Emphasizing the philosophical debates raised by generations of devoted fans, this intriguing volume will be of interest to philosophers and Holmes enthusiasts alike.

In Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique—published in English under the abbreviated title Friday—the protagonist, stranded on an isla.

Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create (...) a “great”character,theauthor cannot just endowher with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. (shrink)

This is a detective story. The starting-point is a philosophical discussion in 1949, where Alan Turing mentioned a machine whose program, he said, would in practice be “impossible to find.” Turing used his unbreakable machine example to defeat an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence. Yet he gave few clues as to how the program worked. What was its structure such that it could defy analysis for (he said) “a thousand years”? Our suggestion is that the program simulated (...) a type of cipher device, and was perhaps connected to Turing’s postwar work for GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the NSA). We also investigate the machine’s implications for current brain simulation projects. (shrink)

In his latest book, Marshall Gregory begins with the premise that our lives are saturated with stories, ranging from magazines, books, films, television, and blogs to the words spoken by politicians, pastors, and teachers. He then explores the ethical implication of this nearly universal human obsession with narratives. Through careful readings of Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave," Thurber's "The Catbird Seat," as well as _David Copperfield_ and _Wuthering Heights_, Gregory asks the question: How do the stories we absorb in our (...) daily lives influence the kinds of persons we turn out to be? "__Shaped by Stories___ _weaves its own compelling story about the pervasive ethical effects of reading narrative, with Marshall Gregory serving as a highly engaging and ethically admirable narrator--a very model of good company." --_James Phelan, Distinguished University Professor of English, Ohio State University_ "Marshall Gregory's __Shaped by Stories_ _brings ethical criticism to the level of felt experience. Witty and passionate, full of personal reflections and sharp examples, this book will help anyone who has been drawn to the mysterious power of stories to think more carefully about the connections between narrative art and human ethos. Gregory reminds us that the urgency of our need for stories is tied permanently to the need to exercise judgment, belief, and empathy in the process of becoming who we are." --_Annette Federico, James Madison University _ "From a lifetime of reflecting on the ethics of fiction, Marshall Gregory has given us an elegant analysis of the power of stories to instruct and delight. No one interested in storytelling will want to be without this incisive guide to both the myriad ways that stories shape our lives and the strategies writers use to affect our responses. Both the theoretical and practical halves of __Shaped by Stories __have clarity and eloquence." --_Robert D. Denham, Fishwick Professor of English, Emeritus, Roanoke College_. (shrink)

Between 1934 and 1937 Maurice Blondel, the French Roman Catholic philosopher best known for his 1893 work, Action, published a trilogy of writings. Out of these writings came a theological ontology of tremendous force, creativity, and coherence. The purpose of the present dissertation is to reassess the viability of Blondel's ontology for contemporary theology. The retrieval begins with John Milbank's 1990 investigation of Blondel's early philosophy. While Milbank focuses on the strengths of Blondel, he also highlights some critical weaknesses. The (...) dissertation argues that Blondel later came to recognize and correct these weaknesses in his trilogy. ;La pensee, the first volume of the trilogy, discusses the nature and development of thought. Recognizing the ontological structure of thought leads Blondel to present his doctrine of the transnatural elan for assimilation to God. The transnatural desire for God is compared with Henri de Lubac's notion of naturae desiderium and then applied to the modern problem of the relationship between nature and supernature. ;The second installment of the trilogy, L'etre et les etres , explores the mysterious relation of Being and beings. Blondel situates the discussion within the language of creation, identifying Being as Creator and beings as creatures. The analogy of creation allows him to forge the proper relationship between Being and beings. After Blondel's death, two different schools of thought emerged on the mystery of being: Karl Rahner's Thomism and Jean-Luc Marion's new phenomenology. Each school is reviewed and critiqued from a Blondelian perspective. ;The trilogy concludes with a long-awaited revision of L'action . It begins by distinguishing the idea of action from action itself and establishing the ontological difference of action. Action is presented ontologically as enacted power, which is investigated in its individual, social, and metaphysical forms. Individual action is identified as making, practicing, and contemplating. Social action is studied next, with the conclusion that the social being of enacted power is determined by either a philosophy of peace or violence. Finally, divine action is evaluated with regards to the language of causality and absolute power. Blondel proposes instead to describe God's activity in terms of pure action. (shrink)

"... fascinating throughout.... the book is recreative in the highest sense." —Arthur C. Danto, The New Republic "A gem for Holmes fans and armchair detectives with a penchant for logical reflection, and Peirce scholars." —Library Journal.

This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until (...) relatively recently. For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the elements of time, memory and mystery in Veronica Mars. Both the plot and the visual style of Veronica Mars assign a huge importance to the past, suggesting that past events have a major impact on the present. The most straightforward way in which the past is accessible to us and has an impact on the present is through everyday memories. Much of the time when we voluntarily remember things, it's because something happening now has (...) prompted us to go looking for a memory designed to answer our question. The final episode of the first season ends with a touching sequence symbolizing the end of one particular detective story. Veronica dreams that she and Lilly are floating together in a pool, surrounded by flower petals, still in the soft focus of the past, but without the dark tints of foreboding and mystery. (shrink)

A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had (...) already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red? (shrink)

This is the first book to describe and explain all of the ancient world's major mystery cults--one of the most intriguing but least understood aspects of Greek and Roman religion. In the nocturnal Mysteries at Eleusis, participants dramatically re-enacted the story of Demeter's loss and recovery of her daughter Persephone; in the Bacchic cult, bands of women ran wild in the Greek countryside to honor Dionysus; and in the mysteries of Mithras, men came to understand the nature of the (...) universe and their place within it through frightening initiation ceremonies and astrological teachings. These cults were an important part of life in the ancient Mediterranean world, but their actual practices were shrouded in secrecy, and many of their features have remained unclear until now. By richly illustrating the evidence from ancient art and archaeology, and drawing on enlightening new work in the anthropology and cognitive science of religion, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World allows readers to imagine as never before what it was like to take part in these ecstatic and life-changing religious rituals--and what they meant to those who participated in them. Stunning images of Greek painted pottery, Roman frescoes, inscribed gold tablets from Greek and South Italian tombs, and excavated remains of religious sanctuaries help show what participants in these initiatory cults actually did and experienced. A fresh and accessible introduction to a fascinating subject, this is a book that will interest general readers, as well as students and scholars of classics and religion. (shrink)

This article focuses on portrayals of fictional characters with neurological synesthesia in seven selected 20th and 21st century English-language novels in the detective-spy genre. Characters are discussed in terms of the five categories of literacy depiction of synesthete characters as outlined in the chapter, “Synesthesia and Literature” in the Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia. I will suggest that depictions of synesthete characters in the detective genre link synesthetic perceptions with glimpses of ultimate truth, and trace these tendencies back (...) to descriptions of synesthesia in 19th century seminal European works, including Arthur Rimbaud’s “Letter of a Seer” and Max Nordau’s Degeneration. Novels included in this study: Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov, The Synesthete by Brent Kiernan, Top Ten by Gene Ha and Alan Moore, The Fallen by T. Jefferson Parker, Miracle Myx by Dave Diotalevi, Still Waters by Nigel McCrery, Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews. Cet article se concentre sur les représentations de personnages fictifs ayant une synesthésie neurologique, dans sept romans anglais des xxe et xxie siècles, sélectionnés dans le genre policier-espionnage. Les personnages sont examinés à partir des cinq catégories de représentation littéraire des personnages synesthésiques, exposées dans le chapitre « Synesthesia and Literature » de l’Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia. Je suggérerai que les représentations de personnages synesthésiques dans le genre policier relient les perceptions synesthésiques à des intuitions sur une vérité supérieure et rapporte ces tendances aux descriptions de la synesthésie dans les œuvres européennes essentielles du xixe siècle, y compris la « Lettre d’un Voyant » d’Arthur Rimbaud et le Dégénérescence de Max Nordau. Romans inclus dans cette étude : Invitation to a Behading de Vladimir Nabokov, The Synesthete de Brent Kiernan, Top Ten de Gene Ha et Alan Moore, The Fallen de T. Jefferson Parker, Miracle Myx de Dave Diotalevi, Still Waters de Nigel McCrery, Red Sparrow de Jason Matthews. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My Story:Evolving ObesitiesAnonymous OneI am a 66–year–old Caucasian woman. I have always had, either in perception or fact, a “weight problem.” In my childhood and early teens when my weight was within the normal range, I felt fat and was always trying to lose weight. After gaining weight in college, I had a weight problem in body as well as mind. Weight concerns have consumed much of my energy (...) over the years. I have spent most of my life evolving toward a healthy way to manage my weight.Act 1: Obesity as MetaphorI can’t remember ever not feeling fat. Growing up I felt humiliated and shamed by my body, even though I was not overweight, just bigger than my peers, with a pear shape and heavy legs, thighs, and ankles. In high school my BMI, although not used at the time as a measuring tool, was 22.8. Yet despite these facts, I was made to feel fat.In my family being overweight was tantamount to sin. My father and sister were tall and skinny; my mother was petite and shapely. I took after another genetic code—the dumpy ones with knocked knees—the grotesque branch of the family tree. Hand–me–downs from my sister were supposed to fit me, but we were too different, and the difference was not celebrated.Other things were at play, a perfect storm of conditions that contributed to my feelings of worthlessness. I really shouldn’t have been born. The earth should have opened up and swallowed me. Of course I was not conscious of reasons for these feelings at the time. That awareness came later. But these feelings of loss, grief, terror, and terrible wrongness were the context of my struggles over the years.I developed a pattern of binge eating, which satisfied two contradictory impulses: my need to nurture myself combined with my desire to punish myself. The intensity of a binge–eating episode was also an avenue for rage. I was young so the extra calories didn’t result in weight gain, but the behavior had begun to take root.Stepping on the scale was like the final judgment. The scale did not measure weight; it measured value. I would see the number, as would the person weighing me, and my failure, as a person, would be evident. My secret shame would become public. I would be declared guilty for the worthless grub that was me.Nothing else mattered: that I was an A student; that I was kind and compassionate; that I had friends. These facts had no bearing. All that counted was the number on the scale. That number sent a shudder of condemnation down to my very soul. That number threatened to hurl me into a bottomless abyss from which I could not escape.I avoided being weighed. I was a very obedient youth, with an exaggerated respect for authority drilled into me by my father. The one time I ever cut class was in high school. I skipped health class where I had heard we would be weighed.The situations when I could not avoid being weighed confirmed my worst fears. Before one gym class we were publicly weighed in [End Page 96] assembly–line fashion. As I stepped off the scale my gym teacher yelled out “Diet” for all to hear. Doctors who knew nothing about me, to whom I had been sent for various required physicals, told me to lose weight.In the mysterious and internally logical way that the mind works, my weight became a metaphor for all that was reprehensible in me. With no comprehension of why I was so unhappy, it was easy for me to fixate on my weight. It was too horrible to contemplate that I was the problem. The problem with me was my size, my body.As I look back now, I am angry that because of its shape, this perfectly wonderful body was judged as wrong, and that there was no compassionate voice loud enough to contradict this message. But at the time I felt no anger. To feel anger over being made to feel bad requires self–respect... (shrink)

Explores the figure of the detective as a pursuer of knowledge in four noir films.

Since the release of ChatGPT, there has been a lot of debate about whether AI systems pose an existential risk to humanity. This paper develops a general framework for thinking about the existential risk of AI systems. We analyze a two-premise argument that AI systems pose a threat to humanity. Premise one: AI systems will become extremely powerful. Premise two: if AI systems become extremely powerful, they will destroy humanity. We use these two premises to construct a taxonomy of ‘survival (...) stories’, in which humanity survives into the far future. In each survival story, one of the two premises fails. Either scientific barriers prevent AI systems from becoming extremely powerful; or humanity bans research into AI systems, thereby preventing them from becoming extremely powerful; or extremely powerful AI systems do not destroy humanity, because their goals prevent them from doing so; or extremely powerful AI systems do not destroy humanity, because we can reliably detect and disable systems that have the goal of doing so. We argue that different survival stories face different challenges. We also argue that different survival stories motivate different responses to the threats from AI. Finally, we use our taxonomy to produce rough estimates of ‘P(doom)’, the probability that humanity will be destroyed by AI. (shrink)

In this study, multidimensional feature extraction is performed on the U-language recordings of the test takers, and these features are evaluated separately, with five categories of features: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, grammar, and semantics. A deep neural network model is constructed to model the feature values to obtain the final score. Based on the previous research, this study uses a deep neural network training model instead of linear regression to improve the correlation between model score and expert score. The method of (...) using word frequency for semantic scoring is replaced by the LDA topic model for semantic analysis, which eliminates the need for experts to manually label keywords before scoring and truly automates the critique. Also, this paper introduces text cleaning after speech recognition and deep learning-based speech noise reduction technology in the scoring model, which improves the accuracy of speech recognition and the overall accuracy of the scoring model. Also, innovative applications and improvements are made to key technologies, and the latest technical solutions are integrated and improved. A new open oral grading model is proposed and implemented, and innovations are made in the method of speech feature extraction to improve the dimensionality of open oral grading. (shrink)

Till We Have Faces is profitably read at three levels: for its surface story, as a crime drama, and as an exploration of the theological mystery of grace. By transposing the myth of Psyche into the mystery genre, Lewis prepares the reader for Orual’s unreliability as a narrator and lures the reader into the novel’s theological depths. Part Two of the novel contains a series of visionary labors which Lewis borrows from Lucius Apuleius but recasts as feats achieved (...) jointly by Orual and Psyche. The theological reading in this article finds textual support for rereading Part One of the novel as depicting Orual, by grace, unknowingly performing Psyche’s labors. Read thusly, the novel is a working out of Lewis’s belief that God can change the past—that grace can reach back into our histories and retell our story. By ascribing to the mutability of the past, Lewis sidesteps the dispute among various branches of Christianity over whether prevenient grace is both irresistible and salvific. An examination of four sources of grace in Orual’s life reveals that what would have been common grace in her life becomes salvific as it leads to her redemption. This exposition also shows the novel’s indebtedness to the many classical Greek sources to which Lewis alludes within it, as well as its affinity with some of the ideas of Simone Weil. (shrink)

Critical algorithm scholarship has demonstrated the difficulties of attributing accountability for the actions and effects of algorithmic systems. In this commentary, we argue that we cannot stop at denouncing the lack of accountability for algorithms and their effects but must engage the broader systems and distributed agencies that algorithmic systems exist within; including standards, regulations, technologies, and social relations. To this end, we explore accountability in “the Generated Detective,” an algorithmically generated comic. Taking up the mantle of detectives ourselves, (...) we investigate accountability in relation to this piece of experimental fiction. We problematize efforts to effect accountability through transparency by undertaking a simple operation: asking for permission to re-publish a set of the algorithmically selected and modified words and images which make the frames of the comic. Recounting this process, we demonstrate slippage between the “complication” of the algorithm and the obscurity of the legal and institutional structures in which it exists. (shrink)

Malaysia is often hailed as a development success story. However, one criticism of this success story is the over-emphasis on the ideology of economic and capitalist growth by the state in its setting, determining and directing of development. This paper looks into some of the most interesting and critical reflections on development. Representing prominent voices in Malaysian literature in English, K. S. Maniam, Chuah Guat Eng and Yang-May Ooi delve into Malaysia’s development success story through Between Lives (2003), Days (...) of Change (2010) and The Flame Tree (1998), respectively. Through textual analysis, I examine how these writers treat the state’s prevailing ideology of development. Through their creative responses to the rapid development that has occurred in Malaysia, Maniam, Chuah and Ooi offer individual expression and powerful critiques of development, not merely reflecting on the ideology of economic and capitalist growth but also illustrating different perspectives on development based on notions of social justice, democracy and cultural sustainability. That is not to say that they reject development. On the contrary, they acknowledge that development is part and parcel of social, economic and political processes. However, through their treatment of development, they bring to light other equally important issues, thus emphasizing the flaws in adopting a development model that is essentially based on economic and capitalist growth. (shrink)

G. H. Hardy’s remarkable Indian protégé Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) is without doubt the most significant mathematician who is known to have solved one of Dudeney’s puzzles. When a student friend at Cambridge read out an arithmetical problem from Dudeney’s “Perplexities” column in the latest issue of The Strand Magazine, specifically the Grand Christmas Double Number of December 1914, Ramanujan solved it straightaway and in a generalised form, without recourse to pencil and paper. The story of this astonishing display of mathematical (...) skill is told in some detail and its supposed implications discussed. (shrink)

First?year students are still failing at an alarming rate. This is an international issue that universities face and there is currently no clear indication of the cause of the problem as universities move from being elite to providing mass education. This article examines the possible correlation between students? high school performance and first?year performance. The focus is primarily on the students? performance in mathematics and English. National Senior Certificate results as well as academic and mathematics competency results are used (...) to determine any correlations and therefore any predictors. The research is done to determine whether these results are a true reflection of a student?s performance and can be used as selection criteria. The results were disappointing since no correlation was found between students? high school performance and first?year performance. There is an indication, however, that the competency results might be an indicator. The results imply that more research is needed and that the current selection criteria are either not valid or need to be adjusted. (shrink)

The model of phoneme monitoring proposed by Norris et al. is implausible when implemented in a localist connectionist network. Lexical representations mysteriously inform phoneme decision nodes as to the presence or absence of a target phoneme.

According to True Detective's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, season two aimed at tragedy, taking inspiration from the archetypical tragedy Oedipus Rex to focus on characters confronting a knowledge that has ultimately fated their path. But, where Aristotle identified the necessity of including "incidents arousing pity and fear" to bring about tragedy's famous katharsis, season two speaks more to Friedrich Nietzsche's views on tragedy—specifically, his views of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides. Where tragedy once focused on only the "grand and bold (...) traits" of the human condition, Nietzsche says, Euripides focused on the moral concerns of the masses. Against season two's backdrop of civic corruption—land‐grabs and pork‐barrels—the tragedy takes up a modern form of morality for the masses that creates a barrier to tragic wisdom: namely, feminist morality. Rust's philosophical outlook establishes the Apollonian function of tragedy by providing a filter through which to confront the "difficulties of the human condition" expressed in the mysteries of Carcosa. (shrink)

The issue of words combinations draws attention of linguists starting from the second half of the XX c. until the present day. This study is focused on the research of semantic mechanisms of unusually combined lexemes and unexpected collocations in English postmodern short-short stories. Reconsideration of the literary past and ironic view on traditional poetic canons are reflected in postmodern literary texts due to the principles of postmodern poetics. Being distinctive feature of postmodern literature in general, uncertainty creates multiplicity (...) of meanings of entire literary text, as well as separate unexpected collocations, by means of unusually combined lexemes. The aim of the study is to elaborate the phenomenon of valence violation, created by unusually combined lexemes and unexpected collocations in English postmodern short-short stories. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to define the notion of valence and lexeme compatibility, to identify types of valence violation in lexemes combinations, and to provide their possible interpretation. Functioning in English postmodern short-short stories such language units widen boundaries of their usage and their combinatorial profile. Unusually combined lexemes focus the reader’s attention and provoke a cognitive mechanism of continuous searching for a hidden meaning of unexpected collocations and the general message of a literary text. In this research unusually combined lexemes are regarded as special markers of postmodern short-short story genre for which violation of text structure, violation of usual relations between lexemes in logic, semantic and syntactic aspects are quite common. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

This article argues that the explicit narrative twist that constitutes the mode of narration of twist films opens the potential for an additional implied twist that emerges in the awoken interpretive process of the viewer. Relying on Roland Barthes's notion of the “writerly” mode of narrative, this article further argues that this mode of implied twist narration inadvertently rearranges the spectator relationship to story construction in potentially any film by bringing spectator desire into focus.

In this philosophical detective story, Giorgio Agamben reads the mysterious 1938 disappearance of atomic physicist Ettore Majorana as an intentional and decisive objection to how quantum physics had reduced the real to probability.

"This is an extremely intelligent, interesting, and well written book." --Murder Is Academic "... compelling analysis of the comedy thriller... " --Theatre Studies "... almost as much fun to read as is seeing the actual plays discussed... " --Journal of Popular Culture The phenomenal success of such plays as Deathtrap and Sleuth heralded the advent of a new form of detective play--the comedy thriller. Carlson takes the wraps off the comedy thriller and reveals its postmodern effects. He looks at (...) all the elements of the thriller--openings, settings, characters, plot lines, the role of the audience, and endings--and shows how they work to overturn the conventions of realism in detective drama. (shrink)

This paper proposes an analytical taxonomy of ‘mystery’ based upon what makes a mystery mysterious. I begin by distinguishing mysteries that depend on what we do not know (e.g. detective fiction) from mysteries that depend on what we do know (e.g. religious mysteries). Then I distinguish three possible grounds for the latter type. The third and most provocative ground offers a mathematical analogy for how rational reflection can be appropriate to mystery without compromising its intrinsically mysterious (...) character. I conclude with reflections on the metaphysical presuppositions that this understanding of mystery requires. (Published Online January 15 2007). (shrink)

The first biography of Kierkegaard's literary muse and one-time fiancée, from the author of the definitive biography of the philosopher Kierkegaard's Muse, the first biography of Regine Olsen, the literary inspiration and one-time fiancée of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, is a moving portrait of a long romantic fever that had momentous literary consequences. Drawing on more than one hundred previously unknown letters by Regine that acclaimed Kierkegaard biographer Joakim Garff discovered by chance, the book tells the story of Kierkegaard and (...) Regine's mysterious relationship more fully and vividly than ever before, shedding new light on her influence on his life and writings. Like Dante's Beatrice, Regine is one of the great muses of literary history. Kierkegaard proposed to her in 1840, but broke off the engagement a year later. After their break, they saw each other strikingly often, inside dimly lit churches, on the streets of Copenhagen, and on the paths along the old city ramparts, passing by without uttering a word. Despite or because of their separation in life, Kierkegaard made Regine his literary life companion, "that single individual" to whom he dedicated all his works. Garff shows how Regine became a poetic presence in the frequent erotic conflicts found throughout Kierkegaard's writings, from the famous "Seducer's Diary" account of their relationship to diary entries made shortly before his death in 1855. In turn, Regine remained preoccupied with Kierkegaard until her own death almost fifty years later, and her newly discovered letters, written to her sister Cornelia, reveal for the first time a woman of flesh and blood. A psychologically acute narrative that is as gripping as a novel, Kierkegaard's Muse is an unforgettable account of a wild, strange, and poignant romance that made an indelible mark on literary history. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. (shrink)

E. L. Grant Watson, an English field naturalist, zoologist, and one of England's best-loved nature writers, spent a lifetime trying to bring nature and...

E. L. Grant Watson, an English field naturalist, zoologist, and one of England's best-loved nature writers, spent a lifetime trying to bring nature and consciousness into a unified, holistic vision that would establish meaning in the world without losing wonder. The questions raised by facts of nature inexplicable in terms of conventional theories, together with insights gained from a reading of Jung--as well as by a study of early Christian gnostic literature and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner--brought him to (...) an imaginative perception of living things based on the conviction of the presence in all things of a spiritual reality. "Love is of man, but wisdom is of nature, and there are times when it almost seems that the author's secret--as perhaps it will one day be the secret of a reformed scientific method--is to stand aside and let the wisdom of nature herself speak through him. "-Owen Barfield. (shrink)

Codicology, also known as ‘the archaeology of the book’, is the study of manuscripts as physical objects. It is a discipline that studies manuscripts with a predominantly historical orientation. This essay explores the sequel to the most famous literature before and after Islamic epic story and the link between Islamic signs and literature review. The greatest pre-Islamic mysteries in the history of Moslem literature and its religious effects were disused, which were solved by manuscript studies and some case studies. The (...) research method is based on the position story and finding the Islamic signs of the research to confirm the Islamic signs in the history and its changes over time. Therefore, in this research, religious symbols in the history of literature have been studied. The authors try to reach a new knowledge regarding the foundations of this school by tracing the history of religious literature. Furthermore, the connection between culture and religious literature is made by examining the Islamic religion mysteries sample. The symbolism and explanation of codes and elements in art works have been studied and the role of myths and metaphors in semantic analysis and religious concepts has been discussed. Finally, the effect of the Islamic events in literature review and art development is discussed.Contribution: This study provides further insights into the relationship between theology and literature through a historical literature review. (shrink)

A notable aspect of contemporary fiction is the increasing importance acquired by the detective as a literary figure. From World War II up to today he has transcended a narrow role played in a narrow genre to become the symbol for man's existential quest and puzzlement in the face of mystery. If science fiction is the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the future of our technological society, the detective and a new form of literary (...) class='Hi'>detective fiction have lately become the expression of our hopes and fears concerning the present, since mystery is not only, too obviously, in the future but, more subtly, in the present. While science fiction lacks a character typical of the genre who may embody and possibly transcend its purposes, the detective novel thanks to the multifold aspects of its “ordainer”—the detective—has progressively risen to literary prominence through the apparently paradoxical negation of its original functions. (shrink)

This article explores the process of female self-fashioning in two previously neglected petitions dated 1786-87 by using signatures to analyse their texts and construct their contexts. In them, Helen Timberlake revises the account of frontier and Cherokee life her husband, Henry Timberlake, had published in his Memoirs. Her intense maternal voice, focused on loss, entangles her history with that of the Cherokee chief Ostenaco, providing a grounded but often untrue narrative of shared family life and a persona tailored to evoke (...) a history intertwined with that of George III. This article explores the mystery of Helen Timberlakes origins, while connecting the rhetoric of her petitions to the gendered emergence of sentimentalism, narratives of Indian captivity, and the historiography of ‘the Atlantic’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Introduction to the Mystery of the Church by Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P.David OlsonIntroduction to the Mystery of the Church. By Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P. Trans. by Michael J. Miller. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Pp. xxviii + 640. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-2607-1.La Soujeole intends his work to be a textbook in an introductory course in ecclesiology. While this is a (...) review of the English translation, the book was first published in French in 2007, and the preface to the original edition stated, “The present volume is a course in ecclesiology that has been taught regularly at the Dominican House of Studies in Toulouse” (xxv). As a textbook, it is well structured and should be accessible to a wide variety of students. The writing style in translation is clear and straightforward, with explanations given for any terms of art which are used, making it accessible to an audience with some theological training.The tone of the book is theological, that is to say, it is focused on an ordered view of the Catholic faith. It is not apologetic or polemical as is sometimes the case with books on ecclesiology, particularly those preceding the Second Vatican Council. On the other hand, it is certainly not a relativistic, blandly Christian study of various notions of church. Each of the topics within the book is situated within Scripture, and the author provides ample bibliography, though—not surprisingly, considering his religious order and background—the work leans heavily upon St. Thomas Aquinas. The book gives a very balanced view of the teachings of Vatican II.The author begins his work with a general introduction that provides a brief historical overview of important moments and trends in the theology of the Church, as well as a review of ecclesiology as a separate theological subject. One point is that the study of ecclesiology per se is relatively new, beginning only in the fourteenth century, but that questions concerning the ecclesia are found within all major areas of theological study. Ecclesiology cannot neatly be divorced from the study of the doctrine of God, Christology, or the sacraments. Issues regarding sacramental theology and Christology are prominent in the second portion of the book.Explanations are full and show a certain rigor. Some might consider them at times pedantic. For example, the distinction of belief in God from belief in the Church in the Nicene Creed is more than four pages in length, rehearsing difficulties of translation (296-301). More substantially on this point, over these four plus pages the author does not manage to make what would be to many theologians the obvious distinction between the absolute God and the created reality referred to as the Church. In fact, it is not clear that this is a distinction the author would want to make, as the second part of the book, containing his speculative theology, eschews a distinction between a visible and invisible church, the body of the Church and the grace of Jesus Christ. A [End Page 324] too-cursory reading of the second part could tend toward conflating the Church and the inner life of God.The book is divided into three parts. The first part is subdivided into thematic descriptions of the Church. The several themes explored are “Images of the Church and the Kingdom of God,” “the Church [as] the Body of Christ,” “the Church [as] the Temple of the Spirit,” and “the Church [as] the People of God.” The discussion on the Kingdom of God is the most limited. The first part of the book concludes with a section entitled “Recapitulation: The Church Is a Mystery.”The presentations on the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Spirit, and the People of God are done thoroughly. They follow a standard pattern of reviewing Scripture, patristic developments, the medieval period (mostly St. Thomas), and developments from Vatican II, which the author characterizes as the council on the Church. Following a thematic approach, particularly in teaching ecclesiology, seems most appropriate since the typical student may lack the needed... (shrink)

Background Scientific and technological advancements in mapping and understanding the interrelated pathways through which biological and environmental exposures affect disease development create new possibilities for detecting disease risk factors. Early detection of such risk factors may help prevent disease onset or moderate the disease course, thereby decreasing associated disease burden, morbidity, and mortality. However, the ethical implications of screening for disease risk factors are unclear and the current literature provides a fragmented and case-by-case picture. Methods To identify key ethical considerations (...) arising from the early detection of disease risk factors, we performed a systematic scoping review. The Scopus, Embase, and Philosopher’s Index databases were searched for peer-reviewed, academic records, which were included if they were written in English or Dutch and concerned the ethics of (1) early detection of (2) disease risk factors for (3) disease caused by environmental factors or gene-environment interactions. All records were reviewed independently by at least two researchers. Results After screening 2034 titles and abstracts, and 112 full papers, 55 articles were included in the thematic synthesis of the results. We identified eight common ethical themes: (1) Reliability and uncertainty in early detection, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) beneficence and non-maleficence, (5) downstream burdens on others, (6) responsibility, (7) justice, and (8) medicalization and conceptual disruption. We identified several gaps in the literature, including a relative scarcity of research on ethical considerations associated with environmental preventive health interventions, a dearth of practical suggestions on how to address expressed concerns about overestimating health capacities, and a lack of insights into preventing undue attribution of health responsibility to individuals. Conclusions The ethical concerns arising with the early detection of risk factors are often interrelated and complex. Comprehensive ethical analyses are needed that are better embedded in normative frameworks and also assess and weigh the expected benefits of early risk factor detection. Such research is necessary for developing and implementing responsible and fair preventive health policies. (shrink)

The mystery of existence and our place in that mystery--as expressed in a single Chinese landscape painting: a new work of meditative philosophy by the renowned translator of the Chinese classics and author of Hunger Mountain. Join David Hinton, the premier modern translator of the Chinese classics, as he stands before a single landscape painting, discovering in it the wondrous story of existence—and as part of that story, the magical nature of consciousness. What he coaxes from the image (...) is nothing less than a revelation: the dynamic interweaving of mind and Cosmos, and the glorious dance of Absence and Presence that is the secret of that Cosmos. The painting called Peaceful-Distance Pavilion by Shih-t'ao (1642-1707) is, like other paintings in that genre, mostly space: one tiny figure, accompanied by an attendant, looks out over a vast landscape of mountains and clouds. But start looking into that space and, with the right guidance, what you end up seeing is profound. David Hinton is the perfect guide. He uses his knowledge of Chinese philosophy, poetry, art, language, and writing system to illuminate this painting's message, which is ultimately the story of the glorious dance between nothing and everything, between emptiness and existence. It's an enthralling journey that can change the way you look at the world, a journey for which David is a wise and eloquent guide. (shrink)

Next SectionIn a series of previous articles, we have considered how we might reconceptualise central themes in medicine and medical education through ‘thinking with Homer’. This has involved using textual approaches, scenes and characters from the Iliad and Odyssey for rethinking what is a ‘communication skill’, and what do we mean by ‘empathy’ in medical practice; in what sense is medical practice formulaic, like a Homeric ‘song’; and what is lyrical about medical practice. Our approach is not to historicise medicine (...) and medical education, but to use thinking with Homer as a medium and metaphor for questioning the habitual and the taken-for-granted in contemporary practice. In this article, we tackle the complex theme of ‘translation’. We use the lens of translation studies to examine the process of turning the patient's story into medical language. We address the questions: what makes a ‘good’ translation? What are the consequences of mistranslation and poor translation? And, while things are inevitably lost in translation, does this matter? (shrink)

A more intimate and vivid glimpse of Athenian political life during and directly after the Peloponnesian War is provided by the speech of Andokides On the Mysteries than by any other work: it is also a major source of legal and prosopographical information, and an important specimen of Attic prose style in the most crucial period of its development. Despite this it has been unduly neglected in recent years, partly for lack of an up-to-date English commentary. This new paperback (...) version of MacDowell's standard edition is intended both for undergraduates and professional scholars. The revised text with apparatus criticus is supplemented with a full introduction surveying the life and trial of Andokides and his literary style; a note on the basis of the text; a detailed commentary; and appendices which discuss Andokides' innocence or guilt, the chronology and political significance of events in 415 BC, the legal revision ordered by the decree of Teisamenos, the date of the trial and the speech, and aspects of the historical and stylistic background relevant to the work. (shrink)

Most of the existing natural language processing systems for legal texts are developed for the English language. Nevertheless, there are several application domains where multiple versions of the same documents are provided in different languages, especially inside the European Union. One notable example is given by Terms of Service (ToS). In this paper, we compare different approaches to the task of detecting potential unfair clauses in ToS across multiple languages. In particular, after developing an annotated corpus and a machine (...) learning classifier for English, we consider and compare several strategies to extend the system to other languages: building a novel corpus and training a novel machine learning system for each language, from scratch; projecting annotations across documents in different languages, to avoid the creation of novel corpora; translating training documents while keeping the original annotations; translating queries at prediction time and relying on the English system only. An extended experimental evaluation conducted on a large, original dataset indicates that the time-consuming task of re-building a novel annotated corpus for each language can often be avoided with no significant degradation in terms of performance. (shrink)

This study examines feedback provided by an English teacher to Chilean secondary student texts, in the context of writing short stories collaboratively in an English as a foreign language class. The study aimed to analyze students’ decisions about the teacher’s types of feedback on their short stories. For this investigation, and under the context of qualitative research, there were analyzed 6 consecutive drafts of the students’ short stories, of a public high school in Chile. This is a qualitative (...) research with an action research design. The data collected was analyzed using Straub and Lunsford categories to describe the impact of the teacher’s written feedback on students’ decisions. In terms of students’ decisions, participant students adopted most of the teacher’s comments. The student’s texts evidenced progress, but still, regardless the feedback provided, they presented some grammatical and organizational issues. (shrink)

Applying media effects and attributions to news coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues, this content analysis examines recent CSR news in the United States. Results showed that the news media presented CSR activities positively with episodic events, offering proactive solutions to social problems, particularly when the media attributed CSR to corporate motives for social benefits. Opposing results were detected when the media inferred corporations’ business motives from CSR activities. Further, the general non-business media favorably described CSR cases with social (...) motives and episodic events, whereas the business-specific media critically portrayed business motives and thematic issues behind CSR activities. Study implications are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 197-214 [Access article in PDF] The Origin of Stories:Horton Hears a Who Brian Boyd Works of art die without attention, and we should expect that any critical theory that cannot explain why we attend to art ought itself to be moribund. Yet the currently dominant approach to criticism, which I will dub Cultural Critique, 1 explains art in terms of the limited and suspect (...) perspectives of the culture (society, group, era) that produced it, or as the site of contestation or locus of imbrication of the ideological discourses of its time. Why anyone would want to attend to art, defined thus, becomes a mystery, unless audiences always do indeed crave ideological nourishment or indigestion. Surely we can do better.I would like to offer the outline of an alternative: an evolutionary explanation first for art, then for narrative, then for fiction. Then, since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or at least sometimes helps us retrieve it, and since we have no printouts of Pleistocene potboilers, I will color in the outline by way of Dr. Seuss's children's classic, Horton Hears a Who, contrasting a sample evolutionary analysis of a single work of fiction with the kind of response typical of Cultural Critique.In art we do or make things simply in order to engage our attention, for the sake of attention, and we are not the only species to do so. Intelligence began to evolve because the world is full of potential information that can suggest advantageous courses of behavior. Curiosity evolved on top of intelligence--especially in the species that Konrad Lorenz liked to call "specialists in non-specialization," such as rats among rodents, corvids among songbirds, and humans among primates 2 --because it extends the range of information creatures can attend to and act on. As a result rats can prefer cognitive stimulation to food and sex. 3 As the most intelligent and versatile of species, we humans particularly like directing our attention to what repays our curiosity. [End Page 197]And like other particularly intelligent species, we like to do things that provide cognitive stimulation, whether they have any immediate survival value or not. Corvids (together with psittacines, the most intelligent of birds) enjoy a kind of aerial acrobatics that Lorenz unashamedly labels art. 4 Dolphins in a Hawaiian marine park have developed, without any human prompting, what has been called "air art," a kind of rhythmic gymnastics in which they deploy air bubbles from their blowholes like gymnasts' ribbons or hoops, or, to stress the affinity to art, a kind of aquatic analogue of light sculpture. 5 Chimpanzees appear to engage both in solitary imaginative play, like Kakama with the stick he famously and repeatedly handled as if it were a toy baby, 6 and in group activity, like rhythmic dances, 7 for the sheer pleasure they produce. In art as in so much else we had thought uniquely human, like tool-using or tool-making, like counting or culture, we are finding there are precursors elsewhere in nature. 8Because we are such a highly social species, we crave the attention of others. Human infants are distressed at adults who do not respond to them; 9 infants and children across cultures punish others by withdrawing attention. 10 At any age we like to command attention in ways we choose, for the ability to compete successfully for attention is closely correlated with status, 11 which raises rates of survival and reproduction. 12 And we can recognize something artistic in such forms of competitive animal attention-getting as the dances of lekking birds, the songs of songbirds or whales, or the extravagant architecture of bowerbirds. Not only do we like to command attention, we also enjoy simply sharing it with others, because this cements our place in a social group whose support we need. 13 Again, there are precursors in other species: the elaborate song of duetting songbirds, 14 or the communal dances of chimpanzees.Curiosity directed at what we can do that gives us cognitive pleasure, whether by engaging our own attention or... (shrink)