The Cartesian Split: A Hidden Myth
... This viewpoint holds that there is an objective reality that can be quantified and measured. A related perspective that has had a major impact on modern healthcare is Cartesian Dualism, more commonly referred to as the mind-body split (Short, 2020). ...
Hospitals provide the vast majority of cancer care. A necessary focus on survival has meant that they are less well-developed in terms of supporting patients with the emotional impact of cancer; and in supporting the frontline staff who contend with this. An integration of psychotherapeutic and neurobiological findings is used to develop an understanding of the patient-staff relationship and impact of high levels of distress within it. This includes reference to Transference and Countertransference, Mirror Neurons and Poly Vagal Theory. This paper considers how patients can unconsciously “transfer” emotional distress on to healthcare practitioners; and how this evokes an emotional response from the practitioner via the mirror neuron system (MNS). This can allow the practitioner to “feel into” the patient’s experience and develop a more nuanced understanding. However, it may also activate emotions connected to the practitioner’s life and can leave them feeling overwhelmed. The practitioner’s capacity to regulate their own emotional arousal, via the vagus nerve, has a significant impact on their ability to support the patient and themselves within emotionally distressing interactions. This dynamic often unfolds without either party having significant awareness of it. A Systemic and Process-Oriented perspective is taken to understand this within the broader context of a hospital-based structure; and consider how practitioners on frontline teams may or may not support each other in working collectively with high levels of distress. A team’s level of understanding and attunement to emotional experiences as well their primary relational and communication style has significant bearing on capacity for emotion-and-relationship focused coping. A failure to work with the emotional and relational interconnection between patients and staff can contribute to isolated patients, disconnected staff, conflict within teams and an overarching system lacking in compassion. However, due to the often unconscious nature of such processes and limited understanding or training on them, they are regularly left unaddressed. Over time, this can have an accumulated effect on everyone. Group-based collective processing is considered in terms of how it can be used in supporting practitioners to integrate an emotional and relational way of working with a problem-focused approach and integrated into regular daily working.
English has become the world language, which on the one side is a blessing for international communication. On the other side, its dominance tends to make large parts of the world rely on only one language for academic work. This impoverishes the conceptual, expressive and epistemological richness available in all the other languages and makes believe that a translation can bring every concept from one language to another. My aim here is to discuss one concrete problem with a missing concept in English; dance and music as a unity. I will test epistemological arguments; why should we keep dance and music apart and why should we unite them under a new term. I then ask why we do not see concepts from other languages as a resource to improve academic terminology in English and other European languages.
This article examines James Hillman’s notion of psyche in relation to metaphor as the foundation for his archetypal psychology. In pushing Jung to his imaginal limits, Hillman provides an archetypal corrective to the Cartesianism inherent in modern scientific psychology in order to understand all aspects of contemporary psychological life. He proposes an ontological view of metaphor that locates psyche beyond language and mind to places in the world, thus seeking to establish a postmodern archetypal psychology. In the end his notion of psyche is not radical enough in its critique to advance archetypal psychology into acknowledging its postmodern condition.
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How may we design coherent, physical-digital hybrid artifacts as meaningful, mediating elements in a persons' embodied 'Being-in-the-World? We explore this question through two cases, one of designing for a person with autism spectrum disorder and one for people with dementia. We reflected in an iterative way on how the designs evolved, and on how our theoretical lens, grounded in embodied theory, helped to shape the designs. In the final round of reflection, we compared both case studies, looking for overall commonalities, which formed the basis for the resulting design framework that we introduce in this paper. The framework consists of seven principles, of which three support embodied activity in the here-and-now, three support developmental processes over a longer timescale , and finally the idea of a reflective process to connect them.
Traditionally, spatial knowledge has been conceptualised and explained through the use of the cognitive map hypothesis, in which the metaphor of the topographic map is used to construct an explanation of the way in which knowledge about space is stored and used. I argue that the topographical metaphor confuses the map with the territory and is therefore inadequate for approaching the study of peoples' spatial knowledge, as the necessary logical reduction that accompanies the practice of transforming the territory into the map is fundamentally alienating of contextual dynamics and particularities. Furthermore, the topographical metaphor requires and thereby reinforces the Cartesian split, and its implicit privileging of the mind as primary, which disqualifies spatial knowledge from the realm of practical consciousness. Drawing on my participant observation of rock climbing throughout 2003, I propose a model of spatial knowledge anchored in corporeal simulation rather than mental representation, and demonstrate the necessity of this conceptual shift by showing that one's perception of the environment proceeds from the culturally inscribed and extended body, just as the body is imaginatively extended and inscribed in order to meet the requirements of effective and acceptable functioning in the context of a particular located activity.
Psychoactive plants have been consumed by many cultures, cults and groups during religious rituals and ceremonies for centuries and they have been influential on the eruption of many images, secret and religious symbols, esoteric geometrical shapes, archetypes, religious figures, and philosophy of religions since the dawn of Homo sapiens. Some of the psychoactive plants used for religious purposes were: narcotic analgesics (opium), THC (cannabis), psilocybin (magic mushrooms), mescaline (peyote), ibogaine (Tabernanthe iboga), DMT (Ayahuasca and Phalaris species), Peganum harmala, bufotenin, muscimol (Amanita muscaria), Thujone (absinthe, Arthemisia absinthium), ephedra, mandragora, star lotus, Salvia divinorum etc. An important property of these natural chemicals is to induce the human psyche to perceive optical forms and shapes that are existent in the subconscious and presumed collective unconsciousness, and which emerge during certain trance states and ASCs (altered states of consciousness). Some of these simple geometric forms are called entoptic images and phosphenes. Entopic images and phosphenes have been found in various cultural works of art and in the drawings on cave walls, which were formed during shamanic religious rituals since Neolithic times. Also entoptic images exist in many folkloric, traditional and cultural geometrical shapes. Long before the creation of languages, visual perception and information were the only source for mankind, alone of the primates, to perceive the outer world. This article reviews the possibility of an ancient forgotten language of visual signs and symbols, which is genetically existent in the human brain and emerges during ASCs, trance states, and consciousness altered by psychoactive plants.
The dual aim of this article is to show both how Heidegger's existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger's existential philosophy. Characterized as a phenomenological contextualism, post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds philosophical grounding in Heidegger's ontological contextualism, condensed in his term for the human kind of Being, Being-in-the-world. Specifically, Heidegger provides philosophical support (a) for a theoretical and clinical shift from mind to world, from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective; (b) for a shift from the motivational primacy of drives originating in the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind to the motivational primacy of relationally constituted affective experience; and (c) for contextualizing and grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma, which plunges us into a form of Being-toward-death. Post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, in turn, (a) relationalizes Heidegger's conception of finitude, (b) expands Heidegger's conception of relationality, and (c) explores some ethical implications of our kinship-in-finitude.
The Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic scientific paradigm that until recently functioned as the
standard conceptual framework for sub-fields of developmental science (including
inheritance, evolution, and organismic—pre-natal, cognitive, emotional, motivational,
socio-cultural—development) has been progressively failing as a scientific research
program. An alternative scientific paradigm composed of nested meta-theories with
Relationism at the broadest level and Relational-Developmental-Systems as a mid-range
meta-theory is offered as a more progressive conceptual framework for developmental
science. Termed broadly the Relational-Developmental-Systems paradigm, this
framework accounts for the findings that are anomalies for the old paradigm, accounts
for the emergence of new findings, and points the way to future scientific productivity—
and a more optimistic approach to evaluate-evidence-based applications aimed at
promoting positive human development and social justice.
Despite bringing about a revolution in our comprehension of the world, reductionist science has constructed a mechanistic picture of the Universe with no place for emergent complexity, free will, or mental phenomena. The Cartesian split between the material and the mental continues to impact our models of human nature and psychopathology, nowhere more evident than in the widely divergent languages of neuroscience and psychodynamics. The informational language of complexity theory stands as a holistic approach with the power to re-unify the domain of the mind (first-person subjective perspective) with the “objective” domain of affective, cognitive, and social neuroscience.
The author’s earlier paper (Shapiro, 2014) used the complexity paradigm to construct a comprehensive psychodynamic formulation that transcends the brain/mind dichotomy by examining the patient’s adaptive landscape, where both subjective experiences and observational data are charted as malleable attractor/repellor states. The therapeutic implications of this complexity approach were operationalized as Dynamical System Therapy (DST). The DST model is built on a strong evolutionary foundation, incorporating qualitative emergence in the phylogeny and ontogeny of the brain/mind system, as well as systemic complexity in the patient-therapist interaction. It allows us to revise the classical assumptions of human nature, psychopathology, and therapeutic process in the light of recent research on non-linear Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) that incorporate both biological and psychological self-organizing processes. It is the aim of this paper to provide theoretical and practical review of the DST model in clinical work, ranging from individual to group therapy to psychodynamic training and supervision.
Physical literacy, a concept introduced by Britain's physical education and phenomenological scholar, Margaret Whitehead, who aligned the term with her monist view of the human condition and emphasis that we are essentially embodied beings in-the-world, is a foundational hub of recent physical education curricular revision. The adoption of the term serves a political purpose as it helps stakeholders advocate for the educational, specifically literacy, rights of the whole child. Yet, one might wonder what impact conceptual shifts of becoming "physically literate" in lieu of becoming "physically educated" have on physical education research and practice. Terms such as "reading" the game and metaphors that describe the body as an "instrument of expression" are entering the lexicon of physical education but from a seemingly cognitive frame of reference. Arguably, the extent to which the adoption of physical literacy has on dissolving Cartesian views of the body and the mechanization of movement it performs has yet to be questioned. This article thus acts as an invitation to explore physical literacy in a Merleau-Pontian inspired act of inscribing the world through movement and how a reading of a reversible imprint might awaken a more fluent sense of what it means to become physically literate as new curricular pathways in the field of physical education emerge.
This article affirms the presence of the intentional consciousness in texts which purport to depict reality or real events. Intentionality, in the context of this article, is not conceived as a pre-existing thought or idea, which precedes the text, but as something which inheres in the text and is produced in it. The Cartesian split between consciousness and being which the former conception enacts is here elided and authorial intention is seen as something which is reproduced in the processes of writing and interpretation. This distinction is significant because the main argument of this article is that authorial intention in texts that purport to depict real events and intervene in a particular socio-historical process for mobilisational purposes, leads to the production of a certain kind of text which deploys specific narrative strategies that consolidate its reading and rendering of events and reinforce narrative closures. These intentionally motivated closures are embedded in narrative strategies, which are seen as both necessary and imperative for the consolidation and legitimation of the message and to foreclose other readings. Very briefly, this article seeks to reinscribe the agency of the author in his/her intentional stance with regard to the text. It further shows how this agency is enacted within the world of the text.
We describe similarities in the ontology of quantum physics and of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology. In spite of the fact that physics and psychology are usually considered as unrelated, in the last century, both of these disciplines have led at the same time to revolutionary changes in the Western understanding of the cosmic order, discovering a non-empirical realm of the universe that doesn’t consist of material things but of forms. These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and act in it. We present arguments that force us to believe, that the empirical world is an emanation out of a cosmic realm of potentiality, whose forms can appear as physical structures in the external world and as archetypal concepts in our mind. Accordingly, the evolution of life now appears no longer as a process of the adaptation of species to their environment, but as the adaptation of minds to increasingly complex forms that exist in the cosmic potentiality. The cosmic connection means that the human mind is a mystical mind.
A primary role of medicine is often perceived as treating or alleviating pain, but what actually constitutes pain can be defined in many ways. A major impediment to a more adequate conceptualization of pain is thought to be the manner in which it has been ‘medicalized,’ over the course of the twentieth century resulting in the inevitable Cartesian split between body and mind. Consequently, the dominant conceptualization of pain has focused almost exclusively upon the neurophysiological aspects, both in diagnosis and treatment, with the subsequent inference that it can be rationally and objectively measured. Social science, in particular the sociological literature on chronic illness, offers a framework for understanding the experience of pain by focusing on ‘lived experience,’ including narratives of suffering. Medically, pain is often explained in terms of risk by attempting to measure so-called objective symptoms, whereas accounts of suffering may encompass more easily the notion of total pain (Saunders 197628.
Saunders , C. 1976. Care of the dying. Nursing Times, 72: 3–24. View all references), which includes psychological, spiritual, interpersonal and even financial aspects of chronic pain, as well as its physical aspects. This paper proposes that illness narratives and phenomenological accounts have become intrinsic to the understanding and treatment of pain and, using examples from empirical research, considers how pain narratives challenge biomedical approaches to chronic pain, which are inevitably framed in the discourse of risk.
From Descartes and Cartesian mind-body dualism in the 17th century though to 21st-century concerns about artificial intelligence programming, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness presents a compelling history and up-to-date overview of this burgeoning subject area.
Acknowledging that many of the original concepts of consciousness studies are found in writings of past thinkers, it begins with introductory overviews to the thought of Descartes through to Kant, covering Brentano’s restoration of empiricism to philosophical psychology and the major figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle and James. These opening chapters on the forces in the history of consciousness lay the groundwork needed to understand how influential contemporary thinkers in the philosophy of mind interpret the concept of consciousness.
Featuring leading figures in the field, Part II discusses current issues in a range of topics progressing from the so-called hard problem of understanding the nature of consciousness, to the methodology of invoking the possibility of philosophical zombies and the prospects of reductivism in philosophy of mind. Part III is dedicated to new research directions in the philosophy of consciousness, including chapters on experiment objections to functionalism and the scope and limits of artificial intelligence.
Equipped with practical research resources including an annotated bibliography, a research guide and a glossary, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness is an authoritative guide for studying the past, present and future of consciousness.
… Scientific work is chained to the course of progress; whereas in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense. It is not true that the work of art of a period that has worked out new technical means, or, for instance, the laws of perspective, stands therefore artistically higher than a work of art devoid of all knowledge of those means and laws — if its form does justice to the material, that is, if its object has been chosen and formed so that it could be artistically mastered without applying those conditions and means. A work of art which is genuine “fulfilment” is never surpassed; it will never be antiquated. Individuals may differ in appreciating the personal significance of works of art, but no one will ever be able to say of such a work that it is ‘outstripped’ by another work which is also “fulfilment.”
These two essays, written late in Jung's life, reflect his responses to the shattering experience of World War II and the dawn of mass society. Among his most influential works, "The Undiscovered Self" is a plea for his generation--and those to come--to continue the individual work of self-discovery and not abandon needed psychological reflection for the easy ephemera of mass culture. Only individual awareness of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche, Jung tells us, will allow the great work of human culture to continue and thrive.Jung's reflections on self-knowledge and the exploration of the unconscious carry over into the second essay, "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams," completed shortly before his death in 1961. Describing dreams as communications from the unconscious, Jung explains how the symbols that occur in dreams compensate for repressed emotions and intuitions. This essay brings together Jung's fully evolved thoughts on the analysis of dreams and the healing of the rift between consciousness and the unconscious, ideas that are central to his system of psychology.
In this classic work, best-selling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes's Meditations, but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs? Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen provides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived by an evil demon into believing falsely. Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement.
This philosophical commentary explores the meaning and significance of care in education, demonstrating how teaching with care enriches the art and soul of pedagogy. Wilde draws upon Western and Eastern philosophies that envision an integrated image of care to illuminate the value of cultivating understanding in the form of awareness, and compassion leading to right action. Comments and stories from teachers' experiences demonstrate important aspects of care that are easily overlooked, such as present attention, listening and teacher, well-being. Although it uncovers a tragic conflict between caring and aspects of contemporary schooling, this book offers hope for teachers. It shares a vision of practice that has the potential to re-enliven and strengthen care even in the midst of these difficulties. It also offers a contemplative approach to pedagogy that calls educators into intentional action, showing them how to renew their deep ethical connections to students, to subject matter and to the world.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) became known as ‘Darwin's bulldog’ because of his forceful and energetic support for Darwin's theory, most famously at the legendary British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860. In fact, Huxley had some reservations about aspects of the theory, especially the element of gradual, continuous progress, but in public he was unwavering in his allegiance, saying in a letter to Darwin ‘As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite’. In his 1892 Essays upon Some Controverted Questions, Huxley collected some of his previously published writings, of which the titles alone give some flavour of his pugnacious stance in debate: ‘The interpreters of Genesis and the interpreters of Nature’; ‘Science and pseudo-science’; ‘Agnosticism and Christianity’. The passion for scientific truth which underlies everything he writes is well demonstrated in this lively and still-relevant collection.
The chapter begins with a broad introduction to the concept of neuroscience as a different level of analysis, initially working from an account of how classical cognitivism resulted in a neglect of neuroscience in psychology. The emergence of developmental cognitive neuroscience is then considered and current theoretical perspectives in this area are briefly outlined. One key emphasis of the chapter is the embodied nature of development, which is considered here to be an essential part of any theory of developmental cognitive neuroscience. The argument is made that embodiment has the potential to reframe the ways in which neuroscience data are considered in relation to other kinds of data. However, important developmental features of this reframing are currently underspecified, and in the final part of the chapter it is suggested that a relational developmental systems perspective provides one way forward. The implications of this approach for forging a new biologically inspired direction for developmental science are profound, and are discussed in more detail toward the end of the chapter.
Keywords:
cognitive science;
development;
developmental cognitive neuroscience;
developmental systems;
embodied cognition;
embodiment;
enaction;
levels of analysis;
neuroscience;
representation
Japanese anime is 'one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of transnational cultural production' (Brown, 2006:1). This study proposes that anime is framed in a different wayfrom orthodox Hollywood cel animation (Wells,1998), influenced by Japanese aesthetics, iconography, social norms and a well developed role for individual anime directors. The significance of anime as a novel form of animation is specifically linked to a broader alignment within Japanese cultural identity.The study benefits from previous research by Thomas Lamarre (2009) who proposed the concept of the 'animetic process' and Hiroki Azuma's (2009) post-modernist discourse on 'otaku' (anime fans). Close reading analyses of selected feature films in the anime canon directed by Hayao Miyazaki (1941-), Satoshi Kon (1963-2010) and Mamoru Oshii (1951-) were conducted, to determine the significance (defined as sharing a common meaning and value) of anime within contemporary discourses on animation. The study concludes that anime represents a continuation of Japanese film tradition which has frequently borrowed from other film cultures, notably Hollywood, but then subverted this influence through a specifically Japanese gaze. Evidence for anime being regarded as novel in terms of the development of film tradition was found in relation to its adoption of digital trans-modality and interactivity to become a mediated cinematic form which breaks new ground. The dialogue between the anime director as the creative force and the viewer as the active consumer has wider implication for this hypothesis that modern anime is emerging as an interesting and important filmic form in digital environments
This paper explores the implications of developments in phenomenological biology for a reconsideration of synchronicity and the self. The enactive approach of Maturana and Varela aims to reformulate the relation between biological organisms and the world in a non-Cartesian way, breaking down the conceptual division between mind and world so that meaning can be seen as a function of the species-specific way in which an organism engages with its environment. This leads to a view of the self as inherently embodied and engaged with the particularities of its material, cultural and social worlds, while being infinitely extended through the power of imagination; this enables humans to adapt to many different social and material environments. In order to understand these differences, we need to 'enter into the world of the other'. Where understanding of other animals requires immersion in their environmental milieux, understanding other humans requires us also to recognize that differences in socio-cultural milieux create significantly different worlds of meaning and experience.
© 2015, The Society of Analytical Psychology.
Rene Descartes's motto challenges his would-be historians: "He lives well who hides well." He hid even in the Discourse on Method, where he professed to recount the story of his "entire life, " but said almost nothing about his childhood and youth. He mentioned neither family nor friends, and he boasted a total freedom from irrational passions. In the Discourse, which presented a new way of achieving certain truth through mathematical reason, Descartes stressed just one event, a day of thinking at the beginning of winter, 1619. Tucked away in an unpublished notebook, however, Descartes also left the Olympica, which documented the wildly irrational dreams he had the night of November 10, 1619, and gave his own enthusiastic interpretations. Embarrassed scholars have tried to reason away this record and even the dreams themselves. Adapting clinical methods to historical research, John Cole offers the first systematic interpretation of the Olympian dreams. He argues that they expressed and masked Descartes's unresolved conflicts: his guilt at having rejected the law career for which he had been trained and which his lawyer father had wanted him to pursue, and his shame over early failures to satisfy the high expectations of his friend and mentor, Isaac Beeckman. Cole shows us how a critical historian can make sense of such irrational material and lets us see the creation of an egocentric and rationalist philosophy.
My article approaches Améry's complex essay via an interpretation of its five subtitles, which refer to a number of paratexts (Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, etc.) and at the same time expose the conceptual inaccessibility of aging: All five can be understood without referring to aging. Second, I try to explore how the essay on aging relates to the traumatizing events in Améry's life, and why he characterizes the inescapable process of aging as a long Todesmarsch. Third, I explain how Améry bridges the abyss between the factual experience of aging and the impossibility to conceptualize this continuous process, which begins with our birth. Aging is experienced in moments of sudden, frightening insights. The analysis of these sudden experiences leads Améry finally to a convincing rethinking of the Cartesian split between mind and body. La souffrance vécue mediates between aging as a concept and its experience. By means of fully exposing himself to aging, Améry thus rejuvenates philosophy.
This book presents and analyses the most important parts of the philosophical works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Volume 1: the shift from Aristotelian to Cartesian physics; Descartes on matter and space, on causation, and on certainty; Descartes and Spinoza on matter and mind, and on desire; Leibniz's metaphysics (monads) and physics, his theory of animals. Volume 2: Locke on ideas, on necessity, on essences, on substance, on secondary qualities, on personal identity; Descartes on modality; Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics; Hume on ideas, on belief, on causation, on bodies, on reason; Hume and Leibniz on personal identity.
This article shows how the concept of 'brain death' was created in order that the routinization of solid organ transplantation could take place. The concept permitted individuals diagnosed as brain-dead but whose respiration and heartbeat continued through technological assistance to be counted as no longer alive, and therefore organs could be retrieved from them without legal reprisals. It is shown how, because the condition of brain-dead bodies is ambiguous--they are at once dead and alive--discursive practices must be put to work in both medicine and law to justify their status as dead. Despite an apparent consensus within the medical world about the concept of brain death, disagreement remains among various countries about how best to make the diagnosis. Moreover, professionals working with brain-dead patients draw on a Cartesian split between mind and body in order to allow themselves to count such patients as dead; this maneuver is justified because the minds of brain-dead patients no longer function, although their bodies clearly remain very much alive. Without the legal fiction of brain death the transplant world would be severely hampered.
This article is the first part of a two-part project which is critical of trends in contemporary U.S. critical and interdisciplinary
legal scholarship and pedagogy. The larger project seeks to use this critique to model fruitful approaches to critical and
theoretical scholarship in law “beyond 2000”.The focus of this article’s criticism is the work of two significant scholars
of the second wave of what might broadly be called CLS scholarship, or more precisely critical, theoretical and interdisciplinary
legal scholarship: Jack Balk in and Pierre Schlag. Looking back to the work of Duncan Kennedy and Stanley Fish, respectively
progenitors of CLS and of theoretical interdisciplinary legal scholarship in the U.S., it is argued that the work of all four
is marked by two significant flaws: lack of self-reflexivity and a desire for a realm of theory which unselfconsciously adopts
the Cartesian split subject. The article then uses the work of Vicki Kirby and Pierre Bourdieu both to identify the tendencies
it critiques, and to suggest why the work of Terry Threadgold and Peter Goodrich might provide models for a praxis of critical
theory in law which is of particular use in the context of professional subject formation.
Les AA. soulignent que la corporeite et l'image du corps constituent deux questions centrales dans l'analyse feministe. Elles examinent les perspectives qui permettent de depasser le dualisme cartesien et le phallocentrisme du cogito qui denie toute creativite au corps. Elles rappellent que Freud a denonce l'identification, dans la philosophie classique, de la subjectivite humaine a la seule conscience rationnelle. Elles estiment que certaines representations de la feminite, notamment l'image du corps fin, peuvent perturber l'image que les femmes ont de leur corps et etre a l'origine de certaines nevroses comme l'anorexie. Elles montrent comment Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari concoivent l'image et la signification du corps.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the 'new women' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - one of a growing number of women who struggled to extend the parameters of their physical abilities within a patriarchal tradition of female confinement and subordination. An exceptional woman of considerable talent, she became a major intellectual force in turn-of-the-century America. As a result of her prolific writing and lecturing on her theory of the evolution of gender relations and women's need to become socially useful in the larger world of production, she became known worldwide as a feminist theorist and iconoclastic social critic. Of special interest to this edition of inspirational women who have contributed to the physical liberation of women's bodies are Gilman's actions and writings about female struggles for creative fulfilment and physical autonomy. Analyses of her feminist writings, fiction, poetry, diaries and autobiography all provide rich insights into her strivings for physical autonomy and intellectual freedom. They all reflect her life-long preoccupation with physical fitness and good health practices and her desire for unrestricted physical mobility as a critical component of emancipated womanhood. Of particular interest to feminists today is The Yellow Wallpaper, seen largely as a depiction of the consciously and unconsciously designed male chauvinistic medical practices to which women were exposed. Gilman's haunting and passionate protest against the rest cure has become a modern feminist classic, a paradigm text for historians looking at the relation between gender roles, madness and creativity. In some respects, the emergence of Gilman as a 'new woman' can best be understood as her break-away from the accepted medical paradigm based on the Cartesian split of mind/body and her forging of a radically new mind/body concept as synergistic. Tragically, she was never able to achieve that liberation and finally ended her own life on 17 August 1935 as the ravages of breast cancer destroyed her future chances of physical emancipation. But her interest in physical fitness as a means to gain personal autonomy, and the emphasis she placed on physical mobility in her numerous fiction writings was a direct and enduring comment on the barriers blocking women from physical emancipation in the real world.
This paper explores the theoretical and practical dimensions of dialogue as a means of harnessing profound and previously unrealized levels of coordination and insight. Dialogue is not only a philosophical concept, but also an actionable skill available to individuals and teams. Often the claim is made that the difficulty in making dialogue more concrete or actionable is inherent in the nature of the phenomenon itself—that dialogue cannot be “willed”, that it is a process that questions the instrumental rationality which arises from the subject-object Cartesian split. The paper seeks to address this and other concerns and makes more explicit how the dialogic process might work in concrete settings, in particular by identifying and removing face-to-face obstacles, and by inviting inquiry into the underlying shared “field” of meaning in which the interactions and conversations take place.