The Subject S Matter

An interdisciplinary and comprehensive treatment of bodily self-consciousness, considering representation of the body, the sense of bodily ownership, and representation of the self. The body may be the object we know the best. It is the only object from which we constantly receive a flow of information through sight and touch; and it is the only object we can experience from the inside, through our proprioceptive, vestibular, and visceral senses. Yet there have been very few books that have attempted to consolidate our understanding of the body as it figures in our experience and self-awareness. This volume offers an interdisciplinary and comprehensive treatment of bodily self-awareness, the first book to do so since the landmark 1995 collection The Body and the Self, edited by José Bermúdez, Naomi Eilan, and Anthony Marcel (MIT Press). Since 1995, the study of the body in such psychological disciplines as cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neuropsychology has advanced dramatically, accompanied by a resurgence of philosophical interest in the significance of the body in our mental life. The sixteen specially commissioned essays in this book reflect the advances in these fields. The book is divided into three parts, each part covering a topic central to an explanation of bodily self-awareness: representation of the body; the sense of bodily ownership; and representation of the self. Contributors Adrian Alsmith, Brianna Beck, José Luis Bermúdez, Anna Berti, Alexandre Billon, Andrew J. Bremner, Lucilla Cardinali, Tony Cheng, Frédérique de Vignemont, Francesca Fardo, Alessandro Farnè, Carlotta Fossataro, Shaun Gallagher, Francesca Garbarini, Patrick Haggard, Jakob Hohwy, Matthew R. Longo, Tamar Makin, Marie Martel, Melvin Mezue, John Michael, Christopher Peacocke, Lorenzo Pia, Louise Richardson, Alice C. Roy, Manos Tsakiris, Hong Yu Wong

Argues for postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. In this ambitious book, Namita Goswami draws on continental philosophy, postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African American and postcolonial feminisms to offer postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. Moving among and between texts, traditions, and frameworks, including the work of Gayatri Spivak, Theodor Adorno, Barbara Christian, Paul Gilroy, Neil Lazarus, and Hortense Spillers, among others, she charts a journey that takes us beyond Eurocentrism by understanding postcoloniality as the pursuit of heterogeneity, that is, of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Recognizing that philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory share a common concern with the concept of heterogeneity, Goswami shows how postcoloniality empowers us to engage more productively the relationships between these disciplines. Subjects That Matter confronts the ways Eurocentrism, an identity politics that considers difference as inherently oppositional, relegates minority traditions to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint to prevent their general implications from playing a critical and transformative role in how we understand subjectivity and agency. Through unexpected, often surprising, and thought-provoking analytic connections and continuities, this book’s interdisciplinary approach reveals a postcolonial pluralism that expands philosophical resources, confounds and limits our habitual disciplinary lexicons, and opens up new areas of inquiry. “This is a groundbreaking contribution to a number of distinct but intersecting fields.” — Amy Allen, author of The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

The aim of this book is to expand the subject and matter of architecture, and to explore their interdependence. There are now many architectures. This book acknowledges architecture far beyond the familiar boundaries of the discipline and reassesses the object at its centre: the building. Architectural matter is not always physical or building fabric. It is whatever architecture is made of, whether words, bricks, blood cells, sounds or pixels. The fifteen chapters are divided into three sections - on buildings, spaces and bodies - which each deal with a particular understanding of architecture and architectural matter. The richness and diversity of subjects and materials discussed in this book locates architecture firmly in the world as a whole, not just the domain of architects. In stating that architecture is far more than the work of architects, this book aims not to deny the importance of architects in the production of architecture but to see their role in more balanced terms and to acknowledge other architectural producers. Architecture can, for example, be found in the incisions of a surgeon, the instructions of a choreographer or the movements of a user. Architecture can be made of anything and by anyone.

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With this sweeping reinterpretation of early cultural encounters between the English and American natives, Joyce E. Chaplin thoroughly alters our historical view of the origins of English presumptions of racial superiority, and of the role science and technology played in shaping these notions. By placing the history of science and medicine at the very center of the story of early English colonization, Chaplin shows how contemporary European theories of nature and science dramatically influenced relations between the English and Indians within the formation of the British Empire. In Chaplin's account of the earliest contacts, we find the English--impressed by the Indians' way with food, tools, and iron--inclined to consider Indians as partners in the conquest and control of nature. Only when it came to the Indians' bodies, so susceptible to disease, were the English confident in their superiority. Chaplin traces the way in which this tentative notion of racial inferiority hardened and expanded to include the Indians' once admirable mental and technical capacities. Here we see how the English, beginning from a sense of bodily superiority, moved little by little toward the idea of their mastery over nature, America, and the Indians--and how this progression is inextricably linked to the impetus and rationale for empire.

Lively, practical, and irreverent, "Subjects Matter" points the way to activities and materials that energize content and engage students across all subject areas.

Weather Architecture further extends Jonathan Hill’s investigation of authorship by recognising the creativity of the weather. At a time when environmental awareness is of growing relevance, the overriding aim is to understand a history of architecture as a history of weather and thus to consider the weather as an architectural author that affects design, construction and use in a creative dialogue with other authors such as the architect and user. Environmental discussions in architecture tend to focus on the practical or the poetic but here they are considered together. Rather than investigate architecture’s relations to the weather in isolation, they are integrated into a wider discussion of cultural and social influences on architecture. The analysis of weather’s effects on the design and experience of specific buildings and gardens is interwoven with a historical survey of changing attitudes to the weather in the arts, sciences and society, leading to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary responses to climate change.

What can we currently make of ‘the subject'? Under the sway of structuralism and poststructuralism, critical thinking took a distinctly negative turn, effectively disqualifying any form of subjectivity as a reference point in discussions of textual or literary meaning. Since the mid-1970s, however, throughout the human sciences, human agency has been restored as both a methodological principle and an ethical value: a phenomenon broadly designated as ‘the return of the subject'. Yet the returning subject bears the traces of its problematization... The present collection of essays explores the ways in which the subject now ‘matters', both in principle and in the variety of critical approaches in authorizes. Essays, which are both literary and theoretical in character, cover authors, texts and issues in French literature from Descartes to the present. A wide range of types of writing is examined, from established forms such as the novel to relatively marginal and generically unsystematized discursive practices such as automatic writing and the ‘récit de rêve'. Though it shuns ‘closure' in a matter which remains ultimately elusive, this book offers some account of the types of answer which remain open and of those we have learned to leave behind.