By Gavin Francis
We think we all know bodies in detail, yet for lots of people they continue to be uncharted territory, an enigma of bone and muscle, neurons and synapses. what percentage folks comprehend the way in which seizures impact the mind, how the guts is hooked up to healthiness, or the why the foot holds the major to our humanity? In Adventures in Human Being, award-winning writer Gavin Francis leads readers on a trip into the hidden pathways of the human physique, supplying a consultant to its internal workings and a party of its marvels.
Drawing on his reports as a medical professional, ER professional, and relatives medical professional, Francis blends tales from the health center with episodes from clinical heritage, philosophy, and literature to explain the physique in illness and in healthiness, in existence and in dying. whilst assessing a tender girl with paralysis of the face, Francis displays at the age-old hassle artists have had in shooting human expression. A veteran of the battle in Iraq suffers a shoulder damage that Homer first defined 3 millennia in the past within the Iliad. And whilst a gardener pricks her finger on a filthy rose thorn, her case of bacterial blood poisoning brings to brain the comatose dozing beauties within the fairy stories we research as children.
At its center, Adventures in Human Being is a meditation on what it ability to be human. Poetic, eloquent, and profoundly perceptive, this ebook will rework how you view your physique.
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Extra info for Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum
Sample text
This metaphysical stance towards existence, which is fundamentally distinct from our modern conception of reality, is why despite drawing upon Aristotle my aim is not to promote an anachronistic return to Aristotle’s epistemology. Although it is beyond the scope of the Poetics to investigate real social phenomena, without substantial modification, Aristotle’s model cannot account for how tragic events are represented in social life. ” It requires an active process of selection, arrangement, and omission, so that “an action” can be meaningfully interpreted as a “whole” and “complete” plot.
In the case of tragedy, the genre drew on the structural properties of the genre to render the universal intelligible. Aristotle’s defence of tragedy is predicated on the genre’s relation to truth, portraying actions (and characters) not merely as they actually are, but as they could or ought to be. While Aristotle’s treatment of tragedy escapes the dichotomy of poetry 34 Social Tragedy as literal fact or falsehood that characterized Greek thought at the time, the Poetics presents the experience of tragedy as a universal response to the moral features of the action represented in the play.
For if tragedy represents actions that align with reality then the genre may be considered psychologically and ethically beneficial insofar as it accords with reason (the true nature of things) and “the result is that we learn something” ([1926] 2006: 126). This traditional view of art as a vehicle for knowledge guides Aristotle’s treatment of tragedy (though in a way that escapes the perennial debate between art as truth versus art as deception). Instead of evaluating tragedy in terms of external moral criteria, Aristotle focused on the capacity of the genre to evoke a particular response to the moral features of the play.