I would first like to congratulate Dr Seale for producing a thought-provoking piece of research that has captured the imagination of the nation's media.1 I would also like to point out an interesting discordance that I have noted with regard to the findings of this important research, which ought to stimulate further discussion. Although religious doctors were significantly less likely than their non-religious colleagues to provide continuous or deep sedation until death or to provide treatment with at least ….

As part of a research conducted in the field of professional didactics for the design of video-based training for saddlers, we mobilize an iterative and collaborative analysis protocol with professionals. We compare the effects produced during a debate between experts mediated by the researcher, based sometimes on a confrontation with video traces of the activity, sometimes on the temporary diagrams of a conceptual structure of the situation. Using the argumentative trilogue analysis framework, we show how these methodologies are able to (...) foster the expression of a process of conceptualization depending on whether professionals are confronted with lived images or concep-tualizations produced by the researcher. (shrink)

As study of knowledge, epistemology attempts at identifying its necessary and sufficient conditions and defining its sources, structure and limits. From this pointof view, until present, there are no applied approaches to the Romanian archaeology. Consequently, my present paper presents an attempt to explore the structural characteristics of the knowledge creation process through the analysis of the results of a series of interviews conducted on Romanian archaeologists. The interviews followed a qualitative approach built upon a semi-structured frame. Apparent data saturation (...) was reached after four interviews within initial target group (senior researchers with institutional authority). Under these conditions a decision was made to continue the interviews within a secondary control group (young doctoral or post-doc researchers guided by members of the initial target group) in order to both verify the observed data saturation and to assess the impact of the attitude of senior researchers towards scientific research on the younger generation. The preliminary results allow to assert that Romanian archaeology is still caught in a highly conservative and intradisciplinarian manner of knowledge production with a negative effect on both new knowledgeproduction and future specialists’ education. (shrink)

IntroductionThe world pandemic of the virus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19 infection was announced by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. Due to the restrictions that were introduced in order to minimize the spread of the virus, people more often suffer from stress, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. The aim of this study was evaluation of the stress levels and sleep disorders among nursing students during the pandemic SARS-CoV-2.Materials and Study MethodsThis is a cross-sectional study conducted among 397 nursing (...) students on March 2020. The research tools used were original questionnaires, Perceived Stress Scale, and the Athenian Insomnia Scale, as well as Coping with Stress Inventory.ResultsRespondents felt a high level of stress, which occurred in 68.8% of interviewees regarding whether there was a danger of contracting COVID-19. Respondents experienced 84% stress levels when a family member suffered from COVID-19. Sleep disorders were determined mainly by the fear of infection and contact with someone who might be infected with the virus. Nursing students who felt a high level of stress often suffered from sleep disorders more frequently than students who felt a low or average stress level. The respondents decided to cope with stress by denial, taking psychoactive substances, ceasing action, or blaming themselves. The greater the intensity of stress experienced by students, the more often they undertook avoidance behaviors or showed helplessness.ConclusionDuring the pandemic, students experienced severe stress, which resulted in sleep disorders and avoidance behaviors. (shrink)

Globalization leads to cross-border business transactions between societies with very different norms and regulations regarding bribery. Bribery in international business transactions can be seen as a function of not only the demand for such bribes in different countries, but the supply, or willingness to provide bribes by multinational firms and their representatives. This study addresses the propensity of firms from 30 different countries to engage in international bribery. The study incorporates both domestic (economic development, culture, and domestic corruption in the (...) supplying country) and international factors (those countries’ patterns of trade and involvement in international accords) in explaining the willingness to bribe abroad. The propensity to provide bribes was the lowest when corruption was not tolerated in the multinational firms’ home countries, when the firms’ countries were signatories of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) anti-bribery convention, and when those countries traded heavily with wealthier nations. Further, these findings are maintained when controlling for levels of economic development and cultural values in the supplying country. In terms of culture, firms from high power distance countries showed a somewhat greater propensity for providing bribes in transactions with less-developed nations. (shrink)

The body plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world. Why, then, are we so frequently oblivious to our own bodies? We gaze at the world, but rarely see our own eyes. We may be unable to explain how we perform the simplest of acts. We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body (...) is _absent_—forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured. In part 1, Leder explores a wide range of bodily functions with an eye to structures of concealment and alienation. He discusses not only perception and movement, skills and tools, but a variety of "bodies" that philosophers tend to overlook: the inner body with its anonymous rhythms; the sleeping body into which we nightly lapse; the prenatal body from which we first came to be. Leder thereby seeks to challenge "primacy of perception." In part 2, Leder shows how this phenomenology allows us to rethink traditional concepts of mind and body. Leder argues that Cartesian dualism exhibits an abiding power because it draws upon life-world experiences. Descartes' corpus is filled with disruptive bodies which can only be subdued by exercising "disembodied" reason. Leder explores the origins of this notion of reason as disembodied, focusing upon the hidden corporeality of language and thought. In a final chapter, Leder then proposes a new ethic of embodiment to carry us beyond Cartesianism. This original, important, and accessible work uses examples from the author's medical training throughout. It will interest all those concerned with phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, or the Cartesian tradition; those working in the health care professions; and all those fascinated by the human body. (shrink)

"There are books—few and far between—which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."—Yaakov Garb, _San Francisco Chronicle_.

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith (...) Butler Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

Whole body gestational donation offers an alternative means of gestation for prospective parents who wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to, gestate. It seems plausible that some people would be prepared to consider donating their whole bodies for gestational purposes just as some people donate parts of their bodies for organ donation. We already know that pregnancies can be successfully carried to term in brain-dead women. There is no obvious medical reason why initiating such pregnancies would (...) not be possible. In this paper, I explore the ethics of whole-body gestational donation. I consider a number of potential counter-arguments, including the fact that such donations are not life-saving and that they may reify the female reproductive body. I suggest if we are happy to accept organ donation in general, the issues raised by whole-body gestational donation are differences of degree rather than substantive new concerns. In addition, I identify some intriguing possibilities, including the use of male bodies–perhaps thereby circumventing some potential feminist objections. (shrink)

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that shouldnow take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existentialphenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and MauriceMerleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical natureand experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows himto preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendencytoward idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body ;front/back asymmetry, the need to balance (...) in a gravitational field, and so forth ;and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality ;problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, (...) Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. (shrink)

The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. We aesthetically assess both our own bodies and those of others, and our felt bodily experiences have aesthetic qualities. The body features centrally in aesthetic experiences of visual art, theatre, dance and sports. It is also deeply intertwined with one's identity and sense of self. Artistic and media representations shape how we see and engage with bodies, with consequences both personal and political. This volume contains sixteen original essays by (...) contributors in philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, medicine, and law. They explore bodily beauty, sexual attractiveness, the role of images in power relations, the distinct aesthetics of disabled bodies, the construction of national identity, the creation of compassion through bodily presence, the role of bodily style in moral comportment, and the somatic aesthetics of racialized police violence. -/- Contents: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, "Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern"; A. W. Eaton, "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression"; C. Winter Han, "From 'Little Brown Brothers' to 'Queer Asian Wives': Constructing the Asian Male Body"; Deborah L. Rhode, "Appearance as a Feminist Issue"; Shirley Anne Tate, "A Tale of Two Olympians—Beauty, 'Race,' Nation"; Glenn Parsons, "The Merrickites"; Stephen Davies, "And Everything Nice"; Tobin Siebers, "In/Visible: Disability on the Stage"; Jill Sigman, "Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field"; Barbara Gail Montero, "Aesthetic Effortlessness"; Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser, "Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports"; Yuriko Saito, "Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues"; George Yancy, "White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Un-Suturing"; Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating"; Ann J. Cahill, "Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation"; Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin, "Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness" -/- . (shrink)

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, (...) is able to explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (shrink)

CURRENT CONTROVERSIES about the Mind-Body Identity Theory form a case-study for the investigation of the methods practiced by linguistic philosophers. Recent criticisms of these methods question that philosophers can discern lines of demarcation between "categories" of entities, and thereby diagnose "conceptual confusions" in "reductionist" philosophical theories. Such doubts arise once we see that it is very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to draw a firm line between the "conceptual" and the "empirical," and thus to differentiate between a statement embodying a (...) conceptual confusion and one that expresses a surprising empirical result. The proponent of the Identity Theory are identical with certain brain-processes) holds that his opponents' arguments to the effect that empirical inquiry could not identify brain-processes and sensations are admirable illustrations of this difficulty. For, he argues, the classifications of linguistic expressions that are the ground of his opponents' criticism are classifications of a language which is as it is because it is the language spoken at a given stage of empirical inquiry. But the sort of empirical results that would show brain processes and sensations to be identical would also bring about changes in our ways of speaking. These changes would make these classifications out of date. To argue against the Identity Theory on the basis of the way we talk now is like arguing against an assertion that supernatural phenomena are identical with certain natural phenomena on the basis of the way in which superstitious people talk. There is simply no such thing as a method of classifying linguistic expressions that has results guaranteed to remain intact despite the results of future empirical inquiry. Thus in this area there is no method which will have the sort of magisterial neutrality of which linguistic philosophers fondly dream. (shrink)

The mind-body problem arises because of our status as double agents apparently en rapport both with the mental and with the physical. We think, desire, decide, plan, suffer passions, fall into moods, are subject to sensory experiences, ostensibly perceive, intend, reason, make believe, and so on. We also move, have a certain geographical position, a certain height and weight, and we are sometimes hit or cut or burned. In other words, human beings have both minds and bodies. What is (...) the relation between these? Religion often tells us that we are really embodied souls released at death from our bodily prisons. Could this be right? (shrink)

Body, Community, Language, World, here made available in English for the first time is Patocka's presentation of phenomenology as a living tradition - as a philosophical heritage that requires to be rethought and redirected in light of possibilities that it has itself uncovered. Jan Patocka lived for most of his adult life in Communist Czechoslovakia where he was at times banned from publishing or teaching. Mentor of Vaclav Havel, Patocka defied the regime as one of the spokespersons for Charta (...) 77, and died in 1977, following two months of police interrogation. (shrink)

Chapter One The most plausible arguments for the identity of mind and body that have been advanced in this century have been for the identity of mental ...

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1 Self-Consciousness and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction by Naomi Eiland, Anthony Marcel and José Luis Bermúdez 2 The Body Image and Self-Consciousness by John Campbell 3 Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore 4 Persons, Animals, and Bodies by Paul F. Snowdon 5 An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self by George Butterworth 6 Objectivity, Causality, and Agency by (...) Thomas Baldwin 7 At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-World Dualism by James Russell 8 Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View by José Luis Bermúdez 9 Proprioception and the Body Image by Brian O’Shaughnessy 10 Awareness of One’s Own Body: An Attentional Theory of Its Nature, Development, and Brain Basis by Marcel Kinsbourne 11 Body Schema and Intentionality by Shaun Gallagher 12 Living without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects by Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard 13 Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership by M. G. F. Martin 14 Bodily Awareness and the Self by Bill Brewer 15 Introspection and Bodily Self-Ascription by Quassim Cassam 16 Consciousness and the Self by Naomi Eilan Contributors Index. (shrink)

Argument for Epiphenomenalism [I]: (A) Mental event-tokens are identical with physical event-tokens. (B) The causal powers of a physical event are determined only by its physical properties; and (C) mental properties are not reducible to physical properties.

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased.

Explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective.

Foreign Bodies analyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis (...) explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us. (shrink)

The body is made up of parts. This basic assumption is central in most neuroscientific studies of bodily sensation, body representation and motor action. Yet, the assumption has rarely been considered explicitly. We may indeed ask how the body is internally segmented and how body parts can be defined. That is, how can we sketch the mereology of the body? Here we distinguish between a somatosensory mereology and a motor mereology.

Clever Hans, the famous horse who was believed to be able to count, is generally cited as the paradigm of the influence of the observer. Psychologist Rosenthal has illustrated this phenomenon with his well-known experiment about ‘bright’ and ‘dull’ maze rats. Hans, however, achieved something much more interesting. Hecould not only read human minds through their bodies: he could also influence his questioners to produce gestures he could read as cues for finding the answer. Hans could make human bodies be (...) moved and be affected, and move and affect other beings and perform things without their owners’ knowledge. The question of ‘influence’ when we read this case becomes therefore far more complicated and interesting. It involves the question of the way bodies can attune, affect and transformeach other. We may follow carefully how scientists of ethological practices create access to the creatures they study, how they are moved by their subjects of interest, and how they give them a chance to be interesting andto articulate other responses. Doing so, we notice that the signs that define subject and object, what talks and what is talked about, subjectivity and objectivity, are redistributed in a new manner. These practices offer a new and pragmatic definition of the body, close to James’s theory of emotions: to have a body is to learn how to feel. (shrink)

Body image and body schema refer to two different yet closely related systems. Whereas BI can be defined as a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one's own body, BS is a system of sensory-motor capacities that functions without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring. Studies have demonstrated that applying the concepts of BI and BS enables us to conceptualize complex pathological phenomena such as anorexia, schizophrenia, and depersonalization. Likewise, it has further been argued (...) that these concepts play a crucial role in our ability to grasp our bodily experiences in the socio-cultural world according to various factors, such as gender, social class, and ethnicity. Referring to the insights of Frantz Fanon, the author of Black Skin, White Masks, this paper suggests that under certain conditions the BI can take over and reshape the BS. Based on an examination of Fanon’s writings, the paper suggests that not only the BI can truly remold the BS but that the gaze of the other can directly influence the BI. (shrink)

Virtuous Bodies breaks new ground in the field of Buddhist ethics by investigating the diverse roles bodies play in ethical development. Traditionally, Buddhists assumed a close connection between body and morality. Thus Buddhist literature contains descriptions of living beings that stink with sin, are disfigured by vices, or are perfumed and adorned with virtues. Taking an influential early medieval Indian Mahayana Buddhist text-Santideva's Compendium of Training (Siksasamuccaya)-as a case study, Susanne Mrozik demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a (...) process of physical and moral transformation. Mrozik chooses The Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing her to reveal a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies. The text is a training manual for bodhisattvas, especially monastic bodhisattvas. In it, bodies function as markers of, and conditions for, one's own ethical development. Most strikingly, bodies also function as instruments for the ethical development of others. When living beings come into contact with the virtuous bodies of bodhisattvas, they are transformed physically and morally for the better. Virtuous Bodies explores both the centrality of bodies to the bodhisattva ideal and the corporeal specificity of that ideal. Arguing that the bodhisattva ideal is an embodied ethical ideal, Mrozik poses an array of fascinating questions: What does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bodies? What kinds of bodies have virtuous effects on others? Drawing on a range of contemporary theorists, this book engages in a feminist hermeneutics of recovery and suspicion in order to explore the ethical resources Buddhism offers to scholars and religious practitioners interested in the embodied nature of ethical ideals. (shrink)

Body ecology by cosmosis refers to the experience of immersion, or the incorporation of the elements of nature through a body practice, leisure or sport. In this article, we propose comprehensive u...

The term body integrity identity disorder (BIID) describes the extremely rare phenomenon of persons who desire the amputation of one or more healthy limbs or who desire a paralysis. Some of these persons mutilate themselves; others ask surgeons for an amputation or for the transection of their spinal cord. Psychologists and physicians explain this phenomenon in quite different ways; but a successful psychotherapeutic or pharmaceutical therapy is not known. Lobbies of persons suffering from BIID explain the desire for amputation (...) in analogy to the desire of transsexuals for surgical sex reassignment. Medical ethicists discuss the controversy about elective amputations of healthy limbs: on the one hand the principle of autonomy is used to deduce the right for body modifications; on the other hand the autonomy of BIID patients is doubted. Neurological results suggest that BIID is a brain disorder producing a disruption of the body image, for which parallels for stroke patients are known. If BIID were a neuropsychological disturbance, which includes missing insight into the illness and a specific lack of autonomy, then amputations would be contraindicated and must be evaluated as bodily injuries of mentally disordered patients. Instead of only curing the symptom, a causal therapy should be developed to integrate the alien limb into the body image. (shrink)

Recent work in neuroscience and artificial intelligence has revived an old philosophical question in a new form: is the brain best understood as a system that constantly predicts its sensory input, or does cognition involve something more than prediction? Predictive processing theories describe the brain as a mechanism that minimizes prediction error and have been highly successful in explaining perception, action, and learning. This paper argues that, while prediction plays an important role in how brains function, it cannot by itself (...) explain understanding, meaning, or rational thought. The problem is not that predictive models are wrong, but that they are often asked to do too much philosophical work. Drawing on ideas from embodied cognition and interpretation, the paper shows why successful prediction does not amount to genuine understanding. Contemporary artificial intelligence systems are used as a test case: despite their impressive predictive abilities, they illustrate how behavior can be effective without being meaningful in the relevant sense. The paper proposes that cognition must be explained at more than one level, combining neural processes, bodily engagement with the world, and participation in norm-governed practices. On this view, the mind–body problem is not about mysterious mental substances, but about how different kinds of explanation fit together. (shrink)

This chapter presents an account of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the body schema as an operative intentionality that is not only opposed to, but also complexly intermingled with, the representation-like grasp of the world and one’s own body, or the body image. The chapter reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s position primarily based on his preparatory notes for his 1953 lecture ‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression’. Here, Merleau-Ponty elaborates his earlier efforts to show that the body schema is (...) a perceptual ground against which the perceived world stands out as a complex of perceptual figures. The chapter clarifies how Merleau-Ponty’s renewed interpretation of the figure-ground structure makes it possible for him to describe the relationship between body schema and perceptual (body) image as a strictly systematic phenomenon. Subsequently, the chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty understands apraxia, sleep, and perceptual orientation as examples of dedifferentiation and subtler differentiation of the body-schematic system. The last section clarifies how such body-schematic differentiating processes give rise to relatively independent superstructures of vision and symbolic cognition which constitute our body image. It, moreover, explains how, according to Merleau-Ponty, the cognitive superstructures always need to be supported by praxic operative intentionality to maintain their full sense, even though, in some cases, they have the power to compensate for praxic deficiencies. (shrink)