scholarly journals Surprise: A Circular Dynamic of Multi-Directional Verbalization

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Depraz
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Body Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Dual Model ◽  
Descriptive Phenomenology ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Number Of Authors

To understand the dynamics of the verbalization of surprise, I will start with the philosophical theoretical place that is, in my opinion, the most remarkable in terms of the descriptive phenomenology of surprise, namely, its approach by Paul Ricœur in Freedom and Nature in terms of what he calls “emotion-surprise.” This theoretical position will lead me to retrace, in a second step, the archeology of what Ricoeur calls the “circular phenomenon” or the “circular process” of surprise, which includes body language in a burst of "shaking" and the language of cognitive as well as aesthetic "shock". There is an a priori antinomy here that is based on a post-Cartesian duality of the body and the mind, but it is circularized by Ricoeur. On the basis of this dual model of surprise, I will retrace its genealogy in a number of authors (Darwin, James, Izard, and Ekman on the one hand, and Peirce, Husserl, Dennett, Davidson, on the other hand) and will analyze some first-person descriptions that come from “microphenomenological interviews” [entretiens d’explicitation].

scholarly journals C. P. E. BACH ‘IN TORMENTIS’: GOUT PAIN AND BODY LANGUAGE IN THE FANTASIA IN A MAJOR, h278 (1782)

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW HEAD
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
Body Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mental Pain ◽  
Keyboard Music ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Mind

ABSTRACTIn his Magazin der Musik, Carl Friedrich Cramer reported that C. P. E. Bach's Fantasia in A major, h278 (1782), was composed during the agonies of gout. Tapping into a reported epidemic of this patrician malady among men of letters, Cramer's anecdote invoked rich associations of sequestered suffering, withdrawal from public life, the pleasures of the table, genius, sexual (im)potency and humour. Reflecting contemporary nerve-based theories of sensation, Cramer aligned different types of physical and mental pain with specific musical gestures. In so doing, he did more than indulge his hermeneutic imagination: he suggested a connection between Bach's solo keyboard music and the experience of embodiment. The seemingly abstract gestures of improvisation were linked dialectically to the corporeal. Behind the specifics of Cramer's reading is a conviction that this kind of music ‘knows’ about the body, as well as the mind, and that it moves between gestures suggestive of thinking, speaking, feeling and corporeal sensation. Analysis of the fantasia, and Bach's letters, supports Cramer's reading.

scholarly journals The Idea of the Posthuman: A Comparative Analysis of Transhumanism and Posthumanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 132-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. I. Kriman
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Influence ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Vitruvian Man ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The article discusses the modern philosophical concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism. The central issue of these concepts is “What is the posthuman?” The 21st century is marked by a contradictory understanding of the role and status of the human. On the one hand, there comes the realization of human hegemony over the whole world around: in the 20th century mankind not only began to conquer outer space, invented nuclear weapons, made many amazing discoveries but also shifted its attention to itself or rather to the modification of itself. Transhumanist projects aim to strengthen human influence by transforming human beings into other, more powerful and viable forms of being. Such projects continues the project of human “deification.” On the other hand, acknowledging the onset of the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, there comes the rejection of classical interpretations of the human. The categories of historicity, sociality and subjectivity are no longer so anthropocentric. In the opinion of the posthumanists, the project of the Vitruvian man has proven to be untenable in the present-day environment and is increasingly criticized. The reflection on the phenomenon of the human and his future refers to the concepts that explore not only human but also non-human. Very often we can find a synonymous understanding of transhumanism and posthumanism. Although these movements work with the same modern constructs and concepts but interpret them in a fundamentally different way. The discourse of transhumanism refers to the Cartesian opposition of the body and the mind. Despite the sacralization of technology and the desire to purify the posthuman from such seemingly permanent attributes of the living as aging and death, transhumanism in many ways continues the ideas of the Enlightenment. For posthumanists, the subject is nomadic and a kind of assembly of human, animal, digital, chimerical. Thus, in posthumanism the main maxim of humanism about the human as the highest value is rejected – the human ceases to be “the measure of all things.”

Personal Identity and the Idea of a Human Being

1991 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Madell
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Approach ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The central fact about the problem of personal identity is that it is a problem posed by an apparent dichotomy: the dichotomy between the objective, third-person viewpoint on the one hand and the subjective perspective provided by the first-person viewpoint on the other. Everyone understands that the mind/body problem is precisely the problem of what to do about another apparent dichotomy, the duality comprising states of consciousness on the one hand and physical states of the body on the other. By contrast, contemporary discussions of the problem of personal identity generally display little or no recognition of the divide which to my mind is at the heart of the problem. As a consequence, there has been a relentlessly third-personal approach to the issue, and the consequent proposal of solutions which stand no chance at all of working. I think the idea that the problem is to be clarified by an appeal to the idea of a human being is the latest manifestation of this mistaken approach. I am thinking in particular of the claim that what ought to govern our thinking on this issue is the fact that human beings constitute a natural kind, and that standard members of this kind can be said to have some sort of essence. Related to this is the idea that ‘person’, while not itself a natural kind term, is not a notion which can be framed in entire independence of this natural kind.

The Aristotelian Categories

1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
The Other ◽  
Precise Position ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The precise position to be assigned to the Categories in the Aristotelian system has always been somewhat of a puzzle. On the one hand, they seem to be worked into the warp of its texture, as in the classification of change, and Aristotle can argue from the premiss that they constitute an exhaustive division of the kinds of Being (An. Post. I. 22, p. 83 b 15). On the other hand, both in the completed scheme of his logic and in his constructive metaphysic they retire into the background, giving place to other notions, such as causation, change, actuality and potentiality. Investigation has, moreover, been hampered, especially in Germany, by attempts to correlate them with the Kantian Categories, with which they have obvious points of contact. But Kant's formal a priori concepts by which the mind makes for itself a world, to use Mr. Bosanquet's phrase, imply an attitude to knowledge and reality so utterly opposed to the Aristotelian that the comparison has tended to confusion rather than elucidation. Scholars now realize better that the Aristotelian Categories can only be understood in connexion with the problems of Aristotle's own age.

Eternal Life and the Body According to Spinoza

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
Alexandre Matheron
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Adequate Knowledge ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Adequate Idea ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Initial Starting

In this chapter, Matheron presents some brief thoughts on Proposition 39 of Part V of the Ethics, which states that a body capable of many things has a mind whose greater part is eternal. The key to unlocking this seemingly unusual claim is to understand what happens in the body when the mind understands. This leads Matheron to reconstruct the demonstrations that accompany the preceding propositions in Part V as well as to a discussion of adequate and inadequate ideas in Spinoza. Though we might not be immediately aware of it, to have an adequate idea of something external us is to have the adequate idea of a certain order that is established between affections in our body whose structure matches the one that inheres in the thing in question. This leads Matheron to a discussion of the ‘third kind of knowledge’ and its relation to the Spinozist concept of eternity, all of which clarify the initial starting point: the acquisition of new and more adequate knowledge always entails a clearer understanding of our body’s capacities that are already included in the eternal idea that we are.

Spirit and Body in the World of Modern Technology

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Zoran Avramović
Keyword(s):  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Spirit and body of the man living in the world of modern technology are discussed in the paper. The entire life of modern man is under the pressure of rapid and far‐reaching changes in economy, organisation, education, self‐image. The relations between the spirit and the body on the one side and illness and health, money, media, narcissism, morality and national identity on the other side are studied in the article. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between the world of modern science and technology and the quality of life focusing on the mind and body. The fact emphazised in the conclusion is that the nature of Western ‐ European civilization has been changing with predominant turning to the SELF, to the absolute interest of an invidual in terms of materialism. The result of this civilizational turn is jeopardizing the spirit and the body of modern man.

Custom and Habit in Physiology and the Science of Human Nature in the British Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 183-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
David Hume ◽  
The Body ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
William Cullen ◽  
Philosophical Writings

In this paper I show how what came to be known as “the double law of habit,” first formulated by Joseph Butler in a discussion of moral psychology in 1736, was taken up and developed by medical physiologists William Porterfield, Robert Whytt, and William Cullen as they disputed fundamental questions regarding the influence of the mind on the body, the possibility of unconscious mental processes, and the nature and extent of voluntary action. The paper shows, on a particular topic, the overlap between eighteenth-century philosophical writings on the science of human nature on the one hand, and medical writings and lectures in physiology on the other. Other early modern writers discussed in the paper include René Descartes, Herman Boerhaave and David Hume.


scholarly journals Playing it Fashionably Queer: Mae West’s Performing Sexuality

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Giada Goracci
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Body Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract “Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” With this challenging innuendo, the American actress and author Mae West offers an insight into gender performativity and heteronormativity through marriage in a period, the “Roaring Twenties,” in which sexual and gender politics could not be put into scrutiny. Her vamp persona and the elaborated iconography that she crafted on her character gave birth to a meticulous semiotics of the body that eventually undermined the American social context of the time fostering on the one hand, an image of heterosexual desire, and on the other hand an appealing icon to a gay market. This article ventures a queer-oriented perspective on West’s charismatic character and on the intertwined effects that tie semiotics to body language, especially focussing on the plays Sex (1926) and The Drag (1927).

Descartes’ Notion of the Mind–Body Union and its Phenomenological Expositions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Heinämaa ◽  
Timo Kaitaro
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The chapter clarifies the connections between Descartes’ discussion of the mind–body union and classical phenomenology of embodiment, as developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that the perplexing twofoldness of Descartes’ account of the mind–body union—interactionistic on the one hand, and holistic on the other—can be explicated and made coherent by phenomenological analyses of the two different attitudes that we can take toward human beings: the naturalistic and the personalistic. In the naturalistic attitude, the human being is understood as a two-layered psycho-physical complex, in which mental states and faculties are founded on the material basis of the body. In the personalistic attitude, the human being forms an expressive whole in which the spiritual and the sensible-material are intertwined. The chapter ends with a discussion of the most important similarities and differences between Descartes’ and Husserl’s conceptions of philosophy as a radical science.

scholarly journals Zorba, Socrates, and the good life

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-206
Author(s):  
Filip Kovacevic
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

How should one live in order to live well? What are the defining characteristics of the good life? These questions - the perennial concern of classical scholars - have in the last 25 years become the subject of debates in contemporary social and political theory as well. Foucault (1986), Taylor (1989), Kekes (1995), Cottingham (1998) and Nehamas (1998) have all stressed the importance of the ?art of living? or ?caring for the self? in light of contemporary political and economic developments. This article, as my contribution to the debate, offers the analysis of two models of the ?good life?: the one as presented by Plato and embodied in the literary character of Socrates, and the other as presented by Nikos Kazantzakis and embodied in the literary figure of Zorba. In general terms, Socrates advocates the rule of reason and the denigration and submission of the bodily Eros, while Zorba remains suspicious of the mind - ?a careful little shopkeeper? - and stresses the significance of bodily experiences as ways of linking oneself with the rest of the universe. Hence in the article I formulate an ethic of sensual Eros by focusing on Zorba?s way of life and contrast it to the Socratic ethics. I conclude that the concern and respect for the body, for the house in which Eros dwells, is the necessary a priori for the living of the good life. This way of life is not one that rejects reason altogether, but what it does reject is the desire of reason to monopolize the individual?s life processes.

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