The perception of Europeans of the world and of the peoples beyond Europe has become in recent years the subject of intense scholarly interest and heated debate both in and outside the academy. So, too, has the concern with how it was that those peoples who were variously ’discovered’, and then, as often as not, colonised, understood the strangers in their midst. This volume attempts to cover both these topics, as well as to provide a number of crucial articles on the difficulties faced by modern historians in understanding the complex, relationship between ’them’ and ’us’. Inevitably such relationships not only changed over time, they also varied greatly from culture to culture. The articles, therefore cover most of the areas with which the European world came into contact from the earliest Portuguese incursions into Africa in the mid fifteenth century until the explorations of Cook and Bougainville in the Pacific in the late eighteenth. It ranges, too, from Brazil to Russia, from Tahiti to China.
We rely heavily on faces during social interactions. Humans possess the ability to recognise thousands of people very quickly and accurately without effort. The serious social difficulties that follow abnormalities of the face recognition system (i.e., prosopagnosia) strongly underline the importance of typical face skills in our everyday life. Over the last fifty years, research on prosopagnosia, along with research in the healthy population, has provided insights into the cognitive and neural features behind typical face recognition. This has also been achieved thanks to non-invasive neuroimaging techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Electroencephalography (EEG), Magnetoencephalography (MEG), Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). However, there is still much debate about the cognitive and neural mechanisms of face perception. In the current “Research Topic” we plan to gather experimental works, opinions, commentaries, mini-reviews and reviews that focus on new or novel theories and methods in face perception research. Where is the field at the moment? Do we need to re-think the experimental procedures we have adopted so far? Again, what kind of techniques (or combination of them) and analysis methods will be important in the future? From the experimental point of view we encourage both behavioural and neuroimaging contributions (e.g., fMRI, EEG, MEG, DTI and TMS). Despite the main emphasis on face perception, memory and identification, we will also consider original works that focus on other aspects of face processing, such as expression recognition, attractiveness judgments and face imagery. In addition, animal investigations and experimental manipulations that alter face recognition abilities in typical human subjects (e.g., hypnosis) are also welcome. Overall, we are proposing a Research Topic that looks at face processing using different perspectives and welcome contributions from different domains such as psychology, neurology, neuroscience, cognitive science and philosophy. The current “Research Topic” evolved over the desire to acknowledge the relatively recent loss of three giants in the field: Drs. Shlomo Bentin, Truett Allison and Andy Calder. We dedicate this “Research Topic” to them and their pioneering studies.
"Bolton is admirably focused, centering broader ventures around precise turning points in the documents and incidents she has selected.... The book crosses generic boundaries... in the spirit of an other who transcends any single history or discipline." -- Religion and Literature Linda Bolton uses six extraordinarily resonant moments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history to highlight the ethical challenge that the treatment of Native and African persons presented to the new republic's ideal of freedom. Most daringly, she examines the efficacy of the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary text and explores the provocative question "What happens when freedom eclipses justice, when freedom breeds injustice?" Guided by the intellectual influence of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Bolton asserts that the traditional subject-centered -- or "I" -- concept of freedom is dependent on the transcendent presence of the "Other," and thus freedom becomes a privilege subordinate to justice. There can be no authentic freedom as long as others, whether Native American or African, are reduced from full human beings to concepts and thus properties of control or power. An eloquent and thoughtful rereading of the U.S. touchstones of democracy, this book argues forcefully for an ethical understanding of American literary history. "Facing the Other is not a cultural history; its focus is the relevance of an ethical analytic to all of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature.... Using Emmanuel Levinas to guide her discussions, Bolton argues that the way in which Americans valorize freedom as an ideal leads us to ignore our responsibilities for doing justice." -- American Literature
What is the significance of the body? What might phenomenology contribute to a theological account of the body? And what is gained by prolonging the overlooked dialogue between St. John Paul II and Emmanuel Levinas? Nigel Zimmermann answers these questions through the agreements and the tensions between two of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. John Paul II, the Polish pope, philosopher, and theologian, and Emmanuel Levinas, the French-Jewish philosopher of Lithuanian heritage, were provocative thinkers who courageously faced and challenged the assumptions of their age. Both held the human person in high regard and did their thinking with constant reference to God and to theological language. Zimmermann does not shirk from the challenges of each thinker and does not hide their differences. However, he shows how they bequeath a legacy regarding the body that we would overlook at significant ethical peril. We are called, Zimmermann argues, to face the other. In this moment God refuses a banal marginalisation and our call to responsibility for the other person is issued in their disarming vulnerability. In the body, philosophy, theology, and ethics converge to call us to glory, even in the paradox of lowly suffering.
Emmanuel Levinas is one of the key philosophers in the post-Heideggerian field and an increasingly central presence in contemporary debates about identity and responsibility. His work spans and encapsulates the major philosophical and ethical concerns of the twentieth century, combining the insights of a basic phenomenological training with the demands of a Jewish culture and its basis in the endless exegesis of Talmudic reading. His concerns and subjects are wide: they include the Other, the body, infinity, women, Jewish-Christian relations, Zionism and the impulses and limits of philosophical language itself. This collection explicates Levinas's major contribution to these debates, namely the idea of the primacy of ethics over ontology or epistemology. It investigates how, in the wake of a post-structuralist orthodoxy, scholars and practitioners in such fields as literary theory, cultural studies, feminism and psychoanalysis are turning to Levinas's work to articulate a rediscovered concern with the ethical dimension of their discipline. Stressing the largely assumed but unexplored Jewish dimension of Levinas's work, this book is an important contribution to the field of Jewish studies and philosophy.
Author's note: If I had known just how difficult an ancestor Erkenbald the Fleming would be, I would possibly have stuffed him back into the academic journal in which I first found him, namely: History, volume 28, issue 108, September 1943, pp. 129-147, Companions of the Conqueror by David C. Douglas. Most academics seem to concur with Professor Douglas that Erkenbald (Erchenbaldo filio Erchenbaldi vicecomitis = Erkenbald, son of Erkenbald the vicomte) had probably taken part in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. However, when I suggested that this same Erkenbald was the true ancestor of the medieval Fleming families in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, I ran into considerable opposition. I was told that it is common knowledge that the Flemings of the British Isles descend from any number of unrelated immigrants from Flanders who took the surname Fleming. Apparently, there cannot possibly have been any "first Fleming." With the publication of this present volume, I hope to give Erkenbald some of the notoriety that I believe he deserves by having made him an interesting character in a story. Later, perhaps, we can re-examine the historical evidence without burdensome preconceptions.
This collection offers a multi-faceted investigation of the critical issue of the creation and place of the “Other” in Ireland. The extraordinarily rapid recent economic development of Ireland has effected a profound transformation in the island’s social and cultural life. In the process, old verities and assumptions concerning the nature of Irish society and culture have been called into question, with a whole variety of new challenges coming to light. The developments of the last two decades have transformed questions of what and who constitutes the “Other” within Irish society, but in the process older societal faultlines based on gender, disability and religious difference have not disappeared and historical processes of “Othering” continue to play a critical role in influencing and moulding the social contours of the new Ireland of the twenty-first century. Drawing on a number of different disciplinary perspectives, this collection presents a number of key analyses of social and cultural practices and policies that reflect anxieties about and negotiations of these changes, examining historical and contemporary representation of fears about the porousness of national borders; the increasing racialization of the Irish state through social and juridical proscriptions, and the popular and official narrative of ‘progress’.
