Chapter

Language Is Everywhere

October 2013

DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823255658.003.0004

In book: The Logos of the Living World (pp.101-134)

Authors:

Louise Westling

University of Oregon

This chapter addresses the place of language and literature in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, setting it within the context of evolutionary continuity in animal life and communicative activities throughout the biosphere. Examining his description of the gestural origins of speech in Phenomenology of Perception and his account of infant entry into language in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, the chapter links his theory of the embodied quality of linguistic behavior with the cognitive and communicative activities of other animals, especially apes. It goes on to show how this work is related to Philip Lieberman’s work in the cognitive neuroscience of language evolution and behavior, and also the new interdisciplinary field of biosemiotics. Concluding with an account of Merleau-Ponty’s description of literature and the other arts as the human voicing of immanent meanings in the world, the chapter ends with a reading of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi that dramatizes the interdependency and uneasy communication among living creatures that must coexist but also kill and eat each other.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.

Article

The French Colonial Mind, Volume 2

October 2011

Martin Thomas

olence was prominent in France’s conquest of a colonial empire, and the use of force was integral to its control and regulation of colonial territories. What, if anything, made such violence distinctly colonial? And how did its practitioners justify or explain it? These are issues at the heart of The French Colonial Mind: Violence, Military Encounters, and Colonialism. The second of two linked ... [Show full abstract] volumes, this book brings together prominent scholars of French colonial history to explore the many ways in which brutality and killing became central to the French experience and management of empire. Sometimes concealed or denied, at other times highly publicized and even celebrated, French violence was so widespread that it was in some ways constitutive of colonial identity. Yet such violence was also destructive: destabilizing for its practitioners and lethal or otherwise devastating for its victims. The manifestations of violence in the minds and actions of imperialists are investigated here in essays that move from the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s to the disintegration of France’s empire after World War II. The authors engage a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the violence of first colonial encounters to conflicts of decolonization. Each considers not only the forms and extent of colonial violence but also its dire effects on perpetrators and victims. Together, their essays provide the clearest picture yet of the workings of violence in French imperialist thought.

Article

[Phenomenology of kicking and kicking to death]

September 1996 · Archiv für Kriminologie

28 autopsy cases with injuries due to blunt trauma comprising kicking or stamping on the victim are analysed for characteristics of the victims, the perpetrator and the assault as well as for the injury pattern. Emphasis is put on patterned contusions which in cases of medium impact reflect the characteristics of the footwear that made them as a mirror image.

Article

Full-text available

Discussion of Stalking Behavior Using a Conscious System

January 2018 · Procedia Computer Science

Stalking behavior, characterized by specific and dreadful acts such as persistent following, repeated sending of unwanted gifts, lack of sympathy, and even willingness to kill the victim, has become a serious concern in modern society. However, since stalking behavior has something partly in common with any criminal behavior, further discussion of this topic is considered helpful in determining ... [Show full abstract] factors behind various criminal behavior. Thus, there is an urgent need to investigate how this mysterious and dangerous behavior arises. There are three main types of stalking behavior: “rejected,” “resentful,” and “other (intimacy seeker and incompetent suitor).” First, we focused on a conscious model of the rejected type, as it is considered the most typical. The artificial conscious model is built to represent a process in which a conflict of concepts arising in the Reason Subsystem is progressively reconciled by the Association Subsystem.

Article

International Variations In Homicide And Warfare

January 2010

Alfred Mcalister

Variations in attitudes toward war and killing may influence national and cultural differences in the acquisition and use of deadly weapons and the perpetration of individual and collective violence. The concept of moral disengagement explains how individual and group differences in judgments about the justifiability of violence lead to individual and group differences in the willingness to ... [Show full abstract] inflict suffering on others. This article summarizes recent studies of international and cultural differences in attitudes toward war and killing. These studies reveal a wide variations in attitudes that are related to objective measures of homicide and military spending.

Article

Psychological experiences of homicide victims’ families : A phenomenological study

May 2018 · THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND SOCIAL ISSUES

Article

Full-text available

Homicide Survivors' Definitions of Forgiveness: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Extrapersonal Orie...

August 2016 · Violence and Victims

Kristen Lee Discola Hourigan

This article explores the definition of forgiveness from the perspective of individuals who have lost loved ones to homicide. This article draws on 33 in-depth, semistructured interviews that asked participants to define and discuss forgiveness and non-forgiveness both in general and as it relates to homicide. Analysis shows three distinct definitions of, or orientations toward, forgiveness, each ... [Show full abstract] learned through interaction with family and/or religion: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal. Analyses suggest that future investigations must include multiple definitions of forgiveness, and victim services must be cognizant of these various pathways toward forgiveness.

Article

Acousto-optic range Doppler processor for target discrimination

October 1998 · Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Essex has developed a hybrid acousto-optic/digital electronic processor, called the Advanced Optical Processor (AOP) a.k.a. Wideband Range-Doppler Imager (WRDI), that generates high dynamic range, high resolution range-Doppler images from wideband radar returns. This processor supports high resolution processing necessary for target discrimination and kill assessment. The processor is described ... [Show full abstract] and results of testing with simulated and real field data are presented. Key capabilities of this processor are: (1) high dynamic range to detect small cross section targets in a severe clutter background, (2) large image sizes in multiples of 1024 range bins by up to 128 Doppler resolution bins, (3) dynamically adjustable Doppler resolution, (4) dynamic reconfigurability of modules to switch between coarse range resolution covering a large range extent for acquisition mode to a fine resolution mode for target discrimination, (5) the ability to accommodate time compression/dilation to eliminate blurring of moving targets in high resolution range-Doppler images, and (6) the ability to efficiently combine multiple low bandwidth, low range resolution radar returns to obtain high range resolution range-Doppler images. The AOP can process true arbitrary waveforms, which are needed to support the high dynamic range required for discrimination. This is achieved in a compact, light weight and cost effective package.

Book

Violence’s Fabled Experiment

March 2018

Richard Baxstrom

Baxstrom and Meyers examine how violence and an unmarked, stubbornly persistent conception of “nature” weave into the fabric of the human in the recent work of three important filmmakers. For Werner Herzog, the salience of prehistory links new cinematic formulations to a long Western tradition of metaphysics, marking man’s break with nature, his fall into consciousness and history, and his ... [Show full abstract] impossible effort to grasp the violence of his descent. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, the display of seemingly “unrepresentable” violence rendered through reenactments of killings – performed by the original perpetrators against Indonesian “communists” in 1965–66 – operates according to logics of trauma and shame, advancing a troubling ontotheology that seeks to neutralize politics and ethics in favor of a vague, curative transcendence. And finally, the films of Lucien Castaing-Taylor offer a picture of nature as a radically open, colossally empty present – nature not as a domain of redemption or restoration for us, but something that overwhelms us, evades us, and crushes us in its path.

Article

From volitional action to automatized homicide: Changing levels of self and consciousness during par...

September 2003 · Aggression and Violent Behavior

Anneliese Alma Pontius

Refined definitions are proposed for subtle, transient changes primarily of the “sense of self,” as expressed in observable action behavior due to neuro-pathological disturbances, especially during partial seizures' interfering with volition. Two such subtypes are exemplified by temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), typically with clouding of consciousness (with amnesia for the acts), and by the proposed ... [Show full abstract] “Limbic Psychotic Trigger Reaction” (LPTR). During LPTR, consciousness is preserved to the extent that such seizure-stricken patients remember their acts, which are associated with a fleeting de novo psychosis and autonomic arousal. The acts are nonvolitional, unplanned, nonintended, motiveless, purposeless, and out-of-character, ranging from socially bizarrely inappropriate behavior to homicide. Basic “paleo” levels of the sense of self and of consciousness are preserved: Such patients “know” the nature, i.e., the kind of action, while they transiently lose their previously characteristic ability to fully appreciate the “quality” of their acts, their consequences, and implications.

Article

Developments at the Kinetic Kill Vehicle Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator (KHILS) facility

July 1999 · Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) sponsored the development of the Kinetic Kill Vehicle Hardware-in-the- Loop Simulator (KHILS) to provide a comprehensive ground test capability for end game performance evaluation of BMDO interceptor concepts. Since its inception in 1986, the KHILS facility has been on the forefront of HWIL test technology development. This development has ... [Show full abstract] culminated in closed-loop testing involving large format resistive element projection arrays, 3D scene rendering systems, and real-time high fidelity phenomenology codes. Each of these components has been integrated into a real-time environment that allows KHILS to perform dynamic closed-loop testing of BMDO interceptor systems or subsystems. Ongoing activities include the integration of multiple resistor arrays into both a cold chamber and flight motion simulator environment, increasing the update speed of existing arrays to 180 Hz, development of newer 200 Hz snapshot resistor arrays, design of next generation 1024 X 1024 resistor arrays, development of a 1000 Hz seeker motion stage, integration of a resistor array into an RF chamber, and development of advanced real-time plume flow-field codes. This paper describes these activities and test results of the major facility components.

Chapter

Power Game of Nao: Violent Disputes in the Chinese Medical Sector

January 2019

Jiong Tu

The medical sector in China has witnessed increasing disputes between doctors and patients over the past several years. Various factors contribute to the increase in medically-related disputes: a rising consciousness of patient rights, the deepening misunderstanding between patients and doctors, inflammatory media reporting, the commercialised health care that infringe on people’s moral economy, ... [Show full abstract] and the absence of a formal institution for dealing with medical disputes. In medical disputes, patients (and their relatives) and doctors (and hospitals) compete in a struggle for power over the control of their interests and safety, and over their moral definitions of justice and rights. When patients are mistreated or die, the moral sentiments of the public who shares many unhappy healthcare experiences are on the side of the patients and their relatives. However, when health professionals are attacked or killed, they become the weak ones, who cannot protect themselves from violence. They begin to win over public sentiment, gradually accumulating moral capital, which justifies them in fighting back. Yet, the configuration of power between disputing patients and health professionals is shaped by the power of the government.

Article

Between the Lines The death of Dylan Thomas: a conspiracy theory

September 2010 · The BMJ

Theodore Dalrymple

The idea of the “poete maudit”—the cursed poet—who drinks, drugs, and misbehaves his way to an early grave is one that is now deeply engraved on our consciousness. Of course, nowadays there are a lot of maudits who are by no means poetes: and where everyone is a bohemian, no one is. But still the image lives on. Dylan Thomas (1914-53) was a perfect poete maudit. He spent much of his short life ... [Show full abstract] in dark bars, inhaling smoke and imbibing beer, often at other people’s expense. Until I read David N Thomas’s book Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? I (like most people) had always assumed …