects of semiotic theory. (shrink)

Much significant work on the topic of privacy and identity on social network sites stems from the realms of media, information and cultural studies, and sociology eschewing language-based disciplines almost entirely. To redress the balance, this article draws on discourse-centred online ethnography, an approach which blends online ethnography with discourse analysis, to explore how self-presentation on Facebook is regulated by means of privacy. To this end, I analyse a dataset of statuses, comments, links, photographs and interviews from five Greek users. (...) The findings highlight users’ creativity and criticality in combining software affordances with linguistic signals and textual practices to manage their privacy and hence their identity. (shrink)

In company with its sister volume, Arts-Based Research Across Textual Media in Education explores arts-based approaches to research across media, including film and comics-related material, from a variety of geographic locations and across a range of sub-disciplines within the field of education. This first volume takes a textual focus, capturing process, poetic, and dramaturgical approaches. The authors aim to highlight some of the approaches that are not always centered in arts-based research. The contributors represent a variety of arts-based (...) practices and methods, and they weave this marrying of artistic and scientific expertise and experience into the fabric of the chapters themselves. Authors from international contexts speak to the importance of utilizing artistic approaches for research processes. From multimodal field notes to poetic forms to the dramaturgical, chapters in this book represent steps forward in educational inquiry to bringing together both the creative and credible. The book includes multiple images and rich descriptions shared from the field. This first volume covers amongst other topics: co-created narratives; creative fiction in research; analytic portraits; dramatic representation, and critical poetic inquiry. It would be suitable for graduate students and scholars interested in qualitative inquiry and arts-based methods, in Education and the social sciences. (shrink)

The emerging field of comparative political theory (CPT) seeks to expand our understanding of politics through intercultural dialogues between diverse systems of political thought. CPT acknowledges diverse modes of political understanding, yet the field is still methodologically focused on textual forms of political practice and learning. I argue that the privileging of political literature in CPT has been inherited from orthodox political theory and the history of political thought and that the prioritizing of text over oral and enactive (...) class='Hi'>practices places constraints on intercultural dialogue. First, methodological focus on texts inhibits dialogue with Indigenous traditions that do not prioritize text in the same way or to the same extent in the reproduction of political culture. Second, the incorporation of oral traditions tends to conflate orality with text in ways that obfuscate the contribution of enactive performance. One result of these methodological oversights is that CPT risks recapitulating some of the historical exclusionary logics that it seeks to overcome. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly and indirectly, (...) to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)

In the past 25 years, many philosophers have endorsed the view that the practical value of causal knowledge lies in the fact that manipulation of causes is a good way to bring about a desired change in the effect. This view is intuitively very plausible. For instance, we can predict a storm on the basis of a barometer reading, but we cannot avoid the storm by manipulating the state of the barometer (barometer status and storm are effects of a common (...) cause, viz. atmospheric conditions). In §1 we present textual evidence which shows that this view is very popular. In §2 we show that this standard view is too restrictive: the practical value of causal knowledge is wider. In §3 we introduce the distinction between ‘manipulative policy’ and ‘selective policy’ as a theoretical framework to account for this wider practical value. (shrink)

We examine one of the well-known mathematical works of Abraham bar Ḥiyya: Ḥibbur ha-Meshiḥah ve-ha-Tishboret, written between 1116 and 1145, which is one of the first extant mathematical manuscripts in Hebrew. In the secondary literature about this work, two main theses have been presented: the first is that one Urtext exists; the second is that two recensions were written—a shorter, more practical one, and a longer, more scientific one. Critically comparing the eight known copies of the Ḥibbur, we show that (...) contrary to these two theses, one should adopt a fluid model of textual transmission for the various manuscripts of the Ḥibbur, because neither of these two theses can account fully for the changes among the various manuscripts. We hence offer to concentrate on the typology of the variations among the various manuscripts, dealing with macro-changes (such as omissions or additions of proofs, additional appendices or a reorganization of the text itself), and micro-changes (such as textual and pictorial variants). (shrink)

New media can change the way that artifacts are constructed and used. Changes in these artifacts, in turn, will be reflected in work practices and processes. This article draws on an empirical investigation of the impact of computer-based technologies on classical scholarship to discuss some of the ramifications that a switch in medium may have for work. The article defines both traditional and computer-based tools as "packages" that consist of artifacts, skill sets, data, beliefs about the work process, and (...) organizational infrastructures, and applies the package metaphor to understand the multiple levels of changes taking place within classics as the use of textual databanks becomes more prevalent. (shrink)

There is a pervasive contrast in the early natural history writings of the co-discoverers of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin. In his writings from South America and the Malay Archipelago (1848-1852, 1854-1862). Wallace consistently emphasized species and genera, and separated these descriptions from his rarer and briefer discussions of individual organisms. In contrast, Darwin's writings during the Beagle voyage (1831-1836) emphasized individual organisms, and mingled descriptions of individuals and groups. The contrast is explained by the different (...) class='Hi'>practices of the two naturalists in the field. Wallace and Darwin went to the field with different educational experiences and social connections, constrained by different responsibilities and theoretical interests. These in turn resulted in different natural history practices; i.e., different habits and working routines in the field. Wallace's intense collecting activities aimed at a complete inventory of different species and their distributions at many localities. Darwin's less intense collecting practice focused on detailed observations of individual organisms. These different practices resulted in different material, textual and conceptual products. Placing natural history practices at the center of analysis reveals connections among these diverse products, and throws light on Wallace and Darwin's respective treatment of individuals and groups in natural history. In particular, this approach clarifies the relation between individuals and groups in Wallace's theory of natural selection, and provides an integrative starting point for further investigations of the broader social factors that shaped Victorian natural history practices and their scientific products. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Critical Forum Introduction:Cultural Encounters and Textual Speculations in the MediterraneanBurcu Kayışcı Akkoyun, Emrah Atasoy, and Merve TaburThis issue's Critical Forum takes its point of departure from two paradigm shifts. The first one has already occurred in utopian studies, as attested by the increasingly evident interest in non-Western conceptions of utopianism and representations of speculative fiction. Scholars of utopian studies such as Lyman Tower Sargent and Jacqueline Dutton have (...) been writing on utopias from other cultural traditions. The 2013 special issue of Utopian Studies (vol. 24, no. 1), which was introduced by Sargent and Dutton, included articles that reflected Iranian, Chinese, and Korean narratives and perspectives. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, monographs1 and journal special issues2 began examining literary and visual cultures of the Global South and transcultural expressions of the utopian imagination alongside a surge of speculative fiction from the Global South. A rising number of symposiums, anthologies, and critical works on Afrofuturism and Latinx and Arabic speculative fiction also contributed to today's widening discussions.3 This special section in Utopian Studies advocates shifting from Western-centric approaches to more nuanced modes of interpretation with a specific focus [End Page 127] on the Mediterranean, which has itself been a contested discursive site in Mediterranean studies, demanding the formation of new critical paradigms.According to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, "It hardly needs stating that the Mediterranean, as an area seldom clearly defined but often subconsciously reduced to Italy and Greece, has been the perceived center of European civilization since the Renaissance, and in many respects since classical antiquity."4 Our set of articles challenges such reductionist views by exploring speculative configurations in the Mediterranean through literary representations of cultural encounters, social conflicts, and environmental crises. Offering analyses of various narratives that present dystopian articulations of the past and figurations of the present along with utopian aspirations for the future, the five contributions in this special section aim to expand the predominantly Eurocentric/Anglophone understanding of the Mediterranean by bringing together scholars and texts from diverse countries: Türkiye, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. They demonstrate the cultural interactions between different traditions, conventions, styles, and narratives, all within the broad domain of "speculative" visioning. As Franco Cassano points out, the Mediterranean "becomes the root that we need to rediscover today," but one that is "constitutionally plural. … The Mediterranean that emerges is not a monolithic identity, but a multiverse that trains the mind to grasp the complexities of the world: hybridity, crossroads, and identities that do not love purity and cleanliness, but have been mixed for a long time."5 Cassano's emphasis on plurality as much as rootedness is relevant to the scope and purposes of our contributions as well.The articles here refrain from creating new hierarchies by simply inverting the East-West dichotomy, or by consolidating the center-margin debate within the context of the Mediterranean. While using familiar Western hermeneutical tools to understand utopian and/or dystopian narratives produced in the Mediterranean, this special section underscores historical, political, social, and literary particularities, engaging with various manifestations of power on both textual and contextual grounds. Gabriele Proglio's introduction to Decolonising the Mediterranean (2016) informs the critical orientation of our approach. Decolonizing the Mediterranean "means deconstructing the power relations at play," he writes, "viewing the Mediterranean as an excess space of signification in order to reconsider the past and present stories and subjectivities erased by Eurocentric, nationalist historical discourse."6 Such reconsiderations are essential to imagining future utopian possibilities not [End Page 128] only for fictional narratives but also for the many types of discursive practices shaping the material world.Following Proglio's lead, Ceyhun Arslan examines utopian possibilities that the Mediterranean, whether taken as a context or as a framework, generates for artists and scholars. He argues for the utopian potential of the Mediterranean's longue-durée history, underlining the importance of identifying and resisting discriminatory notions and practices of Western imperialism throughout that history. Drawing on recent approaches to Mediterranean studies, he envisions what he calls a "disciplinary utopia," wherein critics, scholars, and artists carefully attend to linguistic and historical differences in... (shrink)

Paul of Aegina's (fl.c. 630)Pragmateiais the only extant Greek medical text from antiquity that discusses the extraction of arrows and small missiles. In his book on surgery, Paul details how to extract arrows according to their properties and the parts of the body which they have wounded (6.88). He prefaces his instructions by describing how arrows differ in their material, figure, size, number, mode, and power. Paul's account of arrow varieties appears to reflect the environment of his medical practice, seventh-century (...) Alexandria, for he refers to Egyptian arrow types when listing the material composition and sizes of different arrows. (shrink)

Starting from the current trend to digitise the university, this thesis aims to clarify the specific relation between university thinking and its use of media. This thesis is an investigation concerning the sensorial and medial conditions which enable the event of thinking to emerge at the university, i.e. conditions which do not make thinking necessary, but possible. Thinking is approached as an event which can happen while studying at the university, not as an outcome, nor a disposition or skill. The (...) ambition of this thesis is theory development and of making a contribution in the field of philosophy of education. The theoretical framework discussed in chapters one and two will allow first, an analysis of the university sensorium inspired by the work of Ivan Illich who, through a history of the senses, pioneered this kind of research applied to medieval reading practices. Secondly, the work of media philosopher Vilém Flusser is used to operationalize the analysis of media at the university; this thesis will use the Flusserian concepts of code, modes of consciousness, transcoding, gestures, intellectual field, dialogue and apparatus. The methodology consists of a novel approach inspired by Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures: in order to find traces of thinking, this investigation looks for gestures (with media) occurring in university practices, gestures which seem to imply some form of coding or transcoding. The first chapter critically discusses Ivan Illich’s historical hypothesis of the mediatic specificity of the university thinking. Illich works with a particular conception of the history of the senses through which he shows how the invention of the optical text and its way of reading gave rise to a new way of thinking which was later fostered by the university. The text emerges as an instrumental way of using the book for studying and thinking, a profanation and suspension of the book. This move is taken to be the signature move of the university which enables a particular way of thinking: abstract and non-visual thinking, which is made present through the event of reading. The second chapter introduces the media-theoretical framework of Flusser by discussing his particular take on codes and the modes of consciousness enabled by the dominant codes. Provisionally, transcoding is taken to be an indication of the event of thinking. The threshold introduces the approach of a phenomenology of gestures which will be used in the following two chapters. The third chapter examines the practice of university lecturing from a sensorial and gestural perspective by using several direct observations of lectures and historical reports of lectures. It was found that the lecture does not promote any particular sense, hence no particular mode of consciousness, and that the media in the lecture suffers a continuous transcoding. Thinking in the lecture was described as a thinking which suddenly makes itself present for all those attending the lecture. The fourth chapter examines MOOCs which are taken to be the digital counterpart of the university course. The specific media usage enabled by MOOCs is described starting from two case studies: an xMOOC and the bMOOC (designed by KU Leuven and LUCA researchers). Using interviews and an autoethnographic account, this chapter finds indications of what could be digital gestures in the MOOC and concludes that thinking in the MOOC occurs as a collective construction of a techno-image. The fifth and final chapter outlines the theoretical contributions of this thesis. The kind of thinking made possible by university practices is described as a form of collective thinking, non-productive and anti-apparatus. The ways in which this thinking is made possible are theorised by introducing the notion of mediatic displacement, a specific event in which the particular logic of media is suspended in such a way as to make room for a thinking which is not determined by any mediality. The notion of intellectual askesis is proposed for the collective enactment of attention, as the sensorial condition which makes possible the mediatic displacement. In light of these findings, the thesis proposes to understand the promise of the digital university as still a utopian project to come, because it cannot yet enable the sensorial and collective attention techniques which the classical university managed to enact through its study practices. (shrink)