The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature

Books reviewed:
Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, 158 pp. No price. Reviewed by Colin Lyas, University of Lancaster Furness College Bailrigg Lancaster LA1 4YG     

美容医学伦理宣言

美容医学是维护健康美与生命美的崇高事业,是医疗保健事业的重要组成部分.     

医学美学与人文医学的不解之缘

在阐明我国医学美学学科于20世纪80年代发端于人文医学的基础上,介绍了20多年来,医学美学在当代中国美容医学整体学科形成和发展中起到的理论导向作用,同时促进了自身的发展,进而伴随着美容医学学科走向世界,影响世界,取得了学科理念上的国际共识而领先于世界.最后,阐明了医学美学和美容医学学科两者都进入成熟阶段之后,必将 分别回归于应用医学和人文医学两个不同的医学领域.     

Toward an Aesthetic Medicine: Developing a Core Medical Humanities Undergraduate Curriculum

The medical humanities are often implemented in the undergraduate medicine curriculum through injection of discrete option courses as compensation for an overdose of science. The medical humanities may be reformulated as process and perspective, rather than content, where the curriculum is viewed as an aesthetic text and learning as aesthetic and ethical identity formation. This article suggests that a "humanities" perspective may be inherent to the life sciences required for study of medicine. The medical humanities emerge as a revelation of value inherent to an aesthetic medicine taught and learned imaginatively.     

Performative Force,Convention, and Discursive Injustice

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages.     

Performative contradiction and the regrounding for philosophical paradigms

As a unique method of philosophical argument, performative contradiction attracted general attention after the change in direction of pragmatics in the twentieth century. Hintikka used this method to conduct an in-depth analysis of Descartes’ proposition “I think, therefore I am,” providing a proof which is a model in the philosophical history; Apel absorbed performative contradiction into his own framework of a priori pragmatics; and Habermas introduced it into the theory of formal pragmatics and rendered it an effective weapon of debate. Wittgenstein, who had fallen into the trap of performative contradiction in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, later managed to extract himself from it and indeed used the methodology of performative contradiction to cure the ills of philosophy, making it a general philosophical method. Through analysis of its connotations and classic examples of its use we can see that it is crucial in refuting extreme relativism and skepticism, and hence provides methodological support for a new foundation for philosophical paradigms. Translated by Wang Xuan from Zhongguo Shehui Kexue 中国社会科学 (Social Sciences in China), 2007, (3): 67–76