Disability and Identity Transformation in Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It

This paper examines the significance of disability in Arab British novelist Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It (2011). It underscores how disability engenders an identity transformation that Sabri Mujahed undergoes in the novel. The study highlights how disability triggers resistance strategies to the oppressive socio-political norms and occupying powers. The paper also draws attention to the psychological and socio-cultural impacts of disability on the life of Sabri Mujahed. Sabri turns his skills toward a great mission of writing the history of Palestinian resistance and exposing aggressive Israeli policies. The process of writing itself has a therapeutic effect that helps Sabri overcome his disability and channel his mental powers to a greater cause. Taking into consideration disability studies’ tendency to provide a fresh approach to understand a disabled character’s inner world, this paper employs disability studies as a theoretical and critical framework in light of which the novel is analyzed. The paper also foregrounds the socio-political, cultural and historical conditions and circumstances that Palestinians in Gaza experience and undergo. In this context, continuous Israeli military attacks, a stifling blockade and internal factional conflicts are some of the challenges that people in Gaza, including disabled Sabri, have to cope with on daily basis.

The self and its causal powers between metaphysics and science

According to the thesis of powerism, our world is pervaded by causal powers which are metaphysically basic. The aim of this paper is to defend the existence of the self, defined as a substantial entity, and its mental powers. This claim, which may seem a bold one, should not be deemed as inconsistent with scientific evidence. In fact, this approach does not ignore empirical knowledge, but is not bound only to it in order to understand entities, properties, and the relationship between them. Aristotelian powerism may show that the self, as the subject of one’s mental acts, is a substance that has an essential nature. Firstly, we shall analyze the immediate evidence we have in support of the existence of the self as a substantial entity. We will show that the self is a substance because it possesses an essential character, i.e. an individual essence. We will take into account the Aristotelian perspective of substance, trying to show how the presence of a necessary property that makes every subject identical to itself and the phenomenal features of one’s private experience point to the existence of a substantial entity that corresponds to the self. Secondly, we will try to justify the adoption of a metaphysical theory of causation based on powers, analyzing it in comparison with the main competing theories, namely hypotheticalism and nomism. Then, we shall proceed to show the causal properties of the substance in question, namely the mental powers. In fact, thirdly, we will embrace the thesis of powerism by defending the existence of a set of mental powers that should be attributed to the self. We will describe the main features of mental powers and we will show that they are conceivable as the pure intentional acts we perform by directing an intentional state towards an intentional object. In this way we show how a classic problem of philosophy of mind, relevant to science as well, can be addressed in an original way by a metaphysical approach involving powers.

The Exotic Other and the Other Within

A. C. Doyle praised R. L. Stevenson’s tale The Pavilion on the Links as »the high-water mark of his genius«. He also imitated it very closely in one of his own tales, The Mystery of Cloomber. The present article details the many parallels between the two texts. It also analyses the remaining differences, which are primarily related to the role played by a group of foreigners. Doyle exoticises the foreigners, representing them as Eastern mystics whose mental powers are infinitely superior to those of the British characters. By contrast, Stevenson’s foreigners are ordinary mortals. They are not strange or exotic in themselves; they rather act as a catalyst of strange, incongruous and surprising elements in the personalities of the British characters.

TO THE QUESTION ABOUT THE SEXUAL ACTIVITY OF WOMEN IN THE CITY OF TAMBOV

Sexual activity is one of the main goals of life on earth for every being. For a person, this goal of life is especially important, because, thanks to the mental development of his mental powers, his sexual activity is not instinctive, like in every animal, but is more conscious and therefore constitutes for him a more urgent need for life. Like any creature, human sexual activity is divided between two sexes, between a man and a woman, but the man accounts for only a small part of this activity, almost all the burden is borne by the woman. From this, the functions of the female genital apparatus are very complex: they are not limited to the narrow sphere of one genital apparatus, but relate to the entire female body, having enormous influence on other spheres of its activity.

Against Person Essentialism

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

Adapting Böhme’s Bipolar Model

Chapter 5 argues for the crucial importance for Coleridge’s philosophy of Böhme, whose works he annotated more than any other writer. Section 5.1 discusses Coleridge’s views of various mystics and of the poles of mysticism: one side valued for its sensuous connection, yet found prone to mistake inner idiosyncrasies for noetic insight; the other side, the transcendence-directed contemplation of mystics such as the Christian neo-Platonic Victorines. Section 5.2 argues that the chiasmic crux of Böhme’s thinking inspired three Coleridgean mainstays: the interpenetration of opposites, the intercirculation of energies, and the chiasmus between higher and lower levels. Section 5.3 further argues that an important form of Coleridge’s pentadic logical schemata, which includes his pentad of the ‘Powers of Nature’ and his ‘Order of the Mental Powers’, derives from his fusing Böhme’s transmutational, chiasmic schema of ‘The Seven Forms of Spirits’ with the Christian neo-Platonic, linear, hierarchical ascent from sensus to contemplatio.