Picturing Personhood

Picturing Personhood
Author: Joseph Dumit
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0691236623

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By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching implications: Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain? Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority. The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies.

Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood

Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Author: Simon J. Evnine
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2008-05-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191553697

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Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles governing belief that it is rational for persons to satisfy and are such that nothing can be a person at all unless it satisfies them to a large extent. These principles are that one believe the conjunction of one's beliefs and that one treat one's future beliefs as, by and large, better than one's current beliefs. Thirdly, persons both occupy epistemic points of view on the world and show up within those views. This makes it impossible for them to be completely objective about their own beliefs. Ideals of rationality that require such objectivity, while not necessarily wrong, are intrinsically problematic for persons. This 'aspectual dualism' is characteristic of treatments of persons in the Kantian tradition. In sum, these epistemic consequences support a traditional view of the nature of persons, one in opposition to much recent theorizing.

The Road to Abolition?

The Road to Abolition?
Author: Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009-11-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0814762247

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At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America. The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.

The Psychology of Personhood

The Psychology of Personhood
Author: Jack Martin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2012-11-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107018080

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A new examination of the psychology of personhood, which views persons as irreducibly embodied and socially situated beings.

Reasons and Persons

Reasons and Persons
Author: Derek Parfit
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1986-01-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191622443

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This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.

Death Without Weeping

Death Without Weeping
Author: Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520911563

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When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.

Cyborg Babies

Cyborg Babies
Author: Robbie Davis-Floyd
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2013-08-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 113524099X

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From fetuses scanned ultrasonically to computer hackers in daycare, contemporary children are increasingly rendered cyborg by their immersion in technoculture. As we are faced with reproductive choices connected directly with technologies, we often have trouble gaining perspective on our own cultural co-dependency with these very same technologies. Our notions of fetal health, maternal risk and child IQ are inseparable from them. Cyborg Babies tracks the process of reproducing children in symbiosis with pervasive technology and offers a range of perspectives, from resistance to ethnographic analysis to science fiction. Cultural anthropologists and social critics offer cutting-edge ethnographies, critiques, and personal narratives of cyborg conceptions (sperm banks, IVF, surrogacy) and prenatal (mis)diagnosis (DES, ultrasound, amniocentesis); the technological de- and reconstruction of birth in the hospital (electronic fetal monitors, epidurals); and the effects of computer simulation games and cyborg toys and stories on children's emergent consciousness. Contributors include Janet Isaacs Ashford, Elizabeth Cartwright, David Chamberlain, Jennifer Croissant, Charis M. Cussins, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Joseph Dumit, Eugenia Georges, Anne Hill, Mizuko Ito, Emily Martin, Steven Daniel Mentor, Janneli F. Miller, Lisa Mitchell, Lisa Jean Moore, Rayna Rapp, Matthew A. Schmidt, Syvia Sensiper, Elizabeth Roberts and Sherry Turkle. Examining the increasing cyborgification of the American child, from conception through birth and beyond, Cyborg Babies considers its implications for human cultural and psychological evolution.

Множественная реальность головного мозга. Рецензия на книгу Dumit J. (2004) Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press

Множественная реальность головного мозга. Рецензия на книгу Dumit J. (2004) Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press
Author: Денис Сивков
Publisher: Litres
Total Pages: 11
Release: 2020-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 5040067003

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Одной из важнейших тем в исследованиях биомедицинских технологий является проблема репрезентации. В позитивистской модели науки считалось, что научные репрезентации выражают состояние дел в природе, отражают саму природу и истину. Различные репрезентации являются всего лишь «метками» и / или «иллюстрациями» и в этом смысле не обладают самостоятельным существованием. В 70‐х и 80‐х годах ХХ века в этнографических исследованиях естественнонаучных лабораторий было показано, что ученые не имеют дело непосредственно с природой, а работают с многочисленными репрезентациями, которые зачастую выдаются за природу. В ставшей уже классической работе «Лабораторная жизнь» Бруно Латур и Стив Вулгар открыли: то, что называется научными фактами, представляет собой различного рода записи [Latour, 1986]. «Физический процесс» или «вещество» проявляется или делается видимым, а на деле конструируется в лаборатории в виде репрезентаций. В дальнейшем в исследованиях науки и технологий (STS) рассматривались различные аспекты, связанные с репрезентацией, визуализацией и математизацией в науке и технологии [Coopmans, Vertesi, Lynch, Woolgar, 2014].

Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies

Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies
Author: Jeanette Edwards
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1845458303

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The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data – brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impact and implications of new medical technologies and in marrying the visual and the body but thus far has focused only narrowly on particular kinds of technology or taken only a purely textual/visual (cultural studies) approach to images of the body. Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology – the study of the visual, the study of the technological and the study of the human body – this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume bring an innovative focus that reflects the authors’ shared interest in ‘the body’ and visualising technologies.

Research Handbook on Corporate Purpose and Personhood

Research Handbook on Corporate Purpose and Personhood
Author: Pollman, Elizabeth
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1789902916

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This insightful Research Handbook contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of corporate purpose and personhood, which has become the central debate of corporate law. It provides cutting-edge thoughts on the role of corporations in society and the nature of their rights and responsibilities.