Showing papers on "Sensibility published in 2010"

The Multilingual Subject

Abstract: This book explores the experience of adolescents and young adults who learn a foreign language or use more than one language in daily life. Through ‘language memoirs’ and learners’ testimonies, it documents how these multilingual subjects occupy an embodied, socially and culturally inflected third place in language, filled with memories of other languages and fantasies of other identities. In its referential and mythic dimensions, language performs and creates subjectivities that these multilingual speakers use to conjure alternative worlds and virtual selves, both in real life and on the internet. Teaching to the multilingual subject would mean capitalizing on the potential playfulness, heightened reflexivity and aesthetic sensibility of the increasing number of people around the world who, by choice or necessity, experience life in several languages.

Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction

Abstract: 1. The word 'Romantic' 2. Its origin as an outgrowth of the Sensibility movement 3. The apotheosis or consecration of the poet 4. Romanticism as an international movement 5. Romanticism as a critique of society 6. Romantic themes, images, symbols, or Stoff 7. The Romantic system of the arts 8. Romantic religion 9. Decline of Romanticism

Kant's Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy

Abstract: Anne Margaret Baxley offers a systematic interpretation of Kant's theory of virtue, whose most distinctive features have not been properly understood. She explores the rich moral psychology in Kant's later and less widely read works on ethics, and argues that the key to understanding his account of virtue is the concept of autocracy, a form of moral self-government in which reason rules over sensibility. Although certain aspects of Kant's theory bear comparison to more familiar Aristotelian claims about virtue, Baxley contends that its most important aspects combine to produce something different - a distinctively modern, egalitarian conception of virtue which is an important and overlooked alternative to the more traditional Greek views which have dominated contemporary virtue ethics.

Autoethnography: A Limited Endorsement

Abstract: In this commentary, we wish to draw from Kathryn's experience in Askole to complicate the argument we developed in favor of an autoethnographic sensibility in the earlier article in this issue (Butz and Besio 2004). Just as we used David's first-person singular voice in much of that article, we use Kathryn's voice here to reflect the central influence of her research circumstances on the points that we make. We will return to the first-person plural voice in the commentary's conclusion where we attempt to synthesize the lessons of our two sets of research experiences.

Sense And Sensibility: Old English Semantics And The Lexicographer's Point Of View

Abstract: Not very long ago, in April 2005, the English-speaking world celebrated Dr. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language , marking the 250th anniversary of its first publication. For each dictionary is a product of its age. One clear marker that sets the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) off as a twenty-first-century production, apart from its use of technology, is editorial reluctance to claim more than the evidence allows. To some this may appear as admirable scholarship; to others, an obvious failure to make a commitment; and to others, even worse, a total abdication of authority. This chapter focuses on this interplay between sense and sensibility, between meaning and lexicographic engagement. It begins with an overview of the letter G, the eighth letter of the DOE, recently published online, on CD-ROM and on microfiche. Keywords: A Dictionary of the English Language ; Dictionary of Old English (DOE) ; Dr. Samuel Johnson

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract: Translator's Introduction Letter from Maimon to Kant Letter in reply from Kant to Maimon Letter from Maimon to Berlin Journal for Enlightenment Essay on Transcendental Philosophy Dedication Introduction 1. Matter, Form of Cognition, Form of Sensibility, Form of Understanding, Tim and Space 2. Sensibility, Imagination, Understanding, Pure A Priori Concepts of the Understanding or Categories, Schemata, Answering the Question Quid Juris, Answering the Question Quid Facti, Doubts about the Latter 3. Ideas of the Understanding, Ideas of Reason 4. Subject and Predicate, The Determinable and the Determination 5. Think, Possible, Necessary, Ground, Consequence 6. Identity, Difference, Opposition, Reality, Logical and Transcendental Negation 7. Magnitude 8. Alteration, Change 9. Truth, Subjective, Objective, Logical, Metaphysical 10. On the I, Materialism, Idealism, Dualism Short Overview of the Whole Work My Ontology On Symbolic Cognition and Philosophical Language Notes and Clarifications Glossary Bibliography Index.

From Sensibility to Pathology: The Origins of the Idea of Nervous Music around 1800

Abstract: Healing powers have been ascribed to music at least since David's lyre, but a systematic discourse of pathological music emerged only at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time, concerns about the moral threat posed by music were partly replaced by the idea that it could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality, and even death. During the Enlightenment, the relationship between the nerves and music was more often put in terms of refinement and sensibility than pathology. However, around 1800, this view was challenged by a medical critique of modern culture based on a model of the etiology of disease that saw stimulation as the principal cause of sickness. Music's belated incorporation into that critique was made possible by a move away from regarding music as an expression of cosmic and social order toward thinking of it as quasi-electrical stimulation, something that was intensified by the political and cultural changes unleashed by the French Revolution. For the next hundred and fifty years, nervousness caused by musical stimulation was often regarded as a fully fledged Zivilisationskrankheit, widely discussed in psychiatry, music criticism, and literature.

Sense and Sensibility in Kant's Practical Agent: Against the Intellectualism of Korsgaard and Sidgwick

Abstract: Drawing on a wide range of Kant's recorded thought beyond his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, this essay presents an overview of Kant's account of practical agency as embodied practical agency and argues against the intellectualized interpretations of Kant's account of practical agency presented by Christine Korsgaard and Henry Sidgwick. In both Kant's empirical-psychological and metaphysical descriptions of practical agency, he presents a recognizably human practical agent that is broader and deeper than the faculty of reason alone. This agent chooses action from a reflective distance, but not from the complete affective distance of reason. We choose neither as reason alone, nor even as the sum of all of our ‘higher’ faculties, of cognition (including reason), feeling, and desire, in Kant's view. Instead, we choose as an agent that also has ‘lower’, ‘sensible’ faculties, of cognition (including sense), feeling, and desire, which together comprise our ‘sensibility’. These mental states of sensibility are not merely confused versions of our higher cognitions, feelings, or desires, and so different from them in degree only, but are instead distinct from our higher states in kind also; and these distinct sensible states are not dependent on our higher states and so on a commitment to the value of humanity, for example. For this reason, a choice in favour of sensible states and in opposition to the moral law need in no way undermine its own foundations and thus be incoherent, as Korsgaard and Sidgwick argue, but instead only immoral. Because Kant does not reduce the problem of immoral choice to one of insufficient reflection and ensuing confusion, he does not view moral progress in cognitive terms alone, whether in the form of a clearer understanding of the moral law, improved judgment in applying it, or deeper insight into our own nature as practical agents. Kant instead recognizes the crucial importance of cultivating our feelings and desires over the course of a lifetime both as a way to make ourselves worthy of the humanity within us directly and also as a way to facilitate future moral choices.

Investigation of the moral sensibility of intensive care nurses

Abstract: In order for the intensive care nurses to recognize the ethical problems and to take proper decisions towards the solution of these problems, their moral sensibility, which is defined as the capability of distinguishing an ethical problem should be developed. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the moral sensibilities of intensive care nurses. Ninety out of 102 nurses who were working in the intensive care units of a teaching hospital in Ankara and accepted to be enrolled in the study constituted the study group in this definitive and sectional study. Data collection form is composed of 15 questions consisting of sociodemographic characteristics and study conditions. Moral sensibility of intensive care nurses in the study was in the moderate degree. The total moral sensibility score was not related with age, marital status, educational status, time exercised in intensive care, time exercised in profession, and taking any ethical courses before or after graduation, whereas age and time exercised in profession were closely related with some sub-dimensions of moral sensibility. In order to increase the level of moral sensibility of intensive care nurses and thus to recognize and solve ethical problems, it is suggested to plan postgraduate and continuous education programs. Furthermore it is necessary to conduct larger scale studies to determine different variables affecting the moral sensibility of intensive care nurses.

Sensibility in the Relations and Interactions of Teaching and Learning to Be and Do Nursing

Abstract: This qualitative study focused on proxemic feelings and feelings of detachment and ambiguity among professors-nurses concerning their experiences. This study aimed to reveal the meanings of sensibility held by being-professor-nurse in teaching and learning to be and do nursing. The theoretical-philosophical support is based on Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenological approach and the hermeneutics phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur was used. Nineteen professors-nurses from a Higher Education institution in the South of Brazil were interviewed between November and December 2006. Sensibility was revealed as the capacity to observe details in order to intervene in a situation the best way possible, and also as a way to break with exclusive models of the cognitive-instrumental rationality of science and technique, since sensibility is the basis for developing other ways of teaching and learning to be and do Nursing.

Dueling, honor and sensibility in eighteenth-century spanish sentimental comedies

Abstract: OF DISSERTATION Kristie Bulleit Niemeier The Graduate School University of Kentucky

Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility

Abstract: During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With "Abigail and John Adams:, historian G. J. Barker-Benfield mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected - and helped transform - a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility - a heightened moral consciousness of feeling, rooted in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Adam Smith and including a 'moral sense' akin to the physical senses - threads throughout these letters. As Barker-Benfield makes clear, sensibility was the fertile, humanizing ground on which the Adamses not only founded their marriage, but also the 'abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity' they and their contemporaries hoped to plant at the heart of the new nation. Bringing together their correspondence with a wealth of fascinating detail about life and thought, courtship and sex, gender and parenting, and class and politics in the revolutionary generation and beyond, "Abigail and John Adams" draws a lively, convincing portrait of a marriage endangered by separation, yet surviving by the same ideas and idealism that drove the revolution itself. A feast of ideas that never neglects the real lives of the man and woman at its center, "Abigail and John Adams" takes readers into the heart of an unforgettable union in order to illuminate the first days of our nation - and explore our earliest understandings of what it might mean to be an American.

The politics of patriotism in France (1770–1788)

Abstract: This article focuses on the language of patrie as it was employed from the 1770s to the 1780s in relation to the parlements. It was a complex and ambiguous rhetoric with roots in classical republicanism that was significantly modified in the 1740s and put to many uses. The study seeks to show how and why the parlementaires moved in public opinion from being patriotic heroes in the early 1770s to the decidedly unpatriotic agents of aristocracy in late 1788. The premise is that language in the courts is employed rhetorically and involves an attempt to convince auditors and readers of the arguments on both a rational and an emotional level. The discourse was thus appropriated by actors rather than dominating them. Patrie was evocative of emotions on several levels, from austerity to sensibility. On the other hand, the courts were not supposed to employ emotional arguments but judicial ones based upon the corpus of existing legislation. It is therefore instructive to trace their relationship to this idiom, particularly in the crisis periods of 1770-74 and 1787-89.

Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald's Die Ringe des Saturn

Abstract: "Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos, aus der eine Welt entspringen kann." - Friedrich Schlegel, "Ideen" No. 71 In an essay entitled "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," Hayden White makes the claim that the modernist sensibility represents a response to a new sense of history, one that emerges from the confrontation with a radically transformed reality and a new perception of the unimaginable capacities and limitations of human reason and its implementation. This modernist sensibility comes into being, according to White, as an anticipation of a new form of historical reality, a reality that included, among its supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects, the phenomenon of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, mass starvation, and ecological suicide; a profound sense of the incapacity of our sciences to explain, let alone control or contain these; and a growing awareness of the incapacity of our traditional modes of representation even to describe them adequately. (52) What White describes here might be termed the multifold crisis of human self-understanding under the conditions of technological modernity. It turns on an acknowledgment of the incomprehensible destructiveness of the human species, its capacity not merely to wage "total" war and develop rational strategies for the extermination of an entire people, but also its unfathomable ability to eliminate the very conditions that make its own existence possible, either in the form of catastrophic nuclear obliteration or of the systematic ecological degradation of the life world. What makes this sensibility unique, according to White, is the manner in which it escapes both the explanatory power of traditional scientific thinking and the representational models with which we commonly comprehend and digest historical reality. W G. Sebald is one of the most eloquent recent spokespeople of this modernist sensibility as described by White. His literary works are not simply seismographic records of these human-induced catastrophes, but also attempts to fashion new representational tools for the purpose of acknowledging and coming to terms with the realities of modern human history. In this sense, Sebald's literary project might be understood as an attempt to make manifest in the more sensuous form of literary discourse those aspects of the modernist sensibility that, according to White, escape the grasp of theoretical explanation. In an interview with Uwe Pralle conducted in August 2001, just four months prior to his untimely death, Sebald responded to a question regarding his obsession with a "Universalgeschichte der Katastrophen" by insisting that this focus reflects what he views as an aberration of the human species. "Letzten Endes handelt es sich," Sebald remarks in this context, "um so etwas wie eine Beschreibung der Aberration einer Species," and he goes on to highlight the relevance of this strategy for one of his works in particular, the 1995 "travelogue" Die Ringe des Saturn, which bears the subtitle "Eine englische Wallfahrt": "Man kann - und das ist unter anderem eine der Ideen gewesen hinter der Strukturierung in den Ringen des Saturn - in konzentrischen Kreisen immer weiter nach ausen gehen, und die auseren Kreise determinieren immer die inneren" (Pralle 16). As an example of this process by which one moves from micro- to macro-levels of mutual determination, Sebald maintains that the psychic economy of individuals living in interwar Germany was shaped by the larger circle of family history, which in turn was influenced by the history of the petty bourgeoisie in the 1920s and 1930s, while this class was molded by the economic conditions of that period and the history of industrialization. One can pursue this trajectory, Sebald asserts, until one ultimately arrives at the outermost circles of natural history and the larger history of the human species (Sebald, "Mit einem kleinen Strandspaten" 16). …

Creative Synaesthesia in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck

Abstract: Strong evidence in the field of neuroscience now makes it possible to claim, with minimal reservation, that E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary imagination was enriched by synaesthesia. E. T. A. Hoffmann is recognised as a remarkable polymath. A writer of fiction, bibliophile, composer and music critic, he not only understood Romantic sensibility but also involved himself in contemporary scientific debates on the nature of sound and perception, and was familiar with the acoustic theories of Ritter and Schubert’s work on magnetism and electrical energy. Hoffmann’s distinctive creativity was formed and informed by his diverse abilities and interests, and by his auditory sensibility and kinaesthetic appreciation of music. We postulate that the multi-sensory nature of Hoffmann’s work is evidence of creative synaesthesia, a phenomenon that occurs when a neurophysiological sensation perceived in the brain stimulates a different sense or senses and, as a result, produces a creative outcome. Taking as our example his intensely musical story Ritter Gluck, published in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of February 1809, we examine Hoffmann’s complex and idiosyncratic use of metaphor and structure in the scientific context of his own time and continent, and in the context of 21st century scientific understandings of brain science.We are a sensorium commune, sensuous beings who perceive through many diverse senses at once.1

Cultural computing - creative power integrating culture, unconsciousness and software

Abstract: The author is carrying out technology studies to explore and expand human emotions, sensibility, and consciousness by making innovative use of artistic creativity. We develop interfaces for experiencing and expressing the "essence of culture'' such as human feelings, ethnicity, and story. History has shown that human cultures have common and unique forms such as behavior and grammar. We suggest a computer model for that process and a method of interactive expression and experiencing cultural understanding using IT called "cultural computing". We particularly examine Japanese culture, although it is only a small subject of computing.

Transcendental philosophy and quantum physics

Abstract: In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that the empirical knowledge of the world depends on a priori conditions of human sensibility and understanding, i. e., our capacities of sense experience and concept formation. The objective knowledge presupposes, on one hand, space and time as a priori conditions of sensibility and, on another hand, a priori judgments, like the principle of causality, as constitutive conditions of understanding. The problem is that in the XX century the physical science completely changed how we conceive our knowledge of the world. Face to this new situation, what was changed in our classical reason? However, if the transcendental point of view is adopted, in the specific case of quantum mechanics, we have to wonder about the general conditions of this theory that make possible such knowledge, which predictive value is much more accurate than the classical physics. The aim of this work is firstly to show the Kantian implications on Bohr's interpretation of quantum phenomena and secondly to provide an overview of the key elements for understanding the transcendental locus of ordinary language in the quantum mechanics context, in order to give support to a transcendental pragmatic position in the analysis of science.

A feminist voice in the enlightenment salon: Madame de Lambert on taste, sensibility, and the feminine mind

Abstract: This essay demonstrates how the early Enlightenment salonniere madame de Lambert advanced a novel feminist intellectual synthesis favoring women's taste and cognition, which hybridized Cartesian (specifically Malebranchian) and honnete thought. Disputing recent interpretations of Enlightenment salonnieres that emphasize the constraints of honnetete on their thought, and those that see Lambert's feminism as misguided in emphasizing gendered sensibility, I analyze Lambert's approach as best serving her needs as an aristocratic woman within elite salon society, and show through contextualized analysis how she deployed honnetete towards feminist ends. Additionally, the analysis of Malebranche's, Poulain de la Barre's, and Lambert's arguments about the female mind's gendered embodiment illustrates that misrepresenting Cartesianism as necessarily liberatory for women, by reducing it to a rigid substance dualism, erases from view its more complex implications for gender politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially in the honnete environment of the salons.

Pedagogy and the Poetic: Nurturing Ecological Sensibility through Language and Literature

Abstract: This article provides an overview of the context, methodology, and theoretical framework of a research project conducted with coastal Newfoundland children living in communities deeply affected by the collapse of the marine ecosystem. Through a participatory engagement with bioregional poetry, the author investigates how children grow in their capacity to develop an ecological sensibility for the places they inhabit. The article critically examines the technical, resourcist bias of present educational discourse and proposes it is imperative that the term “ecology” be reclaimed for education.

Ann yearsley, biography and the “pow'rs of sensibility untaught!”

Abstract: As Mary Waldron's important study Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton suggests, it is almost impossible to overlook the biographical when considering the poetry of labouring-class poet Ann Yearsley. Much has been made in recent criticism of the poet's very public falling-out with her one-time patron, Hannah More. The conflict between the middle-class values embodied in the figure of More and the middle-class aspirations of her labouring-class charge emphasizes the fact that eighteenth-century literary culture was still predominantly middle- and upper-class culture. Using this conflict as a starting point, this article considers some of the ways in which Yearsley deploys the discourse of sensibility in her attempt to rise, via her poetry, into the ranks of the middle classes. The author suggests that Yearsley's insistent linking of sensibility to her “real-life” suffering and to the powerful effects produced on her mind by the natural world signals the poet's engagement with a nascent Romantic poetics and her r...

Animals, Humans, Machines And Thinking Matter, 1690-1707

Abstract: This article looks at the debate on the soul in England at the turn of the eighteenth century and at the role played within it by the question of animal soul, which had both theological and scientific ramifications. It discusses the difficulty of accounting for animal behaviour without either adopting the animal-machine hypothesis or according animals an immaterial and hence immortal soul. While those who denied the existence of an immaterial human soul and refused any fundamental distinction between humans and other animals were accused of reducing humans to machines, this article shows that the issues were in fact more complex. The fundamental question was that of the nature of matter; the main danger for many theologians seemed to lie in the attribution of innate life and sensibility to matter, which opened the door to materialism and undermined Christian doctrine

The Song of the Earth: A pragmatic rejoinder

Abstract: In The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate promotes ‘ecopoesis’, contrasting it with ‘ecopolitical’ poetry (and by implication, other forms of writing and expression). Like others recently, including Simon James and Michael Bonnett, he appropriates the notion of ‘dwelling’ from Heidegger to add force to this distinction. Bate's argument is effectively that we have more chance of protecting the environment if we engage in ecopoetic activity, involving a sense of immediate response to nature, than if we do not. This has obvious educational implications. If Bate, James and Bonnett are correct, then the educational pursuit of (eco)poetic sensibility will, of itself, contribute to education for a sustainable future by grounding human experience in nature; if their assertions are insupportable, and (eco)poetic sensibility does not afford privileged access to a state of nature, then the assumption cannot be made that the development of such sensibility will contribute to education for sustainability. I shall critiq...

The sacred, (in)visibility, and communication: an inter-religious dialogue between Goethe and Hāfez

Abstract: Dialogue between religions cannot merely be dialogue between doctrines. As soon as religions are considered not only as abstract systems of beliefs but also as embodied practices of faith, their aesthetic dimension becomes prominent. Dialogue therefore involves the sphere of sensibility. How do believers of different faiths weave the fabric of religious experience? Through which senses, signs, and forms of signification and communication does it find expression? Furthermore, how can different religious aesthetic attitudes be encompassed in the same dialogue? This article does not answer these questions through theoretical investigation. Rather, it offers an example of religious ‘aesthetic hospitality’. In one of his poems devoted to Hāfez, Goethe invents a metaphor that opens a space of dialogue between Christian and Islamic aesthetic sensibilities. This metaphor, based on the Christian tradition of acheiropoietai (not-made-with-hands) images of Jesus' face, allows Goethe to bridge two religious semiotics...