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Abstract
I argue that the temporality of colonialism is a disabling duration. To elaborate, I focus on a site in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where disability/debility and racism intertwine – Fanon’s refusal of “amputation” in his experience of cinema. While such disability metaphors have been problematized as ableist, I argue that amputation is more than a metaphor of lack. It extends what racializing debilitation means and makes tangible the prosthetics that colonialism imposes and the phantoms and affects of colonized life that it attempts to sever. Engaging with disability studies, especially Black and anticolonial theories, I articulate racism and (dis)ability as more than parallel or analogy and conceptualize a debilitating colonial duration, as instanced in our pandemic time. By reconfiguring the possibilities foreclosed through colonialism, I ask what routes there may be to make colonial duration hesitate and destabilize its inevitability, while dwelling with its wounds and ruptures.
Abstract
This article explores aspects of the theory of the constitution of space in the work of Edmund Husserl that appear in his late, posthumously published writings on the themes of intersubjectivity and generativity, which the article proposes imply a theory of environmental experience. It identifies and examines Husserl’s use of the locution Umweltlichkeit as it appears in these late works, proposing a rendering of this term as environmentality. This concept, the article argues, functions operatively in Husserl’s late work, indicating a relationship between his descriptions of the lived bodily constitution of spatiality and his conception of the spatio-environmental nature of the intersubjective and historical becoming of human community. In this way, the article proposes that through the concept of environmentality, Husserl articulates a phenomenological conception of the generativity of space.
Abstract
The experienced qualities of memories of factual and fictional events have been little researched previously. The few studies that exist find no or few differences. However, one reason to expect differences in memory qualities is that processing of fact and fiction seem to involve activation of different brain areas. The present study expands earlier research by including a wider range of memory qualities, using positive and negative events, and three time-points: immediately after, after a ten-minute delay and after a five-week delay. Participants (N = 52) read four short stories in English, labelled either fact or fiction, and rated memory qualities on 7-point scales. Results show no differences; however, an interaction was found between fictionality and story emotional valence, in that memories of negative fictional stories are rated as more clear. The higher clarity can be explained by previous findings that negative events from stories are in general remembered in more detail, in combination with the idea that fiction entails simulation to a higher degree than fact. The conclusion is that although a difference in memory qualities between fact and fiction was found in one case, memory qualities seem not to play an operative role when the memory system distinguishes fact from fiction.
Abstract
This article discusses the relation between philosophy and heart from the viewpoint of a transplanted heart. It is a reflection on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on the heart as intruder in the thought of the world. Departing from the personal experience of a heart transplant, Nancy develops a deconstruction of the idea and experience of the self, showing that the need of another heart in the body of philosophy and in the body of the world has to do with the urgence of experiencing the self as soi-autre, as selfother, which is perhaps nothing but rhythm. Reading passages of his last book Cruor, the article aims to think together the rhythm of a transplanted heart, and of the heart of selfother.
Abstract
Culture and cultural transmission is underpinned by social learning, allowing an individual to adopt the traditions of one’s cultural group by interacting with others. Here I describe studies which demonstrate the role of imitation, the copying of methods and outcomes of behaviour, on cultural sustainability and innovation. Through diffusion studies with children using artificial fruits, the transmission of behaviour within and across groups was investigated. The results show that children are faithful to the methods and outcomes they witness, including copying irrelevant actions. Children in open diffusion studies acquired more than one solution, but sub-groups were established, conforming to a solution with other solutions being held in one’s repertoire. Imitation is a critical skill underpinning the adoption and transmission of culture, with other mechanisms, such as asocial learning, teaching and emulation playing a less pertinent role.
Abstract
Departing from two diverging lines of inquiry of testimony that characterize philosophy today, this article aims to show what a hermeneutic phenomenology of witnessing and testimony is and how this approach to testimony offers a new framework to understand witnessing and testimony, which also repositions the present-day main lines of inquiry of testimony. The first section offers a critical assessment of the state of the art in the philosophy of testimony today and the second section reinterprets the two main diverging lines of inquiry as a conflict. The major part of this article is devoted to a hermeneutic-phenomenological account of witnessing and testimony. The third and fourth sections describe several relations between subject matter, witness, acts of bearing witness, and addressee, to develop this hermeneutic-phenomenological framework and in the process also shows which place is awarded to the two main lines of the present-day inquiry within this framework.
Abstract
Analytic formulation and contribution to treatment of psychotic disorders have little application in modern psychiatry. The medical model, largely based on psychopharmacology and biological conceptualisation of illness, particularly dominates the treatment of psychosis. While many analysts have worked with patients in psychotic states, it is rare to find analytic approaches to psychosis within the national health service (NHS) in the UK. We feel this a detriment to a sometimes difficult to treat patient group. Jung spent his early working years devoted to patients with psychosis at the Burgholzli hospital in Zurich. Later on in his career, Jung had personal experience of psychotic symptoms, interacting with visions and voices within his own mind, that are noted in his posthumous Red Book. Jung is, therefore, arguably one of the most experienced analysts and depth psychologists in the realm of psychosis. In this paper we describe Jung’s in-depth psychological approach to the genesis of psychosis. We then discuss parallels with our contemporary understanding of the aetiology of psychosis. Our aim is to highlight the importance of an analytical approach and thinking in a) understanding the aetiology and b) contribution to treatment of such a complex and intractable disorder as psychosis.
Abstract
In most literature on human cultural evolution and the emergence of large-scale cooperation, the main function of cultural conventions is described as providing group-markers. This paper argues that cultural conventions serve another purpose as well that is at least as important. Large-scale cooperation is characterized by complex division of labour and by a diversity of social roles associated with cultural institutions. This requires ubiquitous ‘role-interaction coordination’ – as it will be labelled. It is argued that without cultural conventions this type of coordination would be cognitively intractable. Thus, apart from functioning as group markers, they are first and foremost important group-makers.
Abstract
The attribution of mental states (MS) to other species typically follows a scala naturae pattern. However, “simple” mental states, including emotions, sensing, and feelings are attributed to a wider range of animals as compared to the so-called “higher” cognitive abilities. We propose that such attributions are based on the perceptual quality (i.e. imageability) of mental representations related to MS concepts. We hypothesized that the attribution of highly imaginable MS is more dependent on the familiarity of participants with animals when compared to the attribution of MS low in imageability. In addition, we also assessed how animal agreeableness, familiarity with animals, and the type of human-animal interaction related to the judged similarity of animals to humans. Sixty-one participants (19 females, 42 males) with a rural (n = 20) and urban (n = 41) background rated twenty-six wild and domestic animals for their perceived similarity with humans and ability to experience a set of MS: (1) Highly imageable MS: joy, anger, and fear, and (2) MS low in imageability: capacity to plan and deceive. Results show that more agreeable and familiar animals were considered more human-like. Primates, followed by carnivores, suines, ungulates, and rodents were rated more human-like than xenarthrans, birds, arthropods, and reptiles. Higher MS ratings were given to more similar animals and more so if the MS attributed were high in imageability. Familiarity with animals was only relevant for the attribution of the MS high in imageability.