Lev Shestov: A Russian Jewish Existentialist

1966 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-402
Author(s):  
Bernard Martin
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
Lev Shestov ◽  
Metaphysical Truth

“What Shestov was fundamentally concerned with throughout his lifetime was to criticize the timidity and lack of imagination of traditional philosophy, with its view that metaphysical truth flows solely from obedience and passive submission to the structures of being given in experience, and to insist instead that ultimate reality transcends the categories of rationalist metaphysics and scientific method and that the truth about it is to be discovered through the untram-meled soaring of the spirit and through daring flights of the imagination. It may be said that so to insist is to abandon philosophy for poetry and art, but Shestov himself always maintained that philosophy is indeed, or rather should be, more art than science.”

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

The Healing Magic of Joy: Understanding Magic as a Metaphor for Positive Emotion in The Secret Garden

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-141
Author(s):  
Margrete Lamond
Keyword(s):  
Positive Affect ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Positive Emotion ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Affective Content ◽  
The Secret Garden ◽  
Biological Nature

Literary analysis tends to be conceptual and top-down driven. Data-driven analysis, although it belongs more to the domain of scientific method, can nevertheless sometimes reveal elements of narrative that conceptual readings may fall short of identifying. In critiques of Burnett's The Secret Garden, the children's return to health is generally understood to be the result of their interactions with nature. Some readings add the power of storytelling as a healing force in the novel. Burnett's concept of magic has tended to be treated with uneasy abstractions, and the influence of affect on health remains open for further investigation. This article bases its argument on data-driven analysis that charts how affective content in the novel occurs in conjunction with references to magic. It identifies the narrative significance of negative allusions to nature and how concepts of magic occur alongside representations of positive affect, and suggests that the magic of healing in The Secret Garden is not the transforming power of biological nature, nor the transforming power of storytelling, but the transforming power of surprise, wonder and happiness in conjunction with all these factors. Positive affect represents the essence of what Burnett means by magic.

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