You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This volume shows that the notions of embodied or situated cognition, which have transformed the scientific study of intelligence have the potential to reorient cultural studies as well. The essays adapt and amplify embodied cognition in such different fields as art history, literature, history of science, religious studies, philosophy, biology, and cognitive science. The topics include the biological genesis of teleology, the dependence of meaning in signs upon biological embodiment, the notion of image schema and the concept of force in cognitive semantics, pictorial self-portraiture as a means to study self-perception, the difference between reading aloud and silent reading as a way to make sense of literary texts, intermodal (kinesthetic) understanding of art, psychosomatic medicine, laughter as a medical and ethical phenomenon, the valuation of laughter and the body in religion, and how embodied cognition revives and extends earlier attempts to develop a philosophical anthropology. (Series A)
The Invention of Marxism shows how a theory of the capitalist system grew into a political philosophy that shaped the history of the twentieth century in extremely destructive as well as productive ways -- how an idea conquered the world.
In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-siècle preoccupa...
Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr offer the first comprehensive examination of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive occult iconoclasts, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary western esotericism.
Brings to light unsuspectedly rich sources of humor in the works of prominent nineteenth-century women writers. Nineteenth-century German literature is seldom seen as rich in humor and irony, and women's writing from that period is perhaps even less likely to be seen as possessing those qualities. Yet since comedy is bound to societal norms, and humor and irony are recognized weapons of the weak against authority, what this innovative study reveals should not be surprising: women writers found much to laugh at in a bourgeois age when social constraints, particularlyon women, were tight. Helen Chambers analyzes prose fiction by leading female writers of the day who prominently employ humor an...
Fact and Fiction explores the intersection between literature and the sciences, focusing on German and British culture between the eighteenth century and today. Observing that it was in the eighteenth century that the divide between science and literature as disciplines first began to be defined, the contributors to this collection probe how authors from that time onwards have assessed and affected the relationship between literary and scientific cultures. Fact and Fiction's twelve essays cover a wide range of scientific disciplines, from physics and chemistry to medicine and anthropology, and a variety of literary texts, such as Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Goethe's Elective Affinities. The collection will appeal to scholars of literature and of the history of science, and to those interested in the connections between the two.
Removing an organ from one (typically dead) body and placing it in another living body challenges our most foundational ideas about boundaries between self and other, individual and social identity, life and death, health and illness. But despite these transgressions, organ transplant is a celebrated and relatively common procedure. Transplant Fictions brings together a diverse set of cultural representations to understand how we have overcome the profound ideological violations represented by organ exchange in order to reimagine the concept and practice as technological and moral victories. From the plots of horror stories and sci-fi novels to sentimental romances and feel-good media reports of stranger donation, this cultural study offers a nuanced portrait of the conceptual journey of organ exchange from strange and terrible to the “gift of life.”
This is the first monograph to deal with medicine as a form of hermeneutics, now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition, including a whole new chapter on medical ethics. The book offers a comprehensive philosophical argument why good medical practice cannot be curtailed to scientific investigations of the body but is a form of clinical hermeneutics performed by health-care professionals in dialogue with their patients. Medical hermeneutics is rooted in a phenomenology of illness which acknowledges and proceeds from the ill party’s bodily feelings, everyday life-world circumstances and self-understanding in aiming to restore health. The author shows how the works of classical phenomeno...
The doctrine and practice of healing through faith has been a hallmark of Pentecostalism since its inception and helps to account for the widespread appeal of the movement. While “divine healing,” as it is called by insiders, has brought hope to the sick, it has also been a source of disenchantment and controversy. The present study offers a close look at the teaching of four major ministers of healing in the twentieth-century United States. The author distinguishes between the healing evangelists and pastoral ministers of healing who react to them. This book discusses in detail the merits of both schools and the author proposes a solution to the problems inherent in the two paradigms under scrutiny.