For more than two decades, classes on “professionalism” have been the dominant platform for the non-technical socialization of medical students. It thus subsumes elements of previous foundation courses in bioethics and “medicine and society” in defining the appropriate relation between practitioners, patients, and society-at-large. Despite its importance, there is, however, no clear definition of what “professionalism” entails or the manner in which it serves various purported goals. This essay reviews, first, the historical role of the vocational practitioner in society, and (...) second, the introduction of “professionalism” as a newly constituted, core value in teaching. The structure of the paper is as an archaeology, a Foucauldian term for an investigation of seemingly separate but related antecedent contexts and ideas whose result is a perspective or point of view. The goal thus is an attempt to precisely locate “professionalism” within the greater history of medicine and its contemporary role in medical socialization. (shrink)

Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.

The primary objective of this two-part essay is to theorize the relationships between religious disenchantment, the autonomy of art, and the phenomenon of contingency. These connections are held to be vital for an understanding of modern aesthetics in general, and the possibility is put forth that they come to a head in the most modern of all the arts: cinema. In the first part, an account of the contemporary rift between the immanence of art and the transcendence of the divine (...) announces the end of the absolute and the beginning of the reign of contingency – a liberating yet catastrophic turning point where artists are responsible for creating meaning with the full knowledge that all meaning is a creation. In the second part, the secular autonomy of art is fully realized in the medium of film, particularly in the camera machine whose first glimpse in time and space reveals a disenchanted world or “contingency in the flesh.” The medium of the moving image and its modes of experience at the turn of the century are here understood as ontologically determined or overdetermined by the great symbolic threat against the powers of human agency – the world in its own image as opposed to the world in our image. However, at the same time this material threat against our will to power is counteracted by the desire to control the shock and indeterminacy of cinematic contingency, a desire fulfilled at the expense of acknowledging the implications of the new anti-absolute. (shrink)