Following a trajectory of thinking from the philosophy of Spinoza via the work of Nietzsche and through Deleuze’s texts, this article explores the possibility of framing a contemporary pedagogical practice by an ontological order that does not presuppose the superiority of the mind over the body and that does not rely on universal morals but that considers instead, as its ontological point of departure, the actual bodies of children and pedagogues through what has come to be known as affective (...) learning. When considering the potentiality of a pure ontology, as outlined by Spinoza, I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of higher values and universal morals allows for a deeper understanding of the limitations of a traditional image of thought. Furthermore, I argue that Deleuze’s conception of the dogmatic image of thought can provide a helpful framework when connecting the work of the two aforementioned philosophers and when conceptualizing a possible image of thought based on the body as a singularity harboring flows of power, rather than one where the body is considered a necessary obstacle to be overcome in the quest for higher values that are situated always beyond the reach of the experiencing body.This philosophical discussion is then situated within the field of educational philosophy via the concept of affective learning which enables the incorporation of these ideas into a concrete educational setting. (shrink)

The article proposes looking at children's literature, particularly the form of the picture book, as an educational resource for producing body awareness in school. Eight reading steps for as many bodily actions aimed at naming the body, activating it, getting to know it and moving it in space, on and off the pages; between grounding, listening, breathing, playing and moving, the rediscovery of gestures and anatomical truths invites to deepen self-knowledge as a preliminary act to the encounter and relationship with (...) the other and with the environment. The picture books by their specificities of short form and cross-over, offer, even in non-fiction production, the possibility of bringing attention back to the body dimension within the school and educational debate, where it lives today in a state of malaise and oblivion. Meaningful conversations, explorations and relationships flow from the pages of the albums: research on language as a tool that gives dignity and value to each person, and encounters with the artistic representation of the world as an infinite mirror of its multiplicity and variety, constitute valuable opportunities for an education that is aware of the wholeness of learners and teachers and the integrated, erotic and embodied dimension of their relationship. (shrink)

This study analyzes the influence of grandmothers’ household residency on the presence of low height-for-age and excessive fat, waist circumference, and sum of triceps and subscapular skinfolds in a sample of 247 6- to 8-year-old urban Maya children from Yucatan, Mexico. Between September 2011 and January 2014, we obtained anthropometric and body composition data from children and mothers, as well as socioeconomic characteristics of participants and households. Grandmothers’ place of residence was categorized as either in the same household as their (...) grandchildren or in separate households. Multiple logistic regression models were used to analyze the association between grandmothers’ residency and outcome variables. Models were adjusted for maternal anthropometric characteristics and the following socioeconomic variables: family size, location, maternal education, monthly family income, and household crowding. Models showed that the presence of grandmothers in their grandchildren’s households was not associated with any of the outcome variables. In contrast, larger family size, overcrowding in the household, and lower family income predicted low height-for-age in children. Larger family size decreased the risk for being overweight based on the three parameters of body composition. Overcrowding in the household increased the risk for greater skinfolds thickness, while low family income increased the risk for higher fat mass index. The residency of grandmothers in their adult daughters’ households is not significantly associated with the outcome variables in this sample of urban Maya families. Instead, maternal anthropometric characteristics and socioeconomic conditions of the family have a greater influence on the overall growth of children. (shrink)

Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do (...) in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games. (shrink)

이 글은 류의근의 저서 『메를로-퐁티의 신체현상학』에 대한 서평이다. 서평을 통해서 찾고자 하는 바는 철학함과 철학이란 무엇인가에 대한 물음에 대한 답찾기이다. 더불어서 확인할 수 있는 것은 메를로-퐁티의 현상학이 21세기 포스트휴먼 혹은 인공지능이라는 새로운 타자의 등장과 함께 어떤 의미로 재해석될 수 있는지에 관한 것이다. 이글은 저서의 구성방법에 따라, 몸과 살, 코기토, 신, 윤리, 정치의 문제로 구분하여 살펴보았다. 특히 이 글에서 비판적으로 살펴보는 것은 저자의 메를로-퐁티 현상학이 철학사에서 차지하는 위치와 신 문제이다. 메를로-퐁티 철학의 기조는 근대철학의 이분법적 구조 속에 나타난 폭력의 문제에 대한 반성이다. (...) 철학이 진리를 드러내는 일, 특히 존재의 드러남이라고 할 때, 철학이 밝혀보여주고자하는 존재는 무엇인가. 메를로-퐁티는 살존재론에서 철학의 가능성을 찾고 있다. 그것은 보이는 것과 보이지 않는 것 사이의 끊임없는 교차와 얽힘 가운데 열어밝혀지는 존재열개이다. 따라서 살의 철학은 철학의 종말이 아니라 철학의 재탄생이다. (shrink)

This paper develops a political ontology of hospitality from the philosophies of Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, paying particular attention to the gendered, temporal, and corporeal dimensions of hospitality. Arendt's claim, that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is the welcome of ‘natality’, is used to argue that the more that this hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time that it takes is given by women without acknowledgement or support. Women's bodies are thus (...) caught within the dual poles of conservative government: regulation of the unpredictable expressions of ‘natality’ in the ‘home’ and management of the uniformity and ‘security’ of the nation. The limitations in Arendt's political ontology of hospitality are addressed by adding consideration of the operation of biopolitics and of the body as bios. (shrink)

Evidence from adult studies of deaf signers supports the dissociation between neural systems involved in processing visual linguistic and non-linguistic body actions. The question of how and when this specialization arises is poorly understood. Visual attention to these forms is likely to change with age and be affected by prior language experience. The present study used eye-tracking methodology with infants and children as they freely viewed alternating video sequences of lexical American sign language (ASL) signs and non-linguistic body actions (self-directed (...) grooming action and object-directed pantomime). In Experiment 1, we quantified fixation patterns using an area of interest (AOI) approach and calculated face preference index (FPI) values to assess the developmental differences between 6 and 11-month-old hearing infants. Both groups were from monolingual English-speaking homes with no prior exposure to sign language. Six-month-olds attended the signer’s face for grooming; but for mimes and signs, they were drawn to attend to the “articulatory space” where the hands and arms primarily fall. Eleven-month-olds, on the other hand, showed a similar attention to the face for all body action types. We interpret this to reflect an early visual language sensitivity that diminishes with age, just before the child’s first birthday. In Experiment 2, we contrasted 18 hearing monolingual English-speaking children (mean age of 4.8 years) vs. 13 hearing children of deaf adults (CODAs; mean age of 5.7 years) whose primary language at home was ASL. Native signing children had a significantly greater face attentional bias than non-signing children for ASL signs, but not for grooming and mimes. The differences in the visual attention patterns that are contingent on age (in infants) and language experience (in children) may be related to both linguistic specialization over time and the emerging awareness of communicative gestural acts. (shrink)

When I was a child, my parents had me circumcised. I was too young to have any recollection of it, but their intervention in my body is now a permanent part of my identity. They did it for cultural reasons: we come from a Muslim tradition, in which infant circumcision is one of the most important identity markers. This identity was etched in my body even before I was able to speak.Infant circumcision is one of the many ways parents shape (...) their children's bodies for cultural reasons. Parental interventions range from less invasive, such as haircuts and ear piercing, to more invasive and permanent, such as surgeries to reshape some parts of the child's body, like the nose, eyelids, or genitals.The current moral... (shrink)

This paper explores the symbolic implications of Luce Irigaray's images of the female body, particularly the two lips and the mucous. It suggests that Irigaray's work reveals some of the problems attendant on "positive images of women.".

This enlightening book presents new perspectives on how women's bodies are viewed and absorbed in popular culture, and considers some of the ways in which the body is central to questions of women's sexual and other identities.

In the last decades videogames have become very popular. In this article I argue that they establish a new relationship between bodies and identities. In videogames, the storylines are based on a mixture of other types of media fiction, where women's bodies are overrepresented and stereotypical, because of the market logic underlying these new media productions, which target a wide audience. Nevertheless, videogames' interactivity shapes new experiences of acting through other bodies. The erotic gaze on virtual (...) class='Hi'>bodies is shaped by the elements of exoticism and the grotesque. The virtual spaces and actions are characterized by exoticism (the recurrent presence of death, fear, surprise, thrills) and the realism necessary to involve the user's senses. I also argue that interaction in games is a process of imagination and action. The game user acts through another body, which he/she controls. This process opens possibilities for a resisting oppositional gaze and subversive practices, beyond the commercial aims of the games' designers. Of course, there are oppressive aspects of the virtual bodies; a female body becomes a mathematical series of polygons, out of space and time, and, only as such, the object of desire of invisible cyberteenagers. Nevertheless, as gendered subjects, to have a virtual body to play with is a liberating appropriation of a space not designed for us. (shrink)

Originally published in 1966 and now recognized as a classic, Norman O. Brown's meditation on the condition of humanity and its long fall from the grace of a natural, instinctual innocence is available once more for a new generation of readers. Love's Body is a continuation of the explorations begun in Brown's famous Life Against Death . Rounding out the trilogy is Brown's brilliant Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.

This study presents scientific theories about the female body in Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It demonstrates the influence of cultural preconceptions on such theories, and of scientific theories on cultural attitudes.

The essay examines how American superheroes wage their mythological battle against evil as one of metaphysical salvation and redemption. They incorporate fantasies of super-human and super-technological bodied that seek to inherit, realize, and surpass all previous mythic hero figures of human civilization. America is staged as a nation of nations that has reached the end of history and is waiting for Judgement Day. The waiting time is filled by the entertainment industry.

What did Thomas Jefferson look like? How did he carry himself? Such questions, reasonable to ask as we look back on a person who lived in an era before photography, are the starting point for this boldly original new work. Maurizio Valsania considers all aspects of Jefferson’s complex conception of "the body," from eighteenth-century clothing and fashion to manners, adornment, posture, gesture, and visual and material culture. Drawing also from the fields of medical science, psychology, and cultural anthropology, the author (...) conjures a vivid and detailed re-creation of the third president as a living, breathing--and pondering--human being. Having situated Jefferson in his own body, Valsania looks at the embodied Jefferson in the world of his fellow humans. Any one of the other people in Jefferson’s society--whether that other person was male or female, free or enslaved, African American or Native American--was a critical counterexample for the eighteenth-century Virginian to define himself against, and Valsania’s explorations here lead to numerous insightful discoveries about race, gender, and structures of power. The first comprehensive exploration of Jefferson’s corporeal world, Jefferson’s Body brings the man vividly to life for the modern reader while deepening our understanding of what it meant to Jefferson to be alive. (shrink)

Philosophers and artists frequently make use of metaphors drawn from female bodily experiences of pregnancy and childbirth to express intellectual or artistic creativity. While philosophical and artistic originality are presented as a kind of spiritual pregnancy, women's bodily pregnancies are often presented as at best intellectually or spiritually insignificant, to be valued solely for their products — physical children. I contrast the view of pregnancy found in philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche, and artists such as Chagall, with an understanding (...) of pregnancy influenced by feminist body art, and focus on the significance of the extent and pace of change that women experience during pregnancy. (shrink)

On Classical Theism, God is ontologically distinct from the physical universe which He has created; He needn't have created any universe at all; and He could exist even if the universe didn't. By contrast, the universe couldn't have existed if God didn't and it needs God to sustain it in existence from moment to moment. Classical Theism is thus committed to the universe not being identical to God. I shall argue that Classical Theism is committed to seeing the universe as (...) God's body . It follows that it is also committed to the falsity of theories which identify people with their bodies or state that of necessity people depend on their bodies for their continued existence. (shrink)

Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures provides an unusual and important reading of Michel Foucault's later work. This response is an effort to introduce McWhorter's project and to describe the challenge it presents to engage in askesis, the transformative exercise of thinking, which McWhorter's work itself exemplifies.

According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea.

Women are everywhere in Dune, especially the members of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. In the Dune universe, the Bene Gesserit give girls so much practice in honing their skills that it almost guarantees they will grow into supremely confident women who trust their bodies to follow through on any action they desire. The Bene Gesserit in Dune represent a fulfillment of the ideal of the liberated women Beauvoir and Young describe. If women were “given the opportunity to use their (...) full bodily capacities in free and open engagement with the world” and encouraged “to develop specific bodily skills,” they could overcome some of the challenges in a sexist society and make their goals a reality. Dualism has cast a long shadow in Western philosophy, making human bodies out to be burdens entrapping the minds within. In particular, the female body has been treated as a nuisance, even by feminists. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Elementary Students’ Construction of Geometric Transformation Reasoning in a Dynamic Animation Environment” by Alan Maloney. Upshot: Parnorkou and Maloney’s article presents an interesting, well-structured and clearly described study of children’s reasoning about mental rotations. Specifically, Parnorkou and Maloney deploy the microworld Graphs ’n Glyphs, and use it as a “window on thinking-in-change” as they observe and interview children who use it. Reading the article raised a few questions for me about the role of body (...) syntonicity in learning about rotation of geometric shapes, and I wonder where the authors feel these foundational concepts fit in with their research. (shrink)

Using Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Society thesis as a reference point, this article contributes sociologically to burgeoning critical obesity studies. It does this using qualitative data from a study of men and weightrelated issues undertaken in northern England. Taking a counter-intuitive approach, it explores whether slimming proceeds in accord with the rationalizing principles of the fast-food restaurant: calculability, efficiency, predictability and technological control. Rather than reproducing a simplified and ultimately stigmatizing account, where fatness is a pathological bodily state caused by fast (...) food, this article explores the degree to which fatness is actively made into a correctable problem using McDonaldized principles. Irrationalities and meaningful resistances associated with the public and private fight against fat are also considered. (shrink)

Much has been written about the disagreement and even radical opposition between Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conceptualizations and those of Jacques Lacan: for example, about desire, psychotherapy, the subject and the radically opposed political consequences that result from their approaches. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate from a Lacanian perspective that in the case of a central concept such as the body, there are rather more similarities than differences. Its main thesis is that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s body (...) without organs is very close to Lacan’s notion of the Other jouissance and that with slightly different strategies they both provide arguments to fight the same enemy: that is, the control and repression of singularity under capitalism. (shrink)

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push the argument, when they had previously just made an appropriate body action (e.g., a push movement) (Experiment 1), or imagined making a specific body movement (Experiment 2), than when they first made (...) a mismatching body action (e.g., a chewing movement) or no movement. These findings support the idea that appropriate body action, or even imagined action, enhances people's embodied, metaphorical construal of abstract concepts that are referred to in metaphorical phrases. (shrink)

This paper explores the gendered and temporal dimensions of the political ontology of hospitality that Derrida has developed from Levinas's philosophy. The claim is that, while hospitality per se takes time, the more that hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time it takes is given by women without acknowledgment or support. The analysis revisits Hannah Arendt's claim that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is disclosure of "natality" (innovation or the birth of the (...) new). This can be described as accounting for the "temporalisation of time": the disruption of the past (cultural tradition) in the present that is a condition of agency and political hospitality. On the other hand, the unpredictability and instability of human affairs that this temporalization of time engenders can, in times of heightened insecurity and fear, give birth to political conservatism that would contain "natality" and dampen the hospitality that characterizes democratic pluralism. The paper examines the connection between this idea of the temporalization of time and feminist observations, overlooked by Arendt, that "lived time" is gendered, that is, that the condition of "natality" and political hospitality is an unacknowledged stability provided by women giving lived time to others, beginning with reproduction in the "home." The inequities that result are exacerbated, and democracy is further compromised, if this re-gendering of domestic space is accompanied by the deregularization of labor time. (shrink)

This latest extensive study by Jeroen Dekker adds to his phenomenal body of work across four decades. The early 1980s saw his engagement with historical anthropology as ‘a new science?’ and explori...