Salman Akhtar: Good Stuff: Courage,Resilience, Gratitude,Generosity, Forgiveness,and Sacrifice

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Sinnregeln, Weltperspektive, Welt:

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Organism,normativity, plasticity: Canguilhem,Kant, Malabou

Some of Catherine Malabou’s recent work has developed her conception of plasticity (originally deployed in a reading of Hegelian Aufhebung) in relation to neuroscience. This development clarifies and advances her attempt to bring contemporary theory into dialogue with the natural sciences, while indirectly indicating her engagement with the French tradition in philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, especially the work of Georges Canguilhem. I argue that we can see her development of plasticity as an answer to some specific shortcomings in Canguilhem’s conception of organic or biological normativity as advanced in The Normal and the Pathological. Such a view of plasticity shows its potential to provide the basis for a powerful critical engagement with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, self-transformation, subjectivation, and the general theory of norms.     

A Breast Cancer Experience Re-narrated: The Undying: Pain,Vulnerability, Mortality,Medicine, Art,Time, Dreams,Data, Exhaustion,Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer,New York: Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2019

Journal of Medical Humanities -     

Creativity,Drugs, Crime,and Education: On Eisenman's Contemporary Social issues: Drugs,Crime, Creativity,and Education

This article reports analyses of the verdicts of various film organizations that annually present awards to motion pictures and investigates whether they award/nominate the same movies in a given year. This research disputes previous findings that reported a high level of agreement between those juries, by the means of reliability analysis and the Cronbach's alpha composite. Arguments were raised for why these earlier findings were flawed and why the use of Cronbach's alpha is problematic. Different aspects of consensus are discussed, after which a new measure (β) is introduced. This is followed by a detailed comparison between particular juries with regard to the percentage share of their decisions that award the most successful (chosen by multiple other juries as well) and the least successful (uniquely awarded) films. This measure shows how often a singular jury decides in line with the others and how much does it stray from the consensus. The article also broadens the theoretical discussions about the reasons for (not) expecting a consensus to arise between various expert juries. It argues that by adopting a cultural economic perspective we become aware of various reasons, most importantly competition between the award events and the juries tend towards a lower level of consensus.