Bringing the Body Back to Sexual Ethics

Hypatia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Barnhill
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Small Step ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Ethical Inquiry ◽  
The One ◽  
Ethical Significance

The body and bodily experience make little appearance in analytic moral philosophy. This is true even of analytic sexual ethics—the one area of ethical inquiry we might have expected to give a starring role to bodily experience. I take a small step toward remedying that by identifying one way in which the bodily experience of sex is ethically significant: some of the physical actions of sex have a default expressive significance, conveying trust, affection, care, sensitivity, enjoyment, and pleasure. When people having sex don't in fact have these feelings, the sex can be misleading, even if they've antecedently communicated that they don't have these feelings. This account of how sex can mislead is inspired by a perhaps surprising source, Catholic sexual morality. Analytic sexual ethicists could benefit from emulating Catholic sexual morality's attentiveness to the bodily nature of sex and its ethical significance.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

Punishment and the physiology of the Timaeus

1996 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. F. Stalley
Keyword(s):  
Physical Health ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One ◽  
Mental And Physical Health ◽  
Health And Sickness ◽  
Made In

It hardly needs to be said that the parallel between mental and physical health plays an important part in Plato's moral philosophy. One of the central claims of the Republicis that justice is to the soul what health is to the body (443b–444e).1 Similar points are made in other dialogues.2 This analogy between health and sickness on the one hand and virtue and vice on the other is closely connected to the so–called Socratic paradoxes. Throughout his life Plato seems to have clung in some sense to the ideas that justice is our greatest good, that the unjust man is correspondingly miserable and that no one is therefore willingly unjust. It follows from these ideas that the unjust man, like the sick man, is in a wretched state which is not of his own choosing.

scholarly journals The Soul, the Virtues, and the Human Good: Comments on Aristotle's Moral Psychology

Labyrinth ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Kathi Beier
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Philosophy Of Psychology ◽  
Ethical Inquiry ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

In modern moral philosophy, virtue ethics has developed into one of the major approaches to ethical inquiry. As it seems, however, it is faced with a kind of perplexity similar to the one that Elisabeth Anscombe has described in Modern moral philosophy with regard to ethics in general. For if we assume that Anscombe is right in claiming that virtue ethics ought to be grounded in a sound philosophy of psychology, modern virtue ethics seems to be baseless since it lacks or even avoids reflections on the human soul. To overcome this difficulty, the paper explores the conceptual connections between virtue and soul in Aristotle's ethics. It claims that the human soul is the principle of virtue since reflections on the soul help us to define the nature of virtue, to understand the different kinds of virtues, and to answer the question why human beings need the virtues at all. 

scholarly journals The Worldwood of the Cinematic Image

Phainomenon ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
José Manuel Martins
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Essential Condition ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
General Relevance ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
Textual Support

Abstract A close analysis of the specifically cinematographic procedure in Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Dream’ Crows reveals it as an articulated and insightful philosophical statement, endowed with general relevance conceming ‘natural’ perception, phenomenological Erlebnis, mechanical image and aesthetic rapture. The antagonism between the Benjarninian lineage of a mechanical irreducibility of the cinematic image to anthropocentric categories, and the Cartesian tradition of a film-philosophy still relying on the equally irreducible structure of the intentional act, be it the one of a deeply embodied and enworlded counsciousness, in accounting for the essential structure of film and spectator (and their relation), i.e., the antagonism between the decentering primacy of the image and the self-centered primacy of perception, cannot be settled through a simple Phenomenological shift from occularcentric, intentional counsciousness to its embodyment ‘ in-the-world’ as yet another carrier of intentionality. Still it remains to be explained what is it in the mechanical image that is able to so deeply affect the human flesh, and conversely, to what features in the human bodily experience is its mechanical other, the fascinating image, so successfuly adressing? It should be expected from the anti-Cartesianism of both the early and the late Merleau- Ponty the textual support for an approach to the essential condition of passivity in movie watching, that would be convergent with Benjamin. The Chapter ‘Le sentir’, in Phénoménologie de la perception, will offer us the proper guide to elucidate what we are already perceiving and conceiving in Kurosawa’s film, where the ex-static phenomenological body of the aesthetical contemplator ‘ enters the frame’ like the Benjaminian surgeon enters the body and like the painter - and always already like our deepest levei of ‘sensing’, previously to any act of cousciousness - ‘just looses himself in the scene before him’. The Polichinello secret of cinema watching is nonetheless too evident to be seen, and that is where Phenomenological description and reduction are still required.

scholarly journals Ciało mistyczne

2019 ◽  
pp. 293-310
Author(s):  
Karol Gromek
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
The One ◽  
Women Mystics

This article proposes to include in the literary studies the body of texts written by the Christian female mystics, whose accounts have so far been the domain of theological discourse. The perspective offered here focuses on the bodily categories contained in the works of women mystics from the 19th and 20th c. such as: Leonia Nastał, Faustyna Kowalska, Zofia Nosko, Roberta Babiak, Rozalia Celakówna, all of whom qualify under the category of experiential or affective mysticism. The present articles focuses on two notions, i.e. on the one hand, the typology of describing the bodily experience in the mystical text, and on the other, the biographical features. The latter opens up a path towards the anthropological and cultural dimension in the analysis of mystical writings with a particular focus on the issue of illness, self-mortification and exhumation.

‘If you shoulder a rifle […] let it be for Ireland’: James Connolly's War on War

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-381
Author(s):  
Margot Gayle Backus ◽  
Spurgeon Thompson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
The Body ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Communications Networks ◽  
Easter Rising ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The One ◽  
National Governments

As virtually all Europe's major socialist parties re-aligned with their own national governments with the outbreak of World War I, Irish socialist and trade unionist James Connolly found himself internationally isolated by his vociferous opposition to the war. Within Ireland, however, Connolly's energetic and relentless calls to interrupt the imperial transportation and communications networks on which the ‘carnival of murder’ in Europe relied had the converse effect, drawing him into alignment with certain strains of Irish nationalism. Connolly and other socialist republican stalwarts like Helena Molony and Michael Mallin made common cause with advanced Irish nationalism, the one other constituency unamenable to fighting for England under any circumstances. This centripetal gathering together of two minority constituencies – both intrinsically opposed, if not to the war itself, certainly to Irish Party leader John Redmond's offering up of the Irish Volunteers as British cannon fodder – accounts for the “remarkably diverse” social and ideological character of the small executive body responsible for the planning of the Easter Rising: the Irish Republican Brotherhood's military council. In effect, the ideological composition of the body that planned the Easter Rising was shaped by the war's systematic diversion of all individuals and ideologies that could be co-opted by British imperialism through any possible argument or material inducement. Although the majority of those who participated in the Rising did not share Connolly's anti-war, pro-socialist agenda, the Easter 1916 Uprising can nonetheless be understood as, among other things, a near letter-perfect instantiation of Connolly's most steadfast principle: that it was the responsibility of every European socialist to throw onto the gears of the imperialist war machine every wrench on which they could lay their hands.

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Criminal Records ◽  
Native Women ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Important Position ◽  
The One

The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar examines gender relations in indigenous societies of central Mexico and Oaxaca from the 1520s to the 1750s, focusing mainly on the Nahua, Ñudzahui (Mixtec), Bènizàa (Zapotec), and Ayuk (Mixe) people. This study draws on an unusually rich and diverse corpus of original sources, including Ñudzahui- (Mixtec-), Tíchazàa- (Zapotec-), and mainly Nahuatl-language and Spanish civil and criminal records, published texts, and pictorial manuscripts. The sources come from more than 100 indigenous communities of highland Mexico. The book considers women’s lives in the broadest context possible by addressing a number of interrelated topics, including: the construction of gender; concepts of the body; women’s labor; marriage rituals and marital relations; sexual attitudes; family structure; the relationship between household and community; and women’s participation in riots and other acts of civil disobedience. The study highlights subtle transformations and overwhelming continuities in indigenous social attitudes and relationships. The book argues that profound changes following the Spanish conquest, such as catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christian marriage, slowly eroded indigenous women’s status. Nevertheless, gender relations remained inherently complementary. The study shows how native women and men under colonial rule, on the one hand, pragmatically accepted, adopted, and adapted certain Spanish institutions, concepts, and practices, and, on the other, forcefully rejected other aspects of colonial impositions. Women asserted their influence and, in doing so, they managed to retain an important position within their households and communities across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

scholarly journals Governing Nonconformity: Gender Presentation, Public Space, and the City in New Order Indonesia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Order ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

scholarly journals Experiential ownership and body ownership are different phenomena

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caleb Liang ◽  
Wen-Hsiang Lin ◽  
Tai-Yuan Chang ◽  
Chi-Hong Chen ◽  
Chen-Wei Wu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Distinct Type ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
First Time ◽  
Full Body

AbstractBody ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness.

scholarly journals Knowledge, authority, and positionality in Asian immigrant female faculty teaching diversity classes

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jung-ah Choi ◽  
Jae Hoon Lim
Keyword(s):  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Teaching Experience ◽  
Faculty Of Color ◽  
The Body ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Safe Environment ◽  
Faculty Teaching ◽  
The One ◽  
Body Knowledge

AbstractThis paper is a self-reflective narrative of our teaching experience as two immigrant Asian female professors who teach Multicultural Education. Employing collaborative autoethnography (CAE), the study addresses the issues of authority, positionality, and legitimacy of knowledge claims in critical feminist pedagogy. Two research questions guided our inquiry: 1. How does a teacher’s racial positionality play out in exercising professional knowledge, and conversely, 2. How does seemingly neutral professional knowledge become racialized in the discussions of race? Major findings demonstrate the double-edged contradictions in the body/knowledge nexus manifested in our everyday teaching contexts. On the one hand, the bodily dimension of teacher knowledge is de-racialized because of institutional norms and cultures. On the other hand, there are times professional knowledge becomes racialized through the teacher’s body. Understanding the body/knowledge nexus that invites precarious power dynamics in racial discussions and even blatantly dismisses our professional knowledge, we, as an immigrant faculty of color, find it impossible to create a safe environment for participatory, critical discourse. Acknowledging our triple marginality, we put forth the concept of “pedagogy of fear” (Leonardo, Z., & Porter, R. K. (2010). Pedagogy of fear: Toward a Fanonian theory of ‘safety’ in race dialogue. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 13(2), 139–157) which squarely disrupts the idea of a safe environment in race dialog and urges teachers to confront their own/their students’ fear and create a space of teaching vulnerably.

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