Off with his head!

This essay explores the multiple significations of the term Acéphale within the work of Georges Bataille. Developing a reading of Bataille’s philosophy from the position of the Acephalic character, the text argues that Bataille’s well-known wish to perform a human sacrifice was intended to create the Acephalic figure itself. In perverting the reading of Bataille’s gesture, the text aims to elucidate other ways in which the Acéphale journals engage with Bataille’s thought. Central to this problem is the illustrated series of images by André Masson that run throughout the Acéphale journals: these images develop a narrativised account of Acéphale’s existence in the celestial world. Claiming that these images function as a form of interrupted myth, Bataille’s work is explored in relation to the problems of myth and community that sit at the heart of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Bataille.peer-reviewe

The Cognitive Significance of Kant's Third Critique

This dissertation aims at forging an archetectonic link between Kant's first and third Critiques within a cognitive-semantic framework. My aim is to show how the major conceptual innovations of Kant’s third Critique can be plausibly understood in terms of the theoretical aims of the first, (Critique of Pure Reason). However, unlike other cognition-oriented approaches to Kant's third Critique, which take the point of contact between the first and third Critique's to be the first Critique's Transcendental Analytic, I link these two works via the first Critique's Transcendental Dialectic, specifically its discussions of the "ideas of pure reason." According to Kant, the “ideas of pure reason” (IPRs) — viz., the notions of self, world-whole, and God — are innate content-bearing entities representing three types of transempirical object, none of which are possible objects of cognition. However, although Kant denies that these rather unique content-bearers can be used for purposes of “speculative cognition,” he does think that they have an internal functional value for human cognitive systems. Although under my analysis of their functional value the IPRs subserve a highest-order aim which derives from theoretical reason — namely, to ground and optimize cognitive systematicity — their directive content in fact renders their implementation(thus their form of intentionality) more characteristic of practical reason. Kant’s positive account of reason’s “interest” in and use of the IPRs exhibits a kind of cognitive pragmatism. Of utmost concern to the cognitive-semantic enterprise, as I conceive it, is the development of (what might be called) a metaphysics of intentionality. A `metaphysics of intentionality', as I use the term, refers to a coherent set of postulative propositional cognitions (or, at any rate, content-bearing entities) implemented, first, for the sake of rationally explaining the phenomenological unity and object-directed character of our perceptual states and, second, to explain why the objects represented in such states are, or must be, law-governed and thus necessarily amenable to scientific investigation. On my view, the discussions in Kant’s third Critique nontrivially contribute to the development of a metaphysics of intentionality and thus to the larger cognitive-semantic enterprise of Kant's first Critique, and it is this link that lends Kant's third Critique a cognitive significance

Guide to Social Change Led By and With Young People

THE FREECHILD PROJECT HAS BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WHILE. In the five years since we began, The Freechild Project has identified three powerful trends in social change led by and with young people: 1. Social change led by young people is not all about young people. Instead, children and youth are working for their communities, their families, their cities, and their world. Action that is focused on youth issues often addresses young people as a whole, not isolating other youth because of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. 2. More action has led to more sophistication, creating more sustainable outcomes. Youth-led social change is not new; the tools and strategies being developed stand on the shoulders of giants from more than a century ago. However, the increasing sophistication and intentionality have heightened the effectiveness of youths\u27 approaches and deepened the impacts they are having throughout communities. 3. A broad youth movement exists today. Media is not talking about it, researchers are generally not aware of it, and even young people do not know they belong to it. However, this decentralization in social movements today is part of a trend called The Multitudes, in which localized action without focal-point leaders is subtly, powerfully changing the world

Quid's Pantheism: William Blake as Natural Philosopher

Challenging a prevalent assumption of Romantic literary criticism, this dissertation positions Blake as the earliest of the British Romantics to envision natural philosophy as inextricable from poetry and, in Blake’s case, visual art. In addition to establishing the nuanced philosophical and scientific history of which Blake was acutely aware, I argue that his early illuminated works develop a metaphysics of monist pantheism, which contends that every material thing is in its essence God. This contrasts the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory, an obstruction to human transcendence. This dissertation finds the central ideas of the pantheist tradition present in wide-ranging interdisciplinary discourses of the long eighteenth century, and it recasts our understanding of the intellectual traditions to which Blake belongs. In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes his early religious and political commitments, I argue that for Blake such commitments are grounded in one’s metaphysics. Pantheism is thus important in that it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of material objects – not just humans – and that spurns hierarchical power structures. I reveal Blake as a natural philosopher intervening in the metaphysical debates of his age via poetry and design as a means to more forcefully engage – and change – the philosophical assumptions of his readers than do the texts of the philosophers he satirizes and critiques. Through the imaginative forms of his art, Blake also literally animates the domain of the metaphysical: uniting the scattered fragments of God in a single, striking design, or dramatizing the catastrophic consequences of natural religion through a nightmarish narrative poem. Blake’s expanded philosophical practice has resonances to this day, as we continue to explore the relationship of the human to its nonhuman environments.Doctor of Philosoph

1861-09-13 Joseph Fletcher requests a discharge for his ailing son Roland

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Radiation dose assessment for occupationally exposed workers in Malawi

Background The objective of this study was to assess individual doses received by radiographers, and the scattered radiation dose rate reaching the control panel in X-ray departments of three hospitals in Malawi, in-order to compare them against the internationally recommended limits.Methods Themoluminescent Dosimeters were issued to fifteen (15) radiographers to record their dose for a month. Dose rate measurements were recorded using survey meters.Results Average monthly dose for workers was 0.247mSv. Average ambient dose rate values were 0.39μSv/hr for Mtengo wa Nthenga Hospital, 5.03μSv/hr for Bwaila Hospital and 4μSv/hr for Kamuzu Central Hospital.Conclusions Dose levels are below the limits recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP)

Investigation of the status of occupational radiation protection in Malawian hospital

BackgroundThe main objective of this study was to explore the occupational radiation protection program in three hospitals in Malawi and discover how radiation protection measures for workers are being implemented in their radiology departments.MethodA questionnaire was administered to heads of X-ray departments for Kamuzu Central Hospital, Bwaila Hospital and Mtengo wa Nthenga Hospital to investigate occupational radiation protection practices in their departments.ResultsThe study discovered that hospitals lack radiation protection programs which covers a number of critical issues including quality assurance and personnel dose monitoring.ConclusionThe implementation of basic elements of occupational radiation protection in Malawian hospitals is inadequate.