Showing papers on "Sensibility published in 2011"

Emotions in History - Lost and Found

Abstract: List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments The Historical economy of emotions: Introduction Brussels, 2010: Emotional politics and the politics of emotion - The Economy of emotions: How it works and why it matters - The modern and the pre-modern Chapter 1 Losing emotions Losing emotions in trauma - Losing emotions in psychology and historiography - Losing emotions in the civilising process - Losing emotions in words: acedia and melancholia - Losing the mot-force: honour - Honour as an emotional disposition: internal/external - Honour practices: The duel - The emotional power of duelling - Shaming the coward - Equality and group cohesion - Crimes of honour, now and then - Chastity and family honour - Rape, sex, and national honour - The decline of honour, or its return? Chapter 2 Gendering emotions Rage and insult - Power and self-control - Women's strength, women's weakness - Modernity and the natural order - Emotional topographies of gender - Sensibility - Romantic families, passionate politics - Intense emotions versus creative minds - Schools of emotions: the media - Self-help literature - More schooling: armies, peer groups, politics - Collective emotions and charismatic leadership - New emotional profiles and social change - Angry young men, angry young women - Winds of change Chapter 3 Finding emotions Empathy and compassion - Social emotions in 18th-century moral philosophy - Self-love and sympathy - Suffering and pity - Fraternite and the French Revolution - Human rights - Abolitionism and the change in sensibility - Sympathy, lexical - Schopenhauer's Nachstenliebe versus Nietzsche's Fernsten-Liebe - Compassion and its shortcomings - Counter-forces and blockades - Suffering, pity and the education of feelings - Modern dilemmas - Humanitarianism and its crises Emotions lost and found: Conclusions and Perspectives Index

Emotions outside the box—the new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality

Abstract: The following text is the first ever translation into English of a writing by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz (*1928). In it, Schmitz outlines and defends a non-mentalistic view of emotions as phenomena in interpersonal space in conjunction with a theory of the felt body’s constitutive involvement in human experience. In the first part of the text, Schmitz gives an overview covering some central pieces of his theory as developed, for the most part, in his massive System of Philosophy, published in German in a series of volumes between 1964 and 1980. Schmitz’s System is centred on the claim that the contemporary view of the human subject is the result of a consequential historical process: A reductionist and ‘introjectionist’ objectification of lived experience culminating in the ‘invention’ of the mind (or ‘soul’) as a private, inner realm of subjective experience and in a corresponding ‘grinding down’ of the world of lived experienced to a meagre, value-neutral ‘objective reality’. To counter this intellectualist trend, Schmitz puts to use his approach to phenomenology with the aim of regaining a sensibility for the nuanced realities of lived experience—hoping to make up for what was lost during the development of Western intellectual culture. Since both this text and the overall style of Schmitz’s philosophising are in several ways unusual for a contemporary readership, a brief introduction is provided by philosophers Jan Slaby and Rudolf Owen Mullan, the latter of whom translated Schmitz’s text into English. The introduction emphasises aspects of Schmitz’s philosophy that are likely to be of relevance to contemporary scholars of phenomenological philosophy and to its potential applications in science and society.

The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760

Abstract: Introduction PART I 1. The Construction of a New World Picture 2. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy PART II 3. The Metaphysical Unity of Natural Philosophy 4. From Experimental Philosophy to Empiricism 5. Explaining the Phenomena PART III 6. Natural Philosophy and the Republic of Letters 7. The Realm of Reason PART IV 8. The Fortunes of a Unified Model of Natural Philosophy 9. Material Activity 10. Living and Dead Matter PART V 11. The Realm of Sensibility 12. Historical Understanding and the Human Condition Conclusion Bibliography of Works Cited Index

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Abstract: The quintessential novel of sentiment, A Sentimental Journey masquerades as the fragmentary travel journal of Parson Yorick, a whimsical and amorous Englishman abroad. Accompanied through Paris and the provinces by his loyal French valet, Yorick enjoys a variety of sentimental and often comic encounters with a lively range of French characters. The novel is also punctuated by passages of self-conscious reflection on questions of personal and national identity, slavery and freedom, poverty and inequality. Appendices include material on sensibility in philosophy and literature and on eighteenth-century travel writing, as well as excerpts from Sterne's other writings and examples of the novel's critical reception, imitation, and illustration.

‘Feminism? That’s So Seventies’: Girls and Young Women Discuss Femininity and Feminism in America’s Next Top Model

Abstract: In this chapter, I examine the particular configuration of feminist and postfeminist consciousness characterizing the way many young women think and speak today. Gill (2006) has recently discussed what she terms the ‘postfeminist’ sensibility, a sensibility that incorporates feminist ideals, but also their rejection. McRobbie similarly discusses this paradox, wherein feminism is both assumed by the general population, and actively refuted and rejected as a belief system (McRobbie, 2009a, p. 1). In the postfeminist sensibility, feminism is rejected by those who should ‘know better’, and thereby the rejection itself is made ‘naughty’ — which, in effect, sexualizes it or makes it pleasurable; and this leads to a certain fetishization of ‘anti-feminist’ symbols of femininity such as an objectified sexualization of women’s bodies, a militantly ‘feminine’ appearance, etc. There is a contradiction in the way that what are seen as the ideals of second-wave feminism — women’s empowerment, autonomy, and ability to choose work, sexual and emotional lifestyles — are at the same time taken for granted, criticized, lauded and coldly rejected (McRobbie, 2007, 2009a, 2009b).

Schopenhauer's Theory of Vision In the Paragraph 21 of On The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Abstract: In this paper I examine Schopenhauer’s Theory of Vision as it appears in section 21 of The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason which header reads “Apriority of the concept of causality; intellectuality of empirical knowledge; the intellect”. The function of this theory in the context of section 21 is to support the intellectual features of empirical knowledge, i.e. perception of the external world. Schopenhauer arguments tries to show the wrongness of the standard theories of his contemporaries who take into account only sensibility, excluding any analysis on intelligence’s spontaneity and its operations that construe empirical and aware vision. Nevertheless, our analysis centers in Schopenhauer’s thesis rather than in its critics towards non-intellectual theories of vision. In order to comprehend Schopenhauer’s theory of vision one must first take into account it’s transcendental physiology of perception for vision is indeed a concrete instance of perception. Consequently I present also a brief exposition of Schopenhauer’s physiologic-transcendental theory of perception.

Mind, body, and the moral imagination in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world

Abstract: This dissertation deals with ideas and assumptions about human nature in the cultural life of the eighteenthcentury British Atlantic world. Most scholars see in this period a decline of the traditional Western dualism in the understanding of human nature. Empiricist philosophy, we are told, increasingly denied the possibility of distinguishing between the body and reason, much less between the body and "soul." Moralists now tended to locate social and moral reactions in sensation and sensibility rather than in reason. The cultural status of physical pleasure was greatly enhanced. I challenge this wide consensus. I find in eighteenth-century British and colonial culture an alternative story of marginalizing the body and downplaying its role in moral and social life. I see persistent efforts to assert the soul as an independent source of feeling and action, with the activity of spirit defining specifically human relations at all levels from intimate to economic. I analyze eighteenth-century perceptions of love, marriage, and companionate family and find a wide-spread conception of essential difference between the spiritual emotion of love-friendship and physical desire. I argue that desire was often perceived to be a mechanical, secondary, and extrinsic component of love and marriage, rather than the genetic root of both. Since the family was commonly conceived as the foundation of social life, this segregation of desire was a crucial part of a wider social imaginary that did not include the body as an active structural component in interpersonal relations. Society, like marriage, could be seen as a compact of souls and minds, with the body being an object, rather than agent, of social relations. Finally, I interpret eighteenth-century conceptualizations of racial difference as attempts both to acknowledge and to eliminate the body as an agent in its own right. Constructing a progression of human bodies from a crude and active animal presence to a pliant and delicate instrument of the soul helped to assert the essential freedom of human spirit at the top of the hierarchy in the white race.

The pleasure of the senses : the art of sensation in Shelley’s Poetics of Sensibility

Abstract: This thesis examines Shelley’s art of sensuous imagery, or poetics of sensibility. To elucidate Shelley’s concept of sensibility which links his poetry to its ethical and aesthetic concerns, I combine close textual readings of Shelley’s imagery of the senses with his intellectual and cultural inheritance from the ‘Age of Sensibility’ which encompasses ‘moral philosophy’ (ethics and aesthetics) and ‘natural philosophy’ (science). Chapter I focuses on Shelley’s notions of sensuous pleasure and sympathy. _A Defence of Poetry_ is a pivotal text that expounds Shelley’s aesthetic and ethical taste, exemplified by his concept of sympathy. Taking up this argument, Chapter II investigates Shelley’s vegetarian politics in _Queen Mab_, rooted in what I call _(dis)gusto_, ‘taste’ in both its physical and aesthetic senses. Chapter III focuses on aural imagery in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ and ‘Mont Blanc.’ Exploring the interplay between motion and emotion reveals how aesthetics and psychology, in Shelley’s lyrics, are associated with the vocalisation of poetic inspiration. Chapter IV considers the relation of sight to Shelley’s notion of the fragmentary in two ekphrastic texts concerned with visual representation, ‘The Coliseum’ and ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery,’ which illuminate Shelley’s idea of a circulating and sympathetic power that unifies humans or subject with object, alongside a fragmentary imperative within these texts. Chapter V investigates Shelley’s treatment of touch and Nature’s economy in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ by juxtaposing Shelley’s poem with Erasmus Darwin’s cyclical system of Nature known as ‘organic happiness,’ which is recognised only by sympathetic sensibility. Chapter VI considers the intermingled imagery of scent and sympathetic love in _Epipsychidion_ in conjunction with Shelley’s theory of nervous vibrations influenced by eighteenth-century psycho-physiological discourses, mediated through the imagery of Venus, whose duality embodies the interrelations between sensuous pleasure and ideal beauty in Shelley’s poetics of sensibility.

Enclosing in God’s Name, Accumulating for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke’s Theory of Property

Abstract: John Locke's theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socioeconomic perspective, which conceives Locke's thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke's theory of money in the Second Treatise can provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law and the historical fact of capital accumulation shade into each other. More specifically, the ambiguity of the status of money enables Locke to navigate an antinomy within the natural law such that he establishes a relation of necessity between the divine telos and accumulative practices.

Sentimental Ideology, Women's Pedagogy, and American Indian Women's Writing: 1815-1921

Abstract: concerns existing outside of her immediate affective ties: ―If you stay here you will be killed, and what happiness could your devoted wife ever expect to have? When I left my father‘s tepee to go with you, you promised to love me and take care of me 247 According to Jaime Osterman Alves, ―Our Brother in Red and the Harrell Monthly—two newspapers for which Callahan wrote—disallowed articles of a secular or a political nature‖ (107), a rule which was apparently used to justify the Methodist Indian Mission‘s official silence regarding Euro-American acts of genocide.

Modernism, Satire and the Novel

Abstract: In this groundbreaking study, Jonathan Greenberg locates a satiric sensibility at the heart of the modern By promoting an antisentimental education, modernism denied the authority of emotion to guarantee moral and literary value Instead, it fostered sophisticated, detached and apparently cruel attitudes toward pain and suffering This sensibility challenged the novel's humanistic tradition, set ethics and aesthetics into conflict and fundamentally altered the ways that we know and feel Through lively and original readings of works by Evelyn Waugh, Stella Gibbons, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and others, this book analyzes a body of literature - late modernist satire - that can appear by turns aloof, sadistic, hilarious, ironic and poignant, but which continually questions inherited modes of feeling By recognizing the centrality of satire to modernist aesthetics, Greenberg offers not only a new chapter in the history of satire but a persuasive new idea of what made modernism modern

Aesthetics of Sustainability: A Transdisciplinary Sensibility for Transformative Practices

Abstract: C ontemporary western societies are marked by symptoms of a culture of unsustainability, rooted in problematic modes of knowing reality, across social systems, whether in the sciences, arts or other fields. Transdisciplinary researchers across the world are already aware of these issues and working on resolving them. To contribute to these efforts and focus on a perspective which potential may have been receiving too little attention so far, this article is introducing how a sensibility to transdisciplinarity and complexity can inform aesthetics of sustainability, and why this matters for a global (environ)mental transformation process. The relevance of this approach is discussed with the field of ecological art and the practice of walking.

Multimodal evaluation: sense and sensibility in Anthony Browne's picture books

Abstract: Children's picture books are celebrated in various disciplines for their rich emotional repertoire, their wide range of themes, and their educational as well as cultural implications (Doonan 1993, 1996; Hunt 2001 ; Martin 2008; Nodelman 1988; Painter 2008; Spitz 1999; Sutherland 1986; Tian 2010; Whalley 1996). In particular, they are highly valued for their integrative use of the visual and the verbal in creating and carrying information and meaning (Guijarro & Sanz 2010; Painter & Martin in press; Unsworth 2001). This research uses Anthony Browne's picture books to investigate how multimoda1 evaluative effect is achieved through choices made when deploying semiotic resources in such texts. This thesis examines the evaluative meanings that are realised visually, verbally and in visual-verbal intersemiotic interplay in Browne's picture books. In discussing the evaluative meanings in the visual, this thesis provides a systematic description of the configuration of face and the realisation of facial affect in illustrations. Drawing largely on the concepts of 'expression' and 'content' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999, Hjelmslev 1943/1961), this research proposes a bi-stratal model in the analysis of evaluative meanings in images. In discussing the evaluative meanings in the verbal, this thesis incorporates an APPRAISAL framework (Martin & White 2005) and a linguistic approach to stories, particularly the concept of 'story family' (Martin & Rose 2008). A new subtype of narrative will be identified. In discussing the creation of evaluative meanings through visual-verbal interplay, this research focuses on the interplay between VISUAL AFFECT and VERBAL AFFECT. It considers how facial affect in the image interacts with affect inscribed in the verbal texts as stories develop and unfold. To enrich the analysis, this research also considers the VISUAL AFFECT VERBAL AFFECT interaction alongside semiotic choices made in interpersonal systems such as VISUAL FOCALISA TION (Painter 2007) and AMBIENCE (Painter 2008). It is through the detailed investigation of these three aspects that this research produces its insights into the multimodal evaluative effect achieved in Browne's children's picture books.

Approaching problem gambling with a discursive sensibility

Abstract: In this paper, I outline some aspects of what I describe as a “discursive sensibility.” Drawing from discourse theory and research, I consider problem gambling in terms of this sensibility: an appreciation for and flexibility in working with differences in how language is used in describing and addressing gambling. I look specifically at how this discursive sensibility can be reflected in particular approaches to practice and research.

Edmund Burke and the Emotions

Abstract: I. INTRODUCTIONIn 1790, Edmund Burke defended the virtues of sentiment against the "conquering empire of light and reason."1 If France had succumbed to this new empire, it was some consolation to Burke that the English had preserved most of their natural feelings: "we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals."2 Burke's trust in sentiment as humanity's moral compass is a wellknown feature of his career. He insisted right to the end of his life that there never was "a jar or discord between genuine sentiment and sound policy."3 Reason, on the other hand, was a "precarious" faculty and often a false friend.4 He trusted himself "not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part."5 In A Philosophical Enquiry (1757), he declared that human beings "often act right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on them from principie."6 In 1770, he maintained that it was "very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculation upon the cause of it."7 According to Burke, it was "not reason but feeling" which drove men, and wise legislators should accommodate this fact.8 The passions were not simply the object of political deliberation. They were also its motivation and ground. When, on the other hand, politicians alienated their feelings in the name of reason the results were often disastrous; it bred a form of political autism, which by the 1790s was gradually laying waste to Europe.Burke's attacks on a wayward and marauding reason have divided interpreters ever since. Mary Wollstonecraft famously denounced his "mortal antipathy to reason" and his belief in the "infallibility of sensibility"; a host of subsequent scholars have cast Burke as a romantic critic of Enlightenment mores or as a full-blown anti-rationalist.9 Others, however, have emphasised his frequent endorsement of reason and insisted that this trumps his praise of sentiment.10 But both of these perspectives remain wedded to a dichotomous view of the faculties, which overlooks his repeated references to the rationality of feeling as well as the affective nature of reason. Burke's own rhetoric is partly responsible for this: as we have seen, he often presented reason and sentiment as antagonistic forces, even though many of his writings and speeches suggest that they have complementary roles. Unfortunately, Burke's account of emotions has received little detailed scrutiny. The emphasis he placed on feeling is frequently noted, but few have paused to consider what exactly a feeling really amounts to in Burke's eyes.11 This article aims to address such an issue.Of course, any attempt to recover a systematic theory of feeling from Burke's disparate writings risks misinterpreting them from the outset. Many of his most persuasive interpreters have questioned the need for an over-arching theory - whether it be of sentiment, reason, morals or politics - for his various rhetorical performances and can point to the statesman's own strictures against theory as an argument in their favour.12 Burke's defence of his Reflections - "I was throwing out reflexions upon a political event, and not reading a lecture upon theorism and principles of Government" - is a corrective to any attempt to cast him as a systematic philosopher on politics or any other aspect of human affairs.13 But in addressing political events, Burke nevertheless enlisted a set of background ideas and languages - the language of common-law jurisprudence, different and even competing discourses of natural law, and idioms drawn from a republican tradition - to which he would also make a contribution. He also enlisted the discourse of sensibility - or what others would call a "sentimental jargon" - and he would add to this discourse by extending its political uses and by providing a justification for such use. …

Advertising the Domestic: Anne Bradstreet's Sentimental Poetics

Abstract: In 1650, the New England Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet published her first book of poetry, The Tenth Muse, under mysterious circumstances Accord ing to her, the verses had been taken and published without her knowledge or consent, and the resulting volume embarrassed her She calls it, in "The Author to Her Book," "ill-formed" and in need of revision (1) In 1678, six years after her death, a second edition appeared with thirteen additional poems These new verses turned the revised edition, titled Several Poems, from political, theological, and historical themes to lyrics about the home With the publication of such poems, Bradstreet raised putatively private experiences to the level of public consciousness and, in the process, reimagined the public community through a domestic lens This move, I argue, meant that the poet achieved many of the same goals__in many of the same ways__as did nineteenth-century authors of sentimental fiction(1) Reading Bradstreet's poetry as sentimental opens it to new insights and expands our understanding of American literary history To describe her works as sentimental (or even proto-sentimental) is, of course, anachronistic;(2) yet in doing so, I build on recent scholarship that traces the history of sentimentalism to the seventeenth century Laura Stevens, for example, argues that English missionary writings, beginning with those of the Puritans, "anticipated many of the ideas and gestures that would constitute the culture of sensibility" (6), and Matthew Brown focuses on "the sentimental portrait of Amerindians" in his chapter on The Eliot Tracts, a series of pamphlets about Puritan missionary activities published between 1643 and 1671 (188) Michelle Burnham, following Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, ties Mary Rowlandson's Puritan captivity narrative of 1682 to the rise of sentimentalism, while Norman Fiering's history of moral philosophy argues more generally for "an inner affinity between sentimentalism and Puritan religious thought" (5) In adding to the work of these scholars, I do not wish to conflate Puritan poetry with sentimental novels but rather to illuminate further "anticipatlions]" and "affinit[ies]" Burnham, for example, links Rowlandson to sentimentalism not through an overt staging of critique but by "putting the material for such critical positions into circulation" (26) Likewise, Fiering pursues his work by "searching seventeenth-century moral thought for evidence of inchoate sentimentalism" (5) In much the same way, I find in Bradstreet's Several Poems evidence of inchoate sentimentalism: the circulation of sentimental material that would take new form and gain greater cultural power in the coming centuries(3) Like many women writers in the nineteenth century, Bradstreet used print to publicize the supposedly private experiences of a woman Moreover, her poetic scenes shaped the public arena in which they appeared: Rather than allow the state to oversee and govern the domestic, she used the domestic to comment on the status of the state Her poetry thus offers an early example of a woman strategically employing publicly sanctioned private roles to engage in cultural politics Such activities emerge most clearly if we approach her work as proto-sentimental, one possible opening in the development of a long sentimental tradition PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIVES In the seventeenth century, the terms public and private did a great deal of ideological work, distinguishing levels of visibility, vocations, spaces, and gender roles The variety of meanings and sanctions attached to them can be illustrated through a brief examination of the writings of influential English Puritans William Perkins and William Ames, divines who were read widely by American Puritans throughout the seventeenth century Perkins wrote the most important preaching manual used by Puritan ministers (Gordis 15-16), and he was still known by Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century as "[t] he famous Mr …

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection

Abstract: In the early twentieth century, Conway Lloyd Morgan warned psychologists against describing the behavior of animals in terms of their mental deliberations. In particular, he suggested that animal psychologists should not call behaviors choices unless they had good evidence that the animals were actually choosing—a dig at Darwinian’s theory of sexual selection (Morgan 1909). A century later, Joan Roughgarden also seeks to discredit Darwinian sexual selection. Unlike Morgan, however, she offers in its place a complex vision of what animal minds are capable of accomplishing—a cooperative model of the evolution of social behavior in which everybody gets to choose, not just females.

Non-Conceptualism and the Problem of Perceptual Self-Knowledge

Abstract: In this paper we (i) identify the notion of 'essentially non- conceptual content' by critically analyzing the recent and con- temporary debate about non-conceptual content, (ii) work out the basics of broadly Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content in relation to a corresponding theory of conceptual content, and then (iii) demonstrate one effective application of the Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content by using this theory to provide a 'minimalist' solution to the problem of perceptual self- knowledge which is raised by Strong Externalism. Appearances could after all be so constituted that the understanding would not find them in accord with the conditions of its unity . . . Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking. (Kant 1997: A90/B123) 1 Perceptual knowledge involves sensibility: that is, a capacity for differential responsiveness to features of the environment, made possible by properly functioning sensory systems. But sensibility does not belong to reason. We share it with non-rational animals. According to Sellars's dictum, the rational faculty that distinguishes us from non-rational animals must also be operative in our being perceptually given things to know. This brings into view a way to fall into the Myth of the Given. Sellars's dictum implies that it is a form of the Myth to think sensibility by itself, without any involvement of capacities that belong to our rationality, can make things available for our cognition. That coincides with a basic doctrine of Kant . . . . The Myth, in the version I have introduced, is the idea that sensibility by itself could make things available for the sort of cognition that draws on the subject's rational powers. (McDowell 2008: 1-2)

Panoramic Memory, Affect, and Sensations of Detachment in the Dying: Discussions Published in France, 1889-1903

Abstract: Between 1889 and 1903, several authors published papers in the French journal "Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger" and in a few other publications in which they discussed panoramic memory, changes of affect, and a sense of detachment from the body in dying persons. With a few exceptions these publications have been ignored in modern discussion of the phenomena of the dying. Whereas philosopher Victor Egger postulated the psychological explanation that panoramic memory results from the dying person's thoughts of imminent death, physicians Paul Sollier and Charles Fere and psychologist Henri Pieron proposed that it, as well as changes in affect, result from physiological changes in the body sensibility and in the brain. Like many authors today who speculate about near-death experiences, the authors in question did not have much evidence for their explanations. These ideas, and their physiological aspects, were part of a general interest in unusual phenomena and states of consciousness during the 19th century.

Austen and Austin

Abstract: Since the publication of J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words in 1962, cultural and literary scholars have worked to connect his “performative” language theory to the vital, often gender and sexuality-based, field that has since become known as “performance studies.” Little has been written, however, about the author whose marriages are ubiquitously performative: the philosopher's “namesake,” Jane Austen. In Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), Stanley Cavell broke news to literary scholars in writing about Austin and Austen, focusing on the moral perfectionism of Emma. By contrast this article follows the spirit of linguistic conformity and play in Austen's earlier major fiction, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. Precisely because Northanger Abbey does not unveil the “transparent mind” of free indirect speech or achieve what D.A. Miller calls final “Austen Style,” the author argues for its engagement with the contestable social and linguistic environment of making “sense.” Not until A...

Sense and sensibility: the conversational etiquette of English national self-identification

Abstract: Sense and sensibility: the conversational etiquette of English national self-identification

Continuity of Heart-mind and Things-events: A Systematic Reconstruction of Neo-Confucian Epistemology

Abstract: Many scholars argue that there is no epistemology in Chinese philosophy, or that an epistemological sensibility was not fully developed in Chinese thinking. This leads western audiences to mistakenly think that Chinese philosophy is not properly ‘philosophical’. This paper argues that there is a great deal of discourse about understanding the world as a whole in ancient Chinese philosophy. Taking Song-ming Neo-Confucianism as an example, the author shows that most researchers do not uncover its philosophical advancement as it developed throughout history. The author reconstructs a real philosophical breakthrough in Neo-Confucianism and argues that Chinese philosophy should be recognized as fully ‘philosophical’—not just ethical, but also epistemological. Through the clarification about epistemological progress in Song-ming Neo-Confucianism, the author argues that there is a coherent development of epistemology in Chinese philosophical history. In short, this article formalizes a systematic view of Chinese...

Una visión panorámica de la ética empresarial

Abstract: The paper is the introduction to Universia Business Review’s special issue on business ethics. Ethics analyzes human actions as long as through these actions human beings become better or worse persons. From this perspective, ethics is a necessity for business and professional activity, beyond being in fashion in certain moments. The paper presents some difficulties for a proper understanding of business ethics: the lack of sensibility in decision makers; the design of the organizations, that favors or hinders the ethical behavior; a broad meaning of the role of business in society. The paper finishes with a brief overview of the papers that compose the special issue.

Sense and Sensibility in Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

Abstract: 219 Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 219–227, ISSN 1053-9867 electronic ISSN 1533-8363. ©2011 Vera Institute of Justice. All rights reserved. Please direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/fsr.2011.23.3.219. Sense and Sensibility in Mandatory Minimum Sentencing