Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama’s affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which con…[Read more]

This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. Malabou effaces the unsettled debates within the life sciences in order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or…[Read more]

Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to…[Read more]

La publicación académica no ha sido objeto de reflexión filosófica, pese a que en las formas que toma actualmente este artefacto cultural está en juego la posibilidad misma de la filosofía, al menos en tanto práctica profesional en el contexto de una economía capitalista del conocimiento. En este capítulo buscamos ofrecer una aproxima…[Read more]

This article explores the consequences of the environmental transformations of the Laurentian Valley on the timber trade uniting the Province of Canada and the industrialization of Great Britain during the nineteenth century. The notion of ghost acres used to describe the ecological footprint of resource consumption from abroad is extended to…[Read more]

Desde que el hispanista francés Félix Lecoy llamase en 1938 la atención sobre las
peculiaridades de los papeles atribuidos a las mujeres en la obra de Juan Ruiz, numerosos
trabajos académicos se han dedicado a esclarecer en lo posible las coordenadas históricas
y literarias de esta presencia femenina en el Libro de buen amor, sobre todo en lo r…[Read more]

This essay shares the author’s ideas, alluding to depth psychology, philosophy, and comparative culture, particularly East-West differences in the basic worldviews people can have, such as I-Thou, Us vs. Them or We-They, I-Nature or I-Universe, with Asian people tending to live more collectively in a social reality. The essay includes Zen insights…[Read more]

Although a plethora of ancient South Asian sources refer to situations that would be considered crises by modern standards, the early Sanskrit vocabulary lacks a word that we could understand as a distinct equivalent of the term “crisis” and its Greek and Latin predecessors. Nevertheless, the descriptions and discussions of personal and col…[Read more]

This journalistic essay can give Western readers insight into non-Western logic that the author has found in a long career in Japan. It is also informed by research on intercultural communication, bilingualism and biculturalism. The author teaches those subjects and has a Japanese family. This 2023 update includes the author’s photo taken in Osaka…[Read more]

The incidence of diseases in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) shaped encounters between colonial officials and indigenous people, yet this subject has merited minimum attention in the Ghanaian historiography. This paper examines the colonial healthcare interventions to combat the outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) in Asante and
how the presence…[Read more]