Corona hotels in Israel: Care and abandonment under the auspices of digital medicine

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Israel established a number of ‘corona hotels’ – hybrid spaces that were neither fully treatment-oriented nor fully incarcerational, in which people known or suspected to be infected with the coronavirus were confined, sometimes for prolonged and indefinite periods. This paper describes the experience of 25 people who were confined in corona recovery and isolation hotels between March and July 2020. The corona hotels exemplify how remote medical technology and digital medicine together enable a new ‘technogeography of care’, where care and abandonment are inextricably linked. The paper adds to the growing number of critical studies on digital health by showing how the employed technologies impact the concepts of human embodiment, subjectivity and social relations, as well as how the occupants negotiated the meaning of these technologies and resisted their effects.

On the Bodily Basis of Human Cognition: A Philosophical Perspective on Embodiment

This paper seeks to show that human cognition cannot be characterised purely in mentalistic term. It has a bodily basis and cognition is thus the product of the interplay between mind, body, and brain. This is how the idea of embodiment and its importance is realised and gets its foothold in both philosophy and cognitive science. This brings a radical change introducing a new framework for philosophy and cognitive science. In this new change philosophy and cognitive science have a special role to play which this paper seeks to explore. Philosophy in its capacity as a conceptual inquiry provides justification for human embodiment on a conceptual ground whereas cognitive science provides the same on an empirical and experimental ground. This brings the two disciplines closer resulting into a new field of inquiry which can be best described as the interface between philosophy and cognitive science. An important consequence that follows from this alignment is that the traditional epistemological distinction between the a priori and the empirical can no longer be rigidly maintained.

On the formulation of the subject matter of social phenomenology

The article is devoted to the formation of the problem field of social phenomenology. The author analyzed the works of the phenomenological and socio-constructivist directions of research and identified a common conceptual core. The authors (T. Luckman, M. Merleau-Ponty, M. Eldred) distinguish a previously undifferentiated communicative horizon in the field of interaction. The communicative horizon belongs to the primordial sphere of the subject and is the result of the demarcation of the homogeneous world according to the criterion of ability to communicate. The line of demarcation is determined by the behavior of beings and does not necessarily cover only the zone of human embodiment. It was established that the communicative aspect and the aspect of asking about oneself as a human being are closely related. The mobility of the boundaries of the meanings of the world objects, the subjectivity of judgment, the possibility of correlating with the help of socio-historical reality comprise the aggregate subject matter of social phenomenology. The author concludes that due to the lack of unambiguous criteria for establishing the framework of the social world, one should resort to the description of the phenomenal plan of sociality, which can help to qualitatively distinguish the levels of social reality in the long term.

Edith Stein (1891–1942)

In this chapter, Edith Stein offers an analysis of empathy with others, which she sees as a fundamental trait of the human being. In her view, empathy is a condition of possibility for sociality and sympathy, rather than the other way around. She grounds empathy in human embodiment, more precisely in the way in which the human being is embodied mind and minded body. Stein’s work on empathy represents a pathbreaking contribution to phenomenology and shows how she makes active use of and goes beyond the works of Edmund Husserl, Alexander Pfänder, and others.

The crowd and citylife: Materiality, negotiation and inclusivity at Tokyo’s train stations

In the history of urban thought, density has been closely indexed to the idea of citylife. Drawing on commuters’ experiences and perceptions of crowds in and around Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, this article offers an ethnographic perspective on the relationship between urban crowds and life in the city. We advance understandings of the relations between the crowd and citylife through three categories of ‘crowd relations’– materiality, negotiation and inclusivity – to argue that the multiplicity of meanings which accrue to people’s encounters with crowds refuses any a priori definitions of optimum levels of urban density. Rather, the crowd relations gathered here are evocations of citylife that take us beyond the tendency to represent the crowd as a particular kind of problem, be it alienation, exhaustion or a threshold for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ densities. The portraits of commuter crowds presented capture the various entanglements between human and non-human, embodiment and mobility, and multiculture and the civic, through which citylife emerges as a mode of being with oneself and others.

Sensing the Sacred: Religious Experience, Somatic Inversions, and the Religious Education of Attention

While previous work has focused largely on discourse, contemporary sociological research has started to examine how the embodied, sensory dimensions of religious practice matter in the construction of religious experience. This paper contributes to this development by drawing sociological attention to the religious cultivation of a particular class of embodied experiences: somatic inversions. Somatic inversions, as we define them, are experiences in which dimensions of human embodiment that usually remain in the tacit background of action and perception are brought to the experiential foreground. We demonstrate how these kinds of practically cultivated experiences of inversion—while not religious in any essential way—enable and encourage attributions of religious significance, making purportedly religious phenomena present to the senses and open to further engagement, exploration, and elaboration. We develop our argument through empirical material from the authors’ respective studies of Eastern Orthodox fasting and Theravada Buddhist meditation practices.

Graphic Embodiments

Comics and other graphic narratives powerfully represent embodied experiences that are difficult to express in language. A group of authors from various countries and disciplines explore the unique capacity of graphic narratives to represent human embodiment as well as the relation of human bodies to the worlds they inhabit. Using works from illustrated scientific texts to contemporary comics across national traditions, we discover how the graphic narrative can shed new light on everyday experiences. Essays examine topics that are easily recognized as anchored in the body as well as experiences like migration and concepts like environmental degradation and compassion that emanate from or impact on our embodied states. Graphic Embodiments is of interest to scholars and students across various interdisciplinary fields including comics studies, gender and sexuality studies, visual and cultural studies, disability studies and health and medical humanities.

The ‘Tectonic Sensibility’ in Architecture: From the Pre-Human to the Post-Human

This paper argues for a new definition and a broader application of tectonic theory in architecture. It extends the traditional understanding of tectonics as a bodily feeling for the physical materiality of constructional elements, in order to form the basis of a more generalized notion of a bodily sensibility towards the ‘the way things are’. The discussion is informed by an evolutionary perspective on the relationship between technology and human embodiment, suggesting links between the ‘pre-human’ and the ‘post-human’. It offers a reassessment of an often overlooked but pivotal insight evident in the work of both André Leroi-Gourhan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that the human and the technological are mutually co-constitutive. It explores this notion in the light of recent research in archaeology, evolutionary, psychology, philosophy and neuroscience.

Outrageous Fortune

The book is a drolly pessimistic and vaguely misanthropic account that gives it a unity of voice, of view, and of several interlaced themes: the scarcity of good, that most of happiness comes in the morally questionable form of Schadenfreude, or is experienced mostly as relief that some expected bad thing did not materialize. It deals extensively with those tinges of ominousness that accompany good luck, and the related widespread belief, or feeling in the gut, that people’s mere desires and wishes provoke the gods to thwart their wishes. Are good things subject to a law of conservation, so that they must always be paid for and sum out at just about zero or less? Why is there no scarcity, in contrast, in the economy of evil? Certain topics the author can never seem to avoid make encores: revenge and getting even, paying back what one owes, competitiveness, humiliation, and disgust with human embodiment. These large themes will be spiced with particular attention to killing messengers bearing both good and bad tidings, the decline of everything (including the author’s mind and body), an occasional eye-gouging, until people face what it means to eat at the table of one’s lord as a historical and religious matter from texts ranging from the Bible to medieval matter, right up to issues of the narcissistic present.

Vile Jelly

This chapter reproduces some of the claims in darkly comic form of the author’s Anatomy of Disgust. The presentation is new, but the ideas are much the same. At issue is a less than celebratory view of human embodiment. The chapter uses the Duke of Cornwall’s sickening description of the human eye as a starting point: People are something of a goopy pond held together by skin that can itself be a site of horror. People are a feeding tube that connects them to a longer tube built at taxpayer expense to send their food remade down to a sunless sea when they flush the toilet. Submerged imagery from Hamlet oozes through the discussion to justify the positions and show their well-attested commonplaceness.