Shared decision-making has become a new focus of health policy. Though its core elements are largely agreed upon, there is little consensus regarding which outcomes to prioritize for policy-mandated shared decision-making.

This book provides a systematic, inter-disciplinary examination of beliefs in as well as evidence for reincarnation that will appeal to students of anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, and the psychology of consciousness and memory, as well as parapsychology.

How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and motion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral type of motion called fictive motion (FM; as in The road runs along the coast) can influence thought about time. Our results (...) suggest that FM uses the same structures evoked in understanding literal motion, and that these literal aspects of FM influence temporal reasoning. (shrink)

Established wisdom in cognitive science holds that the everyday folk psychological abilities of humans -- our capacity to understand intentional actions performed for reasons -- are inherited from our evolutionary forebears. In _Folk Psychological Narratives_, Daniel Hutto challenges this view and argues for the sociocultural basis of this familiar ability. He makes a detailed case for the idea that the way we make sense of intentional actions essentially involves the construction of narratives about particular persons. Moreover he argues that (...) children acquire this practical skill only by being exposed to and engaging in a distinctive kind of narrative practice. Hutto calls this developmental proposal the narrative practice hypothesis. Its core claim is that direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons supply children with both the basic structure of folk psychology and the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice. In making a strong case for the as yet underexamined idea that our understanding of reasons may be socioculturally grounded, Hutto not only advances and explicates the claims of the NPH, but he also challenges certain widely held assumptions. In this way, _Folk Psychological Narratives_ both clears conceptual space around the dominant approaches for an alternative and offers a groundbreaking proposal. (shrink)

People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract -- by an object they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different things will disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In _Yuck!_, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives. Disgust has recently been riding a swell (...) of scholarly attention, especially from those in the cognitive sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the "affective turn." Kelly proposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about disgust. He offers a new account of the evolution of disgust that builds on the model and argues that expressions of disgust are part of a sophisticated but largely automatic signaling system that humans use to transmit information about what to avoid in the local environment. He shows that many of the puzzling features of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are by-products of the imperfect fit between a cognitive system that evolved to protect against poisons and parasites and the social and moral issues on which it has been brought to bear. Kelly's account of this emotion provides a powerful argument against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification. (shrink)

Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason about time, and if so, when and how? Three experiments investigated how (...) thinking about “abstract” motion through sequences of numbers or letters would influence reasoning about time. Our results extend earlier psychological work on the link between time and space by showing that even motion in non-physical domains can influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence that metaphorical understanding is grounded in our everyday physical and conceptual experience. (shrink)

Our study seeks a better understanding of how Spanish-speaking cancer patients communicate about their personal experiences with cancer. We examine the use of metaphor in narratives contributed to an online forum for Spanish speakers afflicted with various types of cancer. Specifically, we identify, quantify and discuss three categories of metaphors: violence, journey and other. Our study expands prior work on cancer communication by examining a language other than English, by focusing on how cancer victims communicate among themselves, and by examining (...) how cancer narratives discuss concerns about personal experiences with this disease. Research thus far has focused on English. The work also expands on what is known about how people use the metaphor ‘in the wild’. (shrink)

Is liberal democracy appropriate for East Asia? In this provocative book, Daniel Bell argues for morally legitimate alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy in the region. Beyond Liberal Democracy, which continues the author's influential earlier work, is divided into three parts that correspond to the three main hallmarks of liberal democracy--human rights, democracy, and capitalism. These features have been modified substantially during their transmission to East Asian societies that have been shaped by nonliberal practices and values. Bell points to the (...) dangers of implementing Western-style models and proposes alternative justifications and practices that may be more appropriate for East Asian societies. If human rights, democracy, and capitalism are to take root and produce beneficial outcomes in East Asia, Bell argues, they must be adjusted to contemporary East Asian political and economic realities and to the values of nonliberal East Asian political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism. Local knowledge is therefore essential for realistic and morally informed contributions to debates on political reform in the region, as well as for mutual learning and enrichment of political theories. Beyond Liberal Democracy is indispensable reading for students and scholars of political theory, Asian studies, and human rights, as well as anyone concerned about China's political and economic future and how Western governments and organizations should engage with China. (shrink)

This work examines the use and understanding of metaphor in wildfire discourse. We focus on the framing of wildfires as monsters, seen in statements such as “Monster wildfire rages in Colorado” and “Two monster wildfires in Northern California are slowly being tamed,” which reflect a “wildfire is monster” metaphor. Study 1 analyzes how and when this phrase is used in TV news reports of wildfires, and Study 2A and Study 2B investigate how it influences reasoning about risks associated with wildfire. (...) The results show that metaphor is widely used in framing news reports about significant wildfires, and that its use influences how people reason about them. The work is part of a project aimed at developing better ways to communicate about risks related to natural events and climate change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 53-71 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Politics Jann Matlock [Figures]The failure of the Second Republic, as we know well, thanks to Marx, was a matter of ghostly politics.1 Successful revolutions succeeded—claimed Marx—in "waking the dead" in order to glorify the new struggles. Unsuccessful revolutions parodied, as in 1848, the old ones. The Second Republic failed to find again "the spirit of revolution" ("den Geist der (...) Revolution"); instead, it made its "ghost walk about again" ["Der 18te Brumaire" 116].2The "conjurations of the dead" ("Totenbeschwörungen") [115] of the failed Second Republic—and of the Second Empire, which crowned its disastrous experiment—were nowhere more apparent than in the obsession that swept France in 1853 within months after Louis-Napoléon declared himself Emperor in the spectral shadow of his great-uncle, as contemporary Louis Figuier described:Suddenly—it was near the last days of April 1853—Paris woke up prey to the [Table-]turning epidemic, and the newspapers, which finally had to break the silence, informed us that [the epidemic] had simultaneously burst forth in Strasbourg, in Marseille, in Bordeaux, in Toulouse, and in all our other great population centers. For the public, it was, at first, only a simple amusement to which people everywhere surrendered themselves amidst great bursts of laughter. Pedestal tables [guéridons], [other kinds of] tables, hats, plates and washbasins—everything that was within reach—were called into service. Some people succeeded. Others—and these were the greater number—failed at the experiment; they accused the successful of deception [supercherie], and the successful, in their turn, accused the unsuccessful of failing to believe. "They turn; they donít turn": that summed up all the debates on this subject, and these were the only two terms through which, among the vulgar, the question of the tables was thrashed about. In our country, always quite frivolous about serious matters, though sometimes extreme in its credulousness and sometimes absurd in its skepticism, the tables were for the larger share of people only an amusement, only a way to kill time in society. Quarrels were frequent [End Page 53] on this subject. People denied. People confirmed. People laughed—when they were not losing their tempers.Nevertheless, the phenomenon soon appeared to make progress, and this was quite another story. Not only did the tables turn, but they spoke and wrote; they rose up and held themselves in the air without any strings—or at least without any visible ones. The tables gave consultations, discovered secrets buried in the most profound mystery, put the world of the living in communication with the world of the dead, and finally, behaved in such a way to let people believe they were haunted by spirits [hantées par des esprits]. [294-95] The Baron Du Potet, editor of the Journal du magnétisme, remarked in the summer of 1853 that "The tables are making one hell of a noise! —Enter into the porter's lodge, you'll see him make his table turn; go to the home of a judge, of a lawyer, of an archbishop even, and their tables are turning—after dinner, of course. It seems that they are even interrogating tables in palaces" [643]. Alexandre Erdan, author of an 1855 book on "the religious excentricities" of contemporary France, denounced the table turning as "a universal monomania" and declared it the "the characteristic event" of the year 1853, "that memorable period of universal mental estrangement" [71]. Daumier honored the trend in May and June 1853 with a series of a dozen caricatures called La Fluidomanie.3 Caricaturist Cham continued to ridicule its believers well into the year 1853 [Fig. 1].4 Louis Huart, author of a series of satirical articles in the opposition newspaper Le Charivari recounted a debate between two scholars on the subject: "Sir, are you for tables turning or for tables not turning," asked the first. The second replied, "It's all the same to me so long as the table is well served and it doesn't turn while I'm eating." Huart's conclusion, not dissimilar to that of most... (shrink)

This article considers the conceptual significance of relationality in Sappho. It argues that Sappho's poetry reconstitutes systems of relation by making evident exceptions to their explanatory capacity. These exceptions can be profitably understood through the rubric of the “event.” Drawing in particular on the relational function of prepositions and Alain Badiou's philosophical work on the event, the article examines how “thinking prepositionally” alongside Sappho reveals both the relations that make up the situational world of her poetry as well as those (...) evental moments of non-relation through which that world is impossibly transformed. The article concludes with considerations of Sapphic fidelity—that is, how Sappho's poetry realizes the transformative potential of the event—and the poet's articulation of the event through figures of preeminence and comparison. (shrink)

In the wake of political evil on a large scale, what does justice consist of? Daniel Philpott takes up this question in Just and Unjust Peace. While scholars have written about many aspects of dealing with past injustice, no general ethic has emerged. Philpott seeks to provide a holistic model that delivers concrete ethical guidelines for societies striving to build peace.

The view we defend is that in virtue of its nature, disgust is not fit to do any moral or social work whatsoever, and that there are no defensible uses for disgust in legal or political institutions. We first describe our favoured empirical theory of the nature of disgust. Turning from descriptive to normative issues, we address the best arguments in favour of granting disgust the power to justify certain judgements, and to serve as a social tool, respectively. Daniel (...) Kahan advances a pair of theses that suggest disgust is indispensable (Moral Indispensability Thesis), and so has an important part to play in the functioning of a just, well-ordered society (Conservation Thesis). We develop responses and show how they rebut the arguments given in support of each thesis. We conclude that any society free of social disgust would be more just, reasonable and compassionate. (shrink)

In short, he is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write. In Becoming Mead, Daniel R. Huebner traces the ways in which knowledge has been produced by and about the famed American philosopher.

In the standard analysis of economic institutions--which include social conventions, the working rules of an economy, and entitlement regimes --economists invoke the same theories they use when analyzing individual behavior. In this profoundly innovative book, Daniel Bromley challenges these theories, arguing instead for "volitional pragmatism" as a plausible way of thinking about the evolution of economic institutions. Economies are always in the process of becoming. Here is a theory of how they become. Bromley argues that standard economic accounts see (...) institutions as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics--particularly the "new" institutional economics--suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage. He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents--legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders--who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create. Bromley's approach avoids the prescriptive consequentialism of contemporary economics and asks, instead, that we see these emergent and evolving institutions as the reasons for the individual and aggregate behavior their very adoption anticipates. These hoped-for outcomes comprise sufficient reasons for new laws, judicial decrees, and administrative rulings, which then become instrumental to the realization of desired individual behaviors and thus aggregate outcomes. (shrink)

War metaphors are ubiquitous in discussions of everything from political campaigns to battles with cancer to wars against crime, drugs, poverty, and even salad. Why are warfare metaphors so common, and what are the potential benefits and costs to using them to frame important social and political issues? We address these questions in a detailed case study by reviewing the empirical literature on the subject and by advancing our own theoretical account of the structure and function of war metaphors in (...) public discourse. We argue that war metaphors are omnipresent because they draw on basic and widely shared schematic knowledge that efficiently structures our ability to reason and communicate about many different types of situations, and they reliably express an urgent, negatively valenced emotional tone that captures attention and motivates action. Nevertheless, we find that the meaning of war metaphors is intimately tied to the context in which they are used, which may result in either positive or negative outcomes, depending on the situation. Thus, blanket statements about whether or not a war frame is useful are misguided or overly constraining. Here we situate our case study results in relation to popular theories of metaphoric representation and processing and offer some guidelines for using a war framing effectively. This work helps illuminate the complex, dynamic, and nuanced functions of metaphor in cognition in general, and in public discourse in particular. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, Confucianism was condemned by Westerners and East Asians alike as antithetical to modernity. Internationally renowned philosophers, historians, and social scientists argue otherwise in Confucian Political Ethics. They show how classical Confucian theory--with its emphasis on family ties, self-improvement, education, and the social good--is highly relevant to the most pressing dilemmas confronting us today. Drawing upon in-depth, cross-cultural dialogues, the contributors delve into the relationship of Confucian political ethics to contemporary social issues, exploring Confucian perspectives (...) on civil society, government, territorial boundaries and boundaries of the human body and body politic, and ethical pluralism. They examine how Confucianism, often dismissed as backwardly patriarchal, can in fact find common ground with a range of contemporary feminist values and need not hinder gender equality. And they show how Confucian theories about war and peace were formulated in a context not so different from today's international system, and how they can help us achieve a more peaceful global community. This thought-provoking volume affirms the enduring relevance of Confucian moral and political thinking, and will stimulate important debate among policymakers, researchers, and students of politics, philosophy, applied ethics, and East Asian studies. The contributors are Daniel A. Bell, Joseph Chan, Sin Yee Chan, Chenyang Li, Richard Madsen, Ni Lexiong, Peter Nosco, Michael Nylan, Henry Rosemont, Jr., and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

In this book, public health ethicist Daniel S. Goldberg sets out to characterize the subjective experience of pain and its undertreatment within the US medical establishment, and puts forward public policy recommendations for ameliorating the undertreatment of pain. The book begins from the position that the overwhelming focus on opioid analgesics as a means for improving the undertreatment of pain is flawed, and argues instead that dominant Western models of biomedicine and objectivity delegitimize subjective knowledge of the body and (...) pain in the US. This general intolerance for the subjectivity of pain is part of a specific American culture of pain in which a variety of actors take part, including not only physicians and health care providers, but also pain sufferers, caregivers, and policymakers. Concentrating primarily on bioethics, history, and public policy, the book brings a truly interdisciplinary approach to an urgent practical ethical problem. Taking up the practical challenge, the book culminates in a series of policy recommendations that provide pathways for moral agents to move beyond contests over drug policy to policy arenas that, based on the evidence, hold more promise in their capacity to address the devastating and inequitable undertreatment of pain in the US. (shrink)

In _The Priority of Prudence_, Daniel Mark Nelson proposes a reappropriation of a moral perspective that focuses on the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. The study aims to recover and rehabilitate the virtue of prudence as a way of resuming a moral conversation that has been stalemated for too long. Nelson's main source for reviving the virtue of prudence is St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the cardinal virtues in the _Summa Theologica_. A primary problem with using (...) Aquinas as a source for reviving an ethics of virtue centered on prudence is that he is commonly perceived as the most prominent figure in the conflicting natural-law tradition. According to Nelson's reinterpretation, however, Aquinas teaches that moral understanding depends first and foremost on prudence working in accord with other cardinal virtues and that natural law functions to explain moral reasoning rather than to guide it. This study serves to advance the debate about the contemporary relevance of an ethics of virtue by way of its significantly more detailed explication of prudence. Nelson makes important connections between influential reinterpretations of the ethical theory of Aquinas that have been published during the last thirty years and widespread interest in an ethics of virtue that has been expressed by Alasdair Maclntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, William Sullivan, Robert Bellah, and others. _The Priority of Prudence _represents a significant contribution to the scholarly literature both in the study of Aquinas and in the debate on the ethics of virtue. (shrink)

Global consumption of antibiotics has accelerated the evolution of bacterial antimicrobial resistance. Yet, the risks from increasing bacterial antimicrobial resistance are not restricted to human populations: transmission of antimicrobial resistant bacteria occurs between humans, farms, the environment and other reservoirs. Policies that take a ‘One Health’ approach deal with this cross-reservoir spread, but are often more restrictive concerning human actions than policies that focus on a single reservoir. As such, the burden of justification lies with these more restrictive policies. We (...) argue that an ethical justification for preferring One Health policies over less restrictive alternatives relies on empirical evidence as well as theory. The ethical justification for these policies is based on two arguments: (i) comparatively greater effectiveness, and (ii) comparatively better tracking of moral responsibility. Yet the empirical assumptions on which these claims rest are limited by existing empirical knowledge. Using livestock farming as an example, we suggest that scientific research into characterising antimicrobial resistance and linking practices to outcomes ought to be guided (at least in part) by the imperative to supply the context-specific data needed to ethically justify preferring a One Health policy over less restrictive alternatives. (shrink)

In _The Smile of Tragedy_, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche’s attitude toward what he called “the tragic age of the Greeks,” showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of “Dionysian pessimism,” Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. (...) Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle’s medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of “selflessness,” as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DID AQUINAS CHANGE HIS MIND ABOUT THE WILL? DANIEL WESTBERG University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia 0 NE OF THE MOST fundamental and challenging problems in the interpretation of St. Thomas is the proper relationship of intellect and will, on which so much of moral theology (and thus of the Summa Theologiae) hinges. As Alasdair Macintyre indicates in both After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? the problem involves (...) our understanding of how to appreciate the genius of Aquinas in the monumental task of harmonizing Aristotelian practical reason and the biblical and Augustinian categories of will, sin and the law of God. When this framework is brought to the reading of St. Thomas, it is very difficult to understand certain texts which can seem to be obscure or inconsistent. In some cases he seems to be following Aristotle's explanations of practical reason and choice, and elsewhere he emphasizes the freedom of the will. One method of dealing with this is to argue for a change in Thomas's thinking: that he shifted from an early emphasis on the intellect (his Aristotelian phase) to an appreciation for the dynamic freedom of the will (which he inherited and developed from the Augustinian tradition). This has the virtue of seeming to deal neatly with inconvenient texts by consigning them to a position which he abandoned; but as we shall see the treatments by Aquinas do not fit the chronology required by this schema of development. There is very little evidence, actually, to recommend this thesis ~even though it has been advocated by prominent scholars41 42 DANIEL WESTBERG and there are strong reasons why we should reject this theory of change. That this explanation has nevertheless been widely held says more about the tradition of voluntarism in our thinking (and our tendency to see Aquinas in that light) than about the merits of the case brought forward to argue for Thomas's shift from reason to will. Proponents of the Theory of Change Dom Odon Lattin questioned the dating of De Malo 6 to 126368 by Mandonnet (and ca. 1268 by Grabmann) on the basis that the work shows advances in the treatment of liberum arbitrium. He argued that whereas Thomas had placed the primary motive factor on reason in his earlier works 1 the emphasis was shifted to the will in De Malo 6 and ST I-II, q.9, a. 4. Therefore we could conclude that De Malo is posterior to ST I and anterior to ST I-II.2 Lottin was right about the dating, but not about the reasons given for it. He alleged that the structure of the argument in De Malo 6 is entirely different from previous treatments because the distinction between voluntas and liberum arbitrium has disappeared and been replaced by " liberty of specification " and "liberty of exercise." Lattin admitted, however, that the former belongs to reason and the latter to will implying (without realizing it, perhaps) that we might well interpret this as a change of terminology rather than a change of doctrine. Lottin softened his claims the following year in an article where he wrote: " ll ne faudrait pas urger la difference... qui eziste entre cet expose du De Malo et celui du De Veritate," admitting that the distinction between specification and exercise is also to be found in De Veritate. Therefore we should not speak "d'opposition ni meme de diversite de doctrine." 3 1 E.g. De Veritate 22.12; Summa contra Gentiles III, 89; ST I, q.82, a.4. 2 " La date de la Question Disputee De Malo de Saint Thomas d'Aquin," Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique 24 (1928) : 373-388. 3 0. Lottin, "Le libre arbitre chez saint Thomas d'Aquin," Revue thomiste 12 (1929): 424, n. 1; reprinted in vol. 1 of Psychologie et morale a=- Xlle et Xllle siecles (Gembloux, 1948). DID AQUINAS CHANGE HIS MIND 43 There is still a difference, however, in emphasis, Lottin argued, for two reasons: ( 1) In the De Malo a text from the Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle is quoted to indicate that God is the first mover of the will; this apparently undercuts the priority of the intellect over the will; Lottin... (shrink)

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that people sometimes take physical actions to make themselves more effective problem solvers. The task was to generate all possible words that could be formed from seven Scrabble letters. In one condition, participants could use their hands to manipulate the letters, and in another condition, they could not. Results show that more words were generated with physical manipulation than without. However, an interaction was obtained between the physical manipulation conditions and the specific (...) letter sets chosen, indicating that physical manipulation helps more for generating words in some circumstances than in others. Overall, our findings can be explained in terms of an interactive search process in which external, physical activity effectively complements internal, cognitive activity. Within this framework, the interaction can be explained in terms of the relative difficulty of generating words from the letters given in the different sets. (shrink)

When literary texts are included in a course on moral philosophy they tend to be classical tragedies or existentialist novels: texts filled with major moral transgressions and agonized debates over rights, wrongs, and relativism. Recently, however, the focus of much discussion on literature and moral philosophy has been Henry James’s last novel, The Golden Bowl. This ought to seem surprising. For The Golden Bowl is a quintessential Jamesian novel. Almost nothing happens. In the course of more than five hundred pages (...) there are two marriages, one affair, and a single act of violence, the smashing of the golden bowl. The rest is reflection, nuance, detail: the creation and preservation of a “‘brilliant, perfect surface,’” one “scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than the cheek of royalty.”1 There are no extreme actions or high-flown speculations. The moral issues among the four central characters either go unspoken or are raised expressly to be suppressed, banished from articulation. And what counts as the expression of the moral maturity and insight of the heroine, Maggie Verver, is her extraordinary ability to keep the truth silen00to put it precisely, to lie. If even there was a novel in which the protagonists shied away from moral debate, it is The Golden Bowl.The challenge for the philosophical critic, it seems to me, is to argue that it is just this stress on surface and silence that makes this novel of interest to moral philosophers, that makes it exemplary for how literature can do something philosophically important that philosophy cannot. 1. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, pp. 445, 172; hereafter cited by page number. Daniel Brudney is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:EMOTION AND GOD: A REPLY TO MARCEL SAROT* DANIEL WESTBERG University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia M ARCEL SAROT has helpfully drawn attention to the question of St. Thomas's treatment of divine emotion; and in my view he rightly protests against the widely fashionable approach of rejecting the classical doctrine of impassibility in favor of a suffering and passible God. Nevertheless, I disagree sharply with his contentions (1) that (...) emotion is restricted to corporeal creatures,' and therefore (2) that emotion cannot be ascribed to God. What kind of moral agent would God be without emotion? Sarot is not helpful here, and in this respect the critics of impassibility have a legitimate point; for, if we eliminate emotion from God, then we have to treat the Scriptures as "embodying primitive anthropomorphic conceptions of God," so that God's love, wrath, mercy, justice, and even his "serious concern for the welfare of His people are meaningless."2 To dismiss the biblical picture of God as anthropomorphic, maintaining not only that "anger" and "joy" are symbolic, but that even the notions of care and concern are not applicable to the divine being, seems unfaithful to revelation. It also calls into question the nature of God's personality and agency.' *See Marcel Sarot, "God, Emotion, and Corporeality," The Thomist 58 (1994): 61-92. Much of this paper was prepared for a theological discussion group at the University of Virginia, before the appearance of Sarot's article. I am grateful for the points raised by Robert Wilken, Jamie Ferreira, Eugene Rogers, David Hart, and others in the discussion, and for the helpful comments of Jeff Greenman on this version. 1 Sarot, 82: "without corporeality, no emotion." 2 T. E. Pollard, "The Impassibility of God," Scottish Journal ofTheology 8 (1955): 360..1 R. E. Creel thinks that emotional impassibility is compatible with caring about and acting for the welfare of another person, but that such a being could not be "rejoiced by the good fortunes of its beloved and distressed by its misfortunes" (Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology [Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1986], 117). I do not think this is close enough to the biblical presentation. 109 110 DANIEL WESTBERG The burden of my response, and what I explain below, is this: Being a rational agent implies emotion of a kind. If we can speak of God having intellect and will, which St. Thomas does (STh I, qq. 14 & 19), so that God is an intelligent being with powers to act, then we should be able to speak (with similar qualifications) about emotion in God. In other words, agency by intellect and will implies emotion, which means that emotion should be ascribed to God, as the Bible does, but in a way that does not attribute passibility. The two basic mistakes I see in Sarot's account are these: (1) to rely on physicalist definitions of the nature of emotion; (2) to assume that the Latin passio is the same as the contemporary English term "emotion." Thus I agree that Aquinas understood the relevant meaning of passio to refer to a person undergoing some bodily change (a transmutatio corporalis), but deny that this extended in Aquinas's account over the entire range of even human emotion. Much of the recent work in the field of emotion, amongst both philosophers and psychologists, suggests that bodily sensation is only sometimes an aspect of emotion, and not essential in its definition. I shall attempt to show the parallels between the distinctions made by Aquinas and the framework of some of this contemporary research. I. EMOTION AND MORAL AGENCY The essence of emotion has to do with being a moral agent, not with bodily existence. Any moral being (including angels and other spirits, God and human beings) has emotion. This is the implication of any moral psychology (especially, though not necessarily, Aristotelian) that analyzes moral action as a result of choice combining reason and desire in reference to an end to be obtained. Beings that have intellect and will (or rational appetite) have emotion; that is, they are capable of being "moved" towards (or away from) an object by appetite. For human beings, the paradigm experience of emotion is... (shrink)

My construction of the position of the eye in Rabbinic Judaism represents almost a reversal of the roles “Hebraic” and “Hellenic.” A powerful case can be made that only under Hellenic influence do Jewish cultures exhibit any anxiety about the corporeality of visibility of God; the biblical and Rabbinic religions were quite free of such influences and anxieties. Thus I would identify Greek influences on Judaism in the Middle Ages as being the force for repressing the visual. The Neoplatonic and (...) Airstotelian revision of Judaism undertaken by the Jewish scholastics was so successful that it has resulted in the near-total forgetting of the biblical and Rabbinic traditions of God’s visibility. W. J. T. Mitchell’s characterization of the Rabbinic tradition is a perfect example of this “forgetting.” In order to position Judaism in a typology of cultures, Mitchell cites Moses Maimonides. Mitchell’s reading of Maimonides is well-founded; the problem lies rather in the identification of Maimonides as if he typified the old Rabbinic tradition. In my view, he represents a distinct departure from that tradition. This Platonic departure was indeed marked and condemned as such by many of his contemporaries, but it has become the almost unchallenged orthodoxy of later Judaism as well as of the critical tradition. The memory of having seen God in the Bible and the desire to have that experience again were a vital part of Rabbinic religion. They constituted, moreover, a key element in the study of Torah, the making of midrash. Daniel Boyarin, associate professor of Talmud and midrash at Bar-Ilan University, has published essays on midrash and literary theory. His book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash is forthcoming. This essay is part of a larger project tentatively entitled Bodies of Torah: Language, Sex and God in Talmudic Judaism. (shrink)

Once an artist imagined how he would look if he plucked out an offending eye. He painted a self-portrait in which the orbit on the right side of his face was gaping, dolorous. Seven years passed, and then there came a day when the artist tried to break up a fight among his friends. In the ensuing melee he lost his left eye—the one he must have painted out all those years before, when working on the self-portrait, if he based (...) his image on the sight of himself in a mirror. Mirrors, of course, reverse the images before them.If we could forget niggling qualifications, epistemological hedges, all the huffing and puffing of the sense of responsibility that distinguishes intellectuals from assassins, then this story might be frightening, uncanny. As it is, I suspect most of my readers would find it terrible only in the derogatory sense. Although it has a certain primitive simplicity, it seems facile, as if it might have served for one of the weaker episodes in Walter Scott’s Waverley novels or Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone.” Even if it were presented by a master of simple plots, I can imagine it succeeding only as an occasion for metaphysical conjectures, glistening thorns and blossoms of irony, and the like. And even if I were to say that this is a true story, that Victor Brauner painted this Autoportrait in 1931 and suffered this injury in 1938, it seems unlikely that it would be more affecting. How could such a corny plot raise a shiver from anyone past the age of reason? If this story is true, so much the worse for truth. It ought to know better than to seek us out with such shopworn devices. Daniel Cottom is a professor in the English department at the University of Florida. His most recent book is Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation. He is currently completing a book on spiritualism and surrealism. (shrink)

When Augustine condemns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading “in the spirit,” they are therefore condemned to remain “Israel in the flesh.” Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one that is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language (...) and discover its immaterial spirit.1 This way of thinking about language has been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul’s usage of “in the flesh” and “in the spirit” respectively to mean literal and figurative. Romans 7:5-6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: “For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter.” In fact, the exact same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, who writes that his interest is in “the hidden and inward meaning which appeals to the few who study soul characteristics rather than bodily forms.”2 For both, hermeneutics becomes anthropology. 1. See Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall, pp. 107-12.2. Philo, On Abraham, sec. 147, in vol. 6 of Philo, trans. and ed. F. H. Colson, p. 75. It is very important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school of people who understood the Bible, and indeed the philosophy of language, as he did. On this see David Winston, “Philo and the Contemplative Life,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green, pp. 198-231, esp. p. 211. Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the department of Near-Eastern studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, as well as the forthcoming Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, from which the present essay is drawn. He is currently engaged in a project entitled The Politics of the Spirit: Paul as a Jewish Cultural Critic. (shrink)

As critics, a vital part of our task is to examine the ways in which language mystifies and reveals, serves and disserves human desires and aspirations. In that spirit we feel that engaging the leading Palestinian intellectual in the United States in a critical dialogue is a vital task. Although this reply takes issue with several points in Edward Said’s paper, “An Ideology of Difference”, our critique is intended as part of the struggle for increased mutual empathy. We in no (...) way wish to deny Said’s claims regarding the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations, nor the validity of Said and other Palestinian intellectuals’ efforts to counter the destructive military, political, and ideological forces that stand in the way of the Palestinians’ achievement and self-determination. Said’s critiques of the idea that Israel is somehow above criticism, and of the elimination of the Palestinians from “Western” discourse, are both valid.2We wish to make our own perspective clear at the start. We are both Jewish nationalists. We believe that it’s a good thing to be Jewish. We believe that those of Jewish heritage who fail to explore and re-create that heritage lose something of themselves. We think that Judaism still has a role to play in the healing of the world. By making this statement, we are not claiming that our views are identical,3 nor that they are the same from day to day, nor, a fortiori, that they are identical or even similar to those of many or most other people who would define themselves in that way. This, we note, touches on one of the aspects of Said’s paper of which we are most critical: The statements that he makes at several points, which seem to reify Zionists and Zionism into one model of theory and social practice, as well as his occlusion of the fact that other options for Jewish self-renewal were obviated by genocide or Soviet repression. 2. We are hardly alone among Jewish intellectuals in concurring with this point. Compare the recent comments by the American Jewish leader Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:In memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study and restudy teach the contrary. Daniel Boyarin is associate professor of midrash at Bar-Ilan University. His articles on midrash and theory have appeared in Poetics Today and Representations, and a monograph on the subject is forthcoming this year. Jonathan Boyarin is a fellow of the Max Weinreich Center at the VIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He edited and translated, with Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, and is currently completing an ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris. He is active in the International Jewish Peace Union. (shrink)

That [John] Cage’s challenge to our musical beliefs, attitudes, and practices is posed from the difficult perspective of a Zen master has often been discussed. What has been neglected both by Cage himself and by others is another equally potent challenge to the ordinary which Cage formulates in a related but distinct voice: that of the philosopher. Through his relentless inquiry into new music, Cage had defined certain radical possibilities for musical change. What is in effect his skepticism about music (...) as we know it contains a cogent analysis of our musical concepts and practices: of what it is for us ordinarily to believe that something is music as opposed to not music, and of how those beliefs about music connect with styles of feeling and treating what we hear when we hear it as music. Indeed it is Cage’s genius to have established the topic of skepticism about music as an issue for philosophy and cultural criticism. Cage’s radical perspective on our musical beliefs allows us to consider both what those beliefs are and whether and how they might be justified. This invitation to philosophical response is an important feature of the avant-garde which Cage shares with Duchamp in plastic art, Gordon Matta-Clarke in architecture, and others. I wish to give it its due by outlining and addressing Cage’s skepticism about music. Daniel A. Herwitz is an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a book exploring philosophical tendencies in twentieth-century music, art, and architecture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What inspires action in Global Health?Daniel Palazuelos"Why do all of you want to go to the middle of nowhere and take care of the sickest people even though you won't have half the tools necessary to make the slightest difference?" he asks.I'm sitting in the Intensive Care Unit workroom enjoying one of those rare, calm moments during residency when this question suddenly breaks my peace. A co-resident, my (...) friend from Latin America, makes this inquiry without even looking up, as he clicks nonchalantly through some Internet pages. I look at him and try to understand him within his context; he was born and raised in [End Page E6] what is traditionally considered a "resource-poor setting," but through talent, hard work, luck and privilege he was accepted into one of the best residency programs in one of the best U.S. hospitals. Unprepared, I give some anemic responses about social responsibility and global citizenship.He looks at his screen and clicks on a couple of links. Suddenly, he turns to me and exclaims, "I get it! You guys are going because then you can put your PWAB on your CV!" I give him a blank look.He stands and goes over to the dry erase board to write: "PWAB—Picture With an African Baby."I'm amused for a moment, and then suddenly hurt. What does this mean? Is he questioning our intentions, our moral resolve? I look over to his computer and see that he's been flipping through the "Global Health Residency" pages of all the local residency programs, or the Facebook pages of colleagues who have recently returned from work abroad. My hurt morphs into incredulity—all the pages have a picture of a beaming, healthy doctor holding a beautiful, newly happy, previously sick, African baby. And then, the code bell goes off, and the admissions start. Reflection time is over.Years later, now that I have become a junior faculty member within the same residency program, I divide my year between global health projects in rural Mexico and Guatemala, the classrooms of a U.S. medical school, and the patient rooms of a teaching hospital. The number of undergraduate and medical students who approach me because they want advice about how to work in global health is staggering; their emails fill my inbox and their faces grace my office hours. External observers have even compared the unprecedented rise of this type of interest to "a veritable tsunami," and we often take for granted that this is because the field is "inspiring" (Mallampati & Heintz, 201, p. 22). We still don't know, however, what all this inspiration becomes once it touches down on-site. For many students, the experience with talented mentors on-site opens up for them a life-long career that aims to address the greatest challenges of our day. The PWAB, however, implies that for an important number of other students, global health is becoming a social capital commodity: an edu-vacation, something to make your mother proud, win a mate, maybe even just another mandatory rotation needed to spice up the application for a career in a highly competitive subspecialty.If students are the future of this field, then the way that global health educators like myself manage this issue may ultimately determine the objectives and scope of countless potential projects hoping to help the billions of people barely surviving abject poverty. I have a career in global health that is more than a hobby because of the clear vision and strong leadership of my mentors and our university (Farmer, 2011). When I was hired as faculty, they worked with me to find the right full-time equivalent (FTE) split so that I could both make a living as an attending, and also still have time to teach, think, research, and manage a project abroad pro bono. But it's from this point that my question begins: once the students are inspired, and the investment made, what inspires good, sustained, pragmatic action in global health?A big part of the answer to this question will depend on how we define global health. Global health is growing, but... (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the conceptual structure of the metaphor “SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY.” The results of four experiments suggest a tight mental link between similarity and proximity. Two experiments revealed that people judge entities to be more similar to each other when they are placed closely in space, while two other experiments showed that entities are judged to be closer to each other when they are thought to be more similar. We discuss this bidirectional metaphor transfer effect in light (...) of approaches to metaphor understanding, including the long-standing view that metaphorical mappings are assumed to be asymmetrical. We also consider the implications of this bi-directional mapping for high level cognition. (shrink)

Uncontrolled wildfires present ever-increasing risks. To respond effectively, we must communicate clearly and compellingly. This is where the scientific study of metaphor can help. Metaphor is the use of one domain to describe or think about another, a process that is often crucial for understanding phenomena that are unusually large, abstract, or complex – phenomena such as wildfires. Here, we describe two metaphorical framings that are widespread in wildfire communication: wildfire as an intentional, hungry beast; and wildfire as an enemy (...) to defeat in war. We then explore how each metaphor makes certain approaches to wildfire management seem natural, while simultaneously making it difficult to understand or appreciate others. Metaphor thus offers an integrated framework for thinking and communicating about wildfire management on multiple scales. (shrink)

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (; ; ; ; ; ; ). This imagery can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain under‐explored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements (e.g., verbs, nouns, etc.) trigger mental simulations? Third, how (...) detailed are the visual simulations that are performed? A series of behavioral experiments address these questions, using a visual object categorization task to investigate whether up‐ or down‐related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same part of the visual field (following ). The results demonstrate that either subject nouns or main verbs can trigger visual imagery, but only when used in literal sentences about real space—metaphorical language does not yield significant effects—which implies that it is the comprehension of the sentence as a whole and not simply lexical associations that yields imagery effects. These studies also show that the evoked imagery contains detail as to the part of the visual field where the described scene would take place. (shrink)