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It is 1950s America and madness is in the air. In a world where the 'cures' for craziness include coma therapy, cyanide treatment and full-frontal lobotomies, Dr. William T. Friedrich, a young and ambitious psychology professor at Yale, stumbles upon a tropical plant that seems to possess the secret ingredient of happiness. In Casper Gedsic, a fiercely intelligent, socially inept, near-suicidal maths student, he seems to have found the perfect guinea pig. But when his experiments goes awry, Casper's thirst for revenge turns murderous and his actions have consequences that will haunt Friedrich and his family forever...
Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens examines the emerging concern for controlling states of psychological ecstasy in the history of western thought, focusing on ancient Greece (c. 750-146 BCE), particularly the Classical Period (c. 500-336 BCE) and especially the dialogues of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE). Employing a diverse array of materials ranging from literature, philosophy, medicine, botany, pharmacology, religion, magic, and law, Pharmakon fundamentally reframes the conceptual context of how we read and interpret Plato's dialogues. Michael A. Rinella demonstrates how the power and truth claims of philosophy, repeatedly likened to a pharmakon, opposes itself to the cultural authority of a host of other occupations in ancient Greek society who derived their powers from, or likened their authority to, some pharmakon. These included Dionysian and Eleusinian religion, physicians and other healers, magicians and other magic workers, poets, sophists, rhetoricians, as well as others. Accessible to the general reader, yet challenging to the specialist, Pharmakon is a comprehensive examination of the place of drugs in ancient thought that will compel the reader to understand Plato in a new way.
Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens examines the emerging concern for controlling states of psychological ecstasy in the history of western thought, focusing on ancient Greece (c. 750-146 BCE), particularly the Classical Period (c. 500-336 BCE) and especially the dialogues of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE). Employing a diverse array of materials ranging from literature, philosophy, medicine, botany, pharmacology, religion, magic, and law, Pharmakon fundamentally reframes the conceptual context of how we read and interpret Plato's dialogues. Michael A. Rinella demonstrates how the power and truth claims of philosophy, repeatedly likened to a pharmakon, opposes itself to the cultural authority of a host of other occupations in ancient Greek society who derived their powers from, or likened their authority to, some pharmakon. These included Dionysian and Eleusinian religion, physicians and other healers, magicians and other magic workers, poets, sophists, rhetoricians, as well as others. Accessible to the general reader, yet challenging to the specialist, Pharmakon is a comprehensive examination of the place of drugs in ancient thought that will compel the reader to understand Plato in a new way.
A range of perspectives on the complex political, philosophical, and pragmatic implications of opening research and scholarship through digital technologies. The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work--to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological vacuum; there are complex political, philosophical, and pragmatic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access across spans of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities.
An analysis of the challenge that India's poison culture posed for colonial rule and toxicology's creation of a public role for science.
Interpretations of Plato, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Philippe Sollers’ writings in three essays: “Plato’s Pharmacy,” “The Double Session,” and “Dissemination.” “The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . Derrida’s central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination—more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to ‘deconstruct’ both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth.” —Peter Dews, The New Statesman
Jasper Neel analyzes the emerging field of composition studies within the epistemological and ontological debate over writing precipitated by Plato, who would have us abandon writing entirely, and continued by Derrida, who argues that all human beings are written. This book offers a three-part exploration of that debate.
In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a ‘crisis of spirit’, brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marx’s theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a ‘pharmacology of the spirit’. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.
The ancient Greek semantic of?pharmakon? comprised at least three meanings? denoting a medicine, a poison, and/or a magic potion. This helps to uncover a non-dogmatic meaning of?drugs.? A millenarian cultural history testifies to the ongoing need of communities and societies to actively use and deal with?pharmaka,? prominently including mind-altering substances. However, Western modernity has complicated an unbiased approach to the pharmacological aspects of historical and social life by aggressively multiplying, and later restricting psychoactive substances. 0The present volume questions a logic of good vs. bad drugs as it discusses a wide semantic spectrum? the cultural, anthropological, aesthetic, and poetological scope of the?pharmakon.? In order to critically resituate the concept, the book offers a glance into compelling scenarios, European, North American, Latin American, Transatlantic, and fascinating transdisciplinary perspectives.