Débats, addressed last summer to that sheet a series of letters descriptive of a rapid tour through the United States. He has just gathered these letters into a volume in which American readers will find a good deal of entertainment and a certain amount of instruction. M. de Molinari, in his capacity of French journalist, is of course lively and witty; but his vivacity is always in excellent taste. He is moreover extremely observant, and he often renders his impressions (...) with much felicity. He had apparently the advantage of coming to America without strong preconceptions in any direction; he was not pledged to find democratic institutions purely delightful, nor had he it on his conscience to lay in a stock of invidious comfort for oppressed Europeans. We have had in America too many observers of each of these categories. M. de Molinari’s conclusions seem disinterested and liberal, especially when we remember that they were addressed to a journal which is not remarkable (save when M. Laboulaye writes in it) for a deferential consideration of American affairs. They are, in the gross, very much the reflections with which sensible Americans themselves point the moral of their contemporary history. M. de Molinari’s weak point appears to have been that he had not time or inclination to look beneath the external surface of American manners, and that he was but scantily acquainted with the language of the people whom he had undertaken to examine. He usually writes his English words faultily – it is startling, for instance, to see a gentleman who has passed.. (shrink)

The importance of working memory in reading and mathematics performance has been widely studied, with recent research examining the components of WM and their roles in these educational outcomes. However, the differing relationships between these abilities and the foundational skills involved in the development of reading and mathematics have received less attention. Additionally, the separation of verbal, visual and spatial storage and processing and subsequent links with foundational skills and downstream reading and mathematics has not been widely examined. The current (...) study investigated the separate contributions of processing and storage from verbal, visual and spatial tasks to reading and mathematics, whilst considering influences on the underlying skills of verbal comprehension and counting, respectively. Ninety-two children aged 7- to 8-years were assessed. It was found that verbal comprehension was predicted by verbal storage and reading was predicted by verbal and spatial storage. Counting was predicted by visual processing and storage, whilst mathematics was related to verbal and spatial storage. We argue that resources for tasks relying on external representations of stimuli related mainly to storage, and were largely verbal and spatial in nature. When a task required internal representation, there was a draw on visual processing and storage abilities. Findings suggest a possible meaningful separability of types of processing. Further investigation of this could lead to the development of an enhanced WM model, which might better inform interventions and reasonable adjustments for children who struggle with reading and mathematics due to WM deficits. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd LekanHenry JackmanBy Todd LekanWilliam James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New York: Routledge, 2022. 156pp., incl. indexWhile William James wrote just a single article in theoretical ethics, it has often been said that ethical concerns animate almost all of his work.1 Indeed, there has been a growing interest in James’s moral philosophy, (...) and Todd Lekan’s William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning is the latest, and arguably the best, sustained attempt to introduce readers to James’s ethical thought. The task is not an easy one, since the one essay of James’s that explicitly focuses on theoretical ethics, 1891’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, deals with ‘social’ concerns that don’t clearly align with the more ‘existential’ questions that run through the rest of his corpus.2 In particular, James’s main ‘ethical’ concerns in most of his writings seem to relate more to our living ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ lives than it does to our living a ‘moral’ ones. Consequently, writings on James’s ethics tend to treat these two strands separately, either focusing disproportionately on just one of these two aspects, or treating the two as separate components that do not affect one another.3 Weaving both strands of James’s ethical though into a coherent whole may be the primary achievement of Lekan’s book, but he provides much insight into interpretive problems relating to the individual threads along the way.The more ‘social’ strand is admirably explained in Lekan’s first chapter, “Pragmatist Moral Philosophy and Moral Life: Embracing the Tensions”, where he outlines James’s meta-ethical views from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, and gives an account of the regulative assumptions and regulative ideals that James appeals to in order to go from his initial thesis that all goodness originates from the desires of sentient beings to the conclusion that “we are morally obligated to [End Page 105] satisfy as many demands as possible”, and that among the available ideals we might choose, “we are morally obligated to adopt ideals whose realization does not undermine the ideals held by others” (15).Ideals move to center stage in the book’s second chapter, “Ideals and Significant Lives”, which trades the social ethics of the first chapter for more existential concerns, and explains how James takes the strenuous pursuit of our own ideals to amount to a kind of ‘self-fashioning’ that makes for a ‘meaningful’ life (36). This answer to the existential question is, however, ambivalent about the social one. Unlike some other interpreters who focus primarily on the existential question, Lekan notes that James’s pluralism about ideals seems to leave plenty of room for ideals that were very much out of line with the moral injunctions of James’s social ethics to produce perfectly significant lives.4 So, for instance, pursuing an ideal tied to the promotion of the supremacy of one’s religion at the expense of all others might satisfy the requirements for creating a significant life, even if that ideal required the relentless persecution of those who did not share it. Indeed, the ideals in question need not be as extreme as this; even more mundane ideals like becoming a great painter, while not directly requiring that you harm others, might still be successfully pursued in a way that ignored the demands of others that was in tension with “The Moral Philosopher”’s emphasis on maximizing overall demand satisfaction.5As the book’s subtitle suggests, Lekan attempts to harmonize the social and existential strands of James’s thought by arguing that our self-fashioning is “responsible” when the ideals involved satisfy the constraints of the moral philosopher discussed in chapter one (50). In particular, the subject who strenuously pursues such moral ideals is characterized as the “existential moral philosopher” (29–30) and striving to satisfy that ideal would produce a life that met both James’s social and existential concerns. That said, it would have been helpful to see a little more about the tension between these two sides... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:American Memory in Henry James: Void and ValueMartin WarnerAmerican Memory in Henry James: Void and Value, by William Righter, edited by Rosemary Righter ; xi & 220 pp. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004. $79.95.The perennial debate about what Arnold termed "culture and anarchy" was both enriched and rendered more subtle by the work of Henry James. The late William Righter's fine and discriminating (...) intelligence helps us to think this through. This is no standard monograph on Henry James. While well-aware of the critical traditions of Jamesian scholarship (and the knowledgeable will be able to detect in his sensitive and often enlightening readings of the texts his engagement with those traditions), Righter sits lightly to this scholarship, ploughing his own furrow, using the later work of Henry James as a lens to question "void and value" in twentieth-century and, by extension, contemporary culture. American Memory in Henry James is elegantly, and indeed sometimes elusively, written, as befits a work on a man whose own stylistic stringency is, alas, so often not emulated by academic writings on his work. The flipside of this, of course, is that a reasonably educated background, including some acquaintance with James's texts, is assumed.Righter is concerned to explore the capacity of the novel form as represented by James to apprehend, through formal arrangement, the apparent incommensurability of the forces that drive history, culture, and human psychology on the one hand, and the frameworks of intelligibility and value within which we seek to live and by means of which we seek to exercise some control over them, on the other. James is apt for this purpose since he focuses on cultural dislocations, between America and Europe, and between past and present. America, for James, represents the overcoming of a late nineteenth-century tradition of civility (primarily, in his case, transcendentalist and Unitarian) by big business and the criteria of capitalism. This precipitates a split between "wasp" culture and an alienated, urban culture, both in danger of losing touch with their roots. Europe, of course, stands for continuity, in this specifically cultural sense, rather than rupture, and the project of importing European culture into America through museums (The Golden Bowl is very much in point here) is one of the ambiguities to which the text recurs.The first part, "America Deconstructed," sets the stage, using James's The [End Page 447] American Scene to analyze his notions of historical change and progression, and their implications for a sense of stable American identity. How is a society so committed to change and progress to honor its past creatively? Part two, "The Note of Europe," engages with The Ambassadors, seeing the victory of Wollett as an indication of the insubstantiality of a certain type of expatriate community, of Americans seeking to take on European culture. The main weight of the text is taken by the engagement with The Golden Bowl, to which the next two parts are dedicated. "Amerigo in American Nowhere" explores the way in which the central characters operate in a sort of void, with social context stripped away to reveal the dynamics of their failed equilibrium. In this, "America" and "England" have become virtually typological symbols. In the light of this reading of the text, Part four, "A Dark Fable of Love and Power," explores the implications for our shaping intelligence, especially ethical intelligence. In suggestive dialogue with Putnam and Nussbaum, Righter points to the difficulty of seeing the relevance of anything like the Categorical Imperative to The Golden Bowl. Rather, in this novel "the language of morality has been examined, picked up, turned over, taken to pieces. But this very process has in the end indicated its unsuitability as an ultimate explanatory scheme." He argues that James poses the possibility that the novel "adds up to a total story which is intelligible beyond the possibilities of a conceptual sorting out" (pp. 154-55).But this raises the question of what the criteria for intelligibility could be in such a case, if beyond the conceptual lies the imaginative. The final part, "Form and Contingency," engages with this issue. James's difficulty here, it is argued with respect to the late... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Eternities: Henry James’s Horatian Sense of Time KATHLEEN RILEY Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. —Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 On a visit to Bodiam Castle in Sussex in 1908, Henry James remarked to Edith Wharton: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”1 The potency of those two words derives (...) from their immediate evocation of an arrested moment between the day’s halcyon perfection and its imminent dying fall. Small wonder that those same words were later used to mythologize an Edenic Edwardian England poised on the brink of war, to preserve in aspic the fancy of a gilded innocence and order, and the promise of “blue remembered hills,”2 careless of the teeming, tumultuous reality of an England already in the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge. James’s masterpiece of 1881, The Portrait of a Lady, begins with a luxuriously redolent depiction of a summer afternoon, of the hours before dusk that constitute a pleasurable little eternity, of the languorous rhythms and rituals of what Disraeli called “the sustained splendour of [a] stately life.”3 Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.4 This passage, it strikes me, is essentially Horatian in its Epicurean delight in the passing moment. For the Augustan poet Horace, this delight, which is intrinsically elegiac, is expressed in the sympotic pleasures of wine and friendship, in the freedom aestivam sermone benigno tendere noctem (“to prolong the summer night with genial conversation,” Epistles i.5.11). For Henry James, it rests in “the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” in the lengthening shadows on an English lawn by “the reedy, silvery Thames” (PL 32). In both cases the evanescence of these simple pleasures is deeply felt and pleasure itself heightened by an undertone of melancholy, by a nostalgic apprehension of the present. LOCI AMOENI in his review of Augustus J. C. Hare’s Days near Rome (1875), Henry James commented: “The smallest pretext for quoting from Horace—the most quotable of the ancients— should always be cultivated.”5 His own facility for quoting from Horace was evident from his earliest published works, and belied an “extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous” education shuttling, at his father’s restless instigation, between New England, Britain and Continental Europe.6 James’s biographer, Leon Edel, recorded the family legend that William James (Henry’s Irish grandfather), “who was eighteen in 1789, when he set foot in the New World, 22 little eternities brought with him a ‘very small sum of money,’ a Latin grammar and a desire to visit the fresh battlefields of the Revolutionary War.”7 Young Henry’s instruction in Latin grammar seems to have begun in the Old World, under a private tutor in London in 1855, a Scotsman named Robert Thomson who later ran a small school in Edinburgh attended by Robert Louis Stevenson. It... (shrink)

William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by (...) Cheryl Misak, Robert Talisse, and Scott Aikin) that portrays him not as criticizing evidentialism itself, but only as trying to expand our conception what we should count as evidence. There are two main strategies for defending this ‘expansive’ reading. The first approach relies on showing that the logic of James’s argument itself relies on highlighting a new type of evidence rather than rather than undermining the need for our beliefs to be grounded in evidence, while the second approach appeals to aspects of James’s biography to show that he always intended something closer to the expansive reading. It is argued here that neither approach is persuasive, and that the anti-evidentialist reading of James remains the most probable. (shrink)

[The Catcher in the Rye's] catalogue of characters, incidents, expressions could be extended indefinitely, all of them suggesting that Holden's sickness of soul is something deeper than economic or political, that his revulsion at life is not limited to social and monetary inequities, but at something in the nature of life itself - the decrepitude of the aged, the physical repulsiveness of the pimpled, the disappearance and dissolution of the dead, the terrors of sex, the hauntedness of human aloneness, the (...) panic of individual isolation. Headlines about Korea, Dean Acheson, and the cold war seem, if not irrelevant, essentially wide of the mark - if we define the mark as the heart and soul of Catcher. James E. Miller, Jr., author of "Henry James in Reality" and numerous books and articles on American literature, responds in this essay to Carol and Richard Ohmann's "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye. The Ohmann's answer will appear in our summer issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 199-200 [Access article in PDF] Benedict's Dharma James Wiseman Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Bulletin The book Benedict's Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict was published by Riverhead Books in the late summer of 2001. Several years in the making, the volume was edited by Patrick Henry, director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey in (...) Collegeville, Minnesota. It contains the reflections of four Buddhist authors—Norman Fischer, Joseph Goldstein, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Yifa—on selected parts of the Rule of Saint Benedict and has already met with such success that plans are underway to have it translated into several foreign languages.To coincide with the publication of the book, the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) board decided to hold a conference at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Beech Grove, Indiana, from September 21-23, 2001. Originally all four of the Buddhist authors had intended to come, but in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11, Norman Fischer and Joseph Goldstein felt it was more important that they remain with their own communities during those days. However, Judith Simmer-Brown and Yifa did attend, along with more than a hundred other persons. The attendees included Father Patrick Barry, the former abbot of Ampleforth Abbey in England, who is currently residing at St. Louis Abbey in Missouri. His sensitive translation of the Rule of Saint Benedict is included as an appendix to Benedict's Dharma.On the opening evening, Father William Skudlarek, OSB, the chair of the MID board, extended a warm welcome to those attending and then introduced Patrick Henry, who served as moderator of the entire conference. Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB, who had worked closely on the project from its inception and had written an afterword to the book, spoke on the Rule of Benedict as a "trellis," which is the root meaning of the Latin and Greek words translated as "rule." Just as a trellis in a garden provides a structure for the plant climbing on it, so does the Rule of Saint Benedict establish a framework on which a life can grow. Brother David's talk was followed by the assigning of "dyads," groups of two participants each; the pairs would use allotted times during the conference for dialogue about matters raised in the general sessions.The next day, Saturday, September 22, began with sitting meditation in the monastery chapel, followed by the service of Morning Praise with the resident community of Benedictine sisters. Various other activities were in the conference schedule, [End Page 199] but especially prominent were talks given by Christian monastics as their responses to the book out of their own experience of living according to the Benedictine Rule. The first of these talks was given by Sister Sarah Schwartzberg of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Her assigned topic was the section of the book Benedict's Dharma dealing with the themes of "freedom and forgiveness." Following a late-morning Eucharist and lunch, two presentations were made in the afternoon: Abbot Francis Cline, OCSO, of Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, reflected on "discipline and spontaneity," and Father Columba Stewart, OSB, of Saint John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, spoke on the part of the book focusing on "tradition and adaptation." Those attending the conference again joined the resident community for vespers in the monastery chapel and then, after dinner, heard Father James Wiseman, OSB, of Saint Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C., speak on the themes of "leadership and humility" as these had been treated by the Buddhist authors in the last section of the book.The Sunday schedule began in a way similar to that of Saturday, with morning talks by the Buddhist scholar the Venerable Heng Sure and the MID chair Father Skudlarek. After Eucharist, Judith Simmer-Brown made some extemporaneous closing remarks to thank persons who had worked so hard to make the entire project a success. She also expressed pleasant surprise at how positively the book had been received. In her own words, "I think I speak for all... (shrink)

In the summer of 1893, following the first publication of F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Edward Caird and Sir Henry Jones exchanged letters, with Caird bringing criticism to bear on Bradley’s work analogous to one of Hegel’s objections to Spinoza’s theory of the attributes of substance. Spinoza’s attributes of his one reality, or substance — i.e., extension and thought and infinitely many other attributes not directly known to us — each contain this reality, and they are each a (...) way for us to know it. Hegel objected that they each failed in this owing to the abstractness of Spinoza’s ideas of the attributes. Caird held that Bradley’s metaphysics also makes the idea of reality in this way opposed to its object. The idea fails to contain reality as concrete experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beastly Vagueness in Charles Sanders Peirce and Henry JamesMegan M. QuigleyIn 1878, Charles Sanders Peirce closed the first section of "How to Make our Ideas Clear"—an article that William James later declared a "birth certificate of Pragmatism"—on a strangely anecdotal note.1 Using what would become known as the pragmatic method to demolish the notion of Grand Ideas ("Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible (...) effects"), Peirce also included a lesson from an "old German story":Many a man has cherished for years some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some morning to find it gone, cleaned vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man.(WCSP, p. 261)The story of the fled Melusina (a half-woman, half-serpent who gives birth to monsters) acts ostensibly as a warning against the danger inherent in "vague" ideas. "A vague shadow of an idea" can sap the life-blood out of a young man and, therefore, Peirce asserted, we must strive to be clear. But Peirce's anecdote did more than further his argument; it was an autobiographical aside—so personal, in fact, that he ordered the passage to be deleted in all future printings of his essay.Melusina was not just an allusion to a mythological figure; it was also a reference to the middle name of his wife, Harriet Melusina Fay. Since his schooldays, Peirce's friend and, later, wife, whom he called [End Page 362] "Zina," had been his constant companion and even the scribe for his fervent aspirations. Under the title "Theories of C. S. Peirce, 1854" she had transcribed his ambitious declaration: "My life is built upon a theory: and if this theory turns out false, my life will turn out a failure" (Brent, p. 51). By the mid 1870s, Peirce's theory, "passionately loved... his companion by day and by night," was finally being elucidated in his articles; however, Melusina herself had "cleaned vanished away," after two decades of intimacy, leaving Peirce in Paris to what his friend Henry James described as "a very lonely and dreary existence." Peirce's inclusion of an anecdote about his own loneliness—"I have myself known such a man"—is poignant even as it reveals his anger. Melusina is both a monster and "beautiful," and with her disappearance, Peirce has lost, "the essence of his life." The personal allusion also highlights the anxiety in the young Peirce's writing. What if his theories came to nothing, remained merely vague, and he lost his whole life and his wife to a misguided dedication? And how ironic would that be given that the idea itself aimed to explode the fallacy of grand ideas? Such an irony was not lost on his main companion during the winter of 1875, Henry James.In the following pages I aim to demonstrate that Charles S. Peirce's anxiety acted as a germ for the beast of John Marcher in James's late story, "The Beast in the Jungle." "More than any of Henry James's tales," Paul Lindholdt writes, "'The Beast in the Jungle,' has prompted source studies and psychoanalytic discussions by critics striving to identify" John Marcher.2 Eager to diagnose the relationship between Marcher and May Bartram, critics have sought both autobiographical and literary sources for Marcher's character.3 Strangely, however, no one has noted the connection between Peirce and Marcher, an omission that is especially odd given the critical attention directed at the relationship between the story and pragmatism. Since Richard Hocks's Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought highlighted the pragmatic tendencies of James's story and called Marcher the "anti-pragmatist" hero, "an epitome of William's... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wandering at Ease in the ZhuangziJames MillerWandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi. Edited by Roger T. Ames. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Pp. viii + 239."Good grief!" exclaimed the reviewer as he greedily tore open the package from Philosophy East and West. "Not another book on Zhuangzi!"As it turns out, Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, edited by Roger T. Ames, was found to be (...) not just "another book on Zhuangzi" but, instead, a wonderful collection of creative essays that genuinely wanders on Zhuangzi's vast spirit and that should appeal to a broad academic audience. Do not be deceived by the publisher's blurb on the back cover: "an excellent balance of philological and philosophical analysis." This summary of the book's contents proves to be fortunately misleading.The common thread running through this book is that it is dedicated to Yang Yu-wei, who taught many of the contributors while they were graduate students at Taiwan Normal University. Randall P. Peerenboom hilariously describes his first encounter with Professor Yang in a coda to his essay "Living Beyond the Bounds:Henry Miller and the Quest for Daoist Realization":He darted across the busy main street, dodging traffic, all the while calling out my name in a booming voice sure to attract the attention of the wandering undead and waving his arms in whirlwind fashion, managing somehow to evoke simultaneously images of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the Bodhidharma. Welcome, I thought, to the wonderful world of Oz.(p. 139) [End Page 125]This description sets the tone for the essays here, which concentrate on the Zhuangzi's humor, character, and personality, unafraid to stride out across the busy, one-way streets of traditional academic disciplines. While remaining rigorously within the bounds of academic probity, this volume steadfastly resists the dangerous encroachment of desiccating intellectualism upon the wit, intelligence, and charm of one of the world's greatest works of literature.All of the essays "live beyond the bounds" in some fashion or other. Chris Jochim's "Just Say No to 'No Self' in Zhuangzi" reviews recent writing on self and personhood in the Zhuangzi, and includes the treatment of Zhuangzi in the theories of flow and happiness by the noted psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. Daniel Coyle's study of the zhenren (authentic person), lurks tentatively in the shadows of comparative mysticism. A comparison such as "Theocentrism aside, Zhuangzi's language is Eckhart-like in that it cancels itself out, short-circuiting the intellect so as to open one up to spontaneity and the omnipresence of Heaven" deserves greater exploration than a short essay can afford. James D. Sellmann's essay on the transformative effects of humor is briefly illuminated by a reference to Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1986),1 but this worthy literary intersection is only pursued in a footnote. The question of philosophy and literature is also raised in William Callahan's study of action and decision making in the story of Cook Ding. Callahan, again in footnotes, acknowledges the influence of Kundera, Barthes, and Derrida in his quest to understand what it means to "read" literary philosophy or philosophical literature. His essay, however, owes its chief debt to the linguistic analysis of Chad Hansen and A. C. Graham, and we can only hope that he will soon furnish us with the full fruits of his literary education.One group of essays deals with particular characters in the Zhuangzi. Kirill Ole Thompson's inventive study of fishermen in the Zhuangzi wades into the waters of Tang poetry, incorporating translations of Zhang Zhihe, Liu Zongyuan, Wang Wei, and Sikong Shu. The literary connection is only in a coda, but it is there nonetheless. A future study would perhaps do well to broaden this research to include works of art. One thinks of Wang Meng's masterpiece of around 1360, Fisherman of Huaxi or the Yuan literatus Wu Zhen's Fisherman Recluse on Lake Dongting, both in the collection of the National Palace Museum, T'aipei.2Zhuangzi's close companion, Hui Shi, is the subject of... (shrink)

Introduction -- "Mediating estrangement: a theory for diplomacy," review of International Studies (April, l987), 13, pp. 91-110 -- "Arms, hostages and the importance of shredding in earnest: reading the national security culture," Social Text (Spring, 1989), 22, pp. 79-91 -- "The (s)pace of international relations: simulation, surveillance and speed," International Studies Quarterly (September 1990), pp. 295-310 -- "Narco-terrorism at home and abroad," Radical America (December 1991), vol. 23, nos. 2-3, pp. 21-26 -- "The terrorist discourse: signs, states, and systems of (...) global political violence," World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century's End, ed. M. Klare and D. Thomas, St. Martin's Press (1991), pp. 237-265. -- "S/N: international theory, balkanisation, and the new world order," Millennium Journal for International Studies (Winter 1991), vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 485-506 -- "Cyberwar, videogames, and the Gulf War syndrome," Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Cambridge, Ma and Oxford, UK, 1992), pp. 173-202 -- "Act IV: fathers (and sons), mother courage (and her children), and the dog, the cave, and the beef," in Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations, ed. James N. Rosenau (Boulder, Co and Oxford, Uk: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 83-96 -- "The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard," in the Political Subject of Violence, ed. G.M. Dillon and David Campbell, Manchester University Press (1993), pp. 94-113 -- "The C.I.A., Hollywood, and sovereign conspiracies," Queen's Quarterly (Summer 1993), vol. 100, no. 2, pp. 329-347 -- "Great men, monumental history, and not-so-grand theory: a meta-review of Henry Kissinger's diplomacy," Forum review article, Mershon International Studies Review (april 1995), vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 173-180 -- "Post-theory: the eternal return of ethics in international relations," New Thinking in International Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry (New York: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 55-75 -- "Cyber-deterrence," Wired (September 1994), 2.09., p. 116 (plus 7 pages) -- "Global swarming, virtual security, and Bosnia," the Washington Quarterly (Summer 1996), vol. 19, n0. 3., pp. 45- 56 -- "The simulation triangle," 21c (issue 24, 1997), pp. 19-25 -- "Virtuous war and hollywood," the Nation (3 april 2000), pp. 41-44 -- "Virtuous war/virtual theory," International Affairs (fall, 2000), pp. 771-788 -- "Hedley Bull and the case for a post-classical approach," International Relations at LSE: a History of 75 Years (London: Millennium Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 61-87. "the illusion of a grand strategy, op-ed," the New york Times, may 25, 2001 -- "In terrorem: before and after 9/11," Worlds in Collision, eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 101-116 -- "The question of information technology in international relations," Millennium Journal of International Studies (vol. 32, no. 3, 2003), pp. 441-456 -- "The illusion of a grand strategy," op-ed, the New York Times, may 25, 2001. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus’s infamous An Essay on the Principle of Population was published. The publication of the Essay is best remembered for Malthus’s principle – that population multiplies geometrically as opposed to subsistence increasing arithmetically. What is not well known, however, is that Malthus’s Essay also offered a sophisticated – and heterodox – theory of mind. Despite a recent revival in Malthusian scholarship, Malthus’s theory of mind has been largely forgotten. The present study attempts to address this (...) neglected area within the literature, by evaluating Malthus’s contribution to the naturalization of the soul. I first situate Malthus’s theory of mind within the Essay’s broader naturalization project, examining Malthus’s role as naturalist; his views on humans as animals; and the Essay’s cosmology. This is followed by an exploration of the making and reception of the Essay, illustrating how readers widely interpreted Malthus’s theory of mind as a theory of naturalization. Finally, I reconstruct Malthus’s naturalized system of mind, discussing the mechanisms and dynamics involved in the operation of a materialist mind. In sum, I argue for the centrality of Malthus’s Essay in the larger naturalization movement, specifically as it pertains to the soul. (shrink)

Established religions integrate a society's everyday secular realities with humankind's numinous experience of the holy. Powerful emotions nourish the cultural expression of the archetypes propelling the “ritual dances” of art, sport, and technocracy. During sacred moments such as mother‐infant or adult bonding, neuroendocrine triggers activate lifelong ties. The cultural canon of the left cortex contrasts with the intuitive right. Brainstem “switches” alternate the left's cool, extraverted, sympathetic drive for control with the right's “warm” attachment behavior and dreaming sleep. Psychic trauma (...) damages flexibility with resultant alexithymic blindness to emotions and archetypes. Substance abuse and narcissistic overemphasis on control ensue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 361-363 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing, by Alfred I. Tauber; xi & 317 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, $40.00. Among the marvelous qualities of Thoreau's writing is its vivid concreteness and immediacy. As befits one who spent his life seeing for (...) himself, Thoreau shares a vision of a cosmos whose significance is there to be discovered in the things themselves, if only one cultivates the desire, faith, and discipline required for seeing to the bottom of things. An ironic and happy consequence of Thoreau caring more for the company of nature than for that of his fellow man is that it ultimately made him a finer, more engaging writer with a large audience. Whereas Thoreau might have lost himself and his subject-matter (not to mention the better part of his audience) amidst the twists and turns of Kant's or Fichte's conceptual plumbing, he came to his senses instead--and avoided their abstractions and the intellectual fuss they generate. Imagine how tedious and stale his reflections on the supposed bottomlessness of Walden pond would be if he had framed them explicitly in the terms of intellectual debates revolving around skepticism and realism, phenomena and noumena, and their like. It belongs to Thoreau's enduring genius and charm that he avoided such trappings. One can rely on him for a philosophically inflected appreciation of the realms of nature and spirit, while Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche are more reliable for philosophically incisive articulations of the first principles governing these realms.Inevitably, scholarly books like Alfred Tauber's Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing will not have the same fresh, original spirit as do their subjects. But though a scholar addresses someone's views rather than the things themselves, one nonetheless chooses whether to develop one's subject's views primarily in light of (what the scholar understands to be) the things themselves, or whether to focus on how the subject's views relate to the views of others. By claiming his book is philosophical, Tauber in effect claims that it is of the former sort, but in fact it is of the latter sort. As such, readers interested in Thoreau's Zeitgeist and contemporary influences, in past and recent assessments of his thought, as well as in some discussion of its place in contemporary intellectual currents will find Tauber's book timely and valuable. For example, prior to articulating his own view of Thoreau's relation to the science of his day, Tauber gives the reader a primer on the history of positivism. Similarly, in the course of assessing how Thoreau viewed the relation of self and nature, Tauber leads the reader through summary appraisals of (and here I give only a sampling) some relevant swatches of Kant, Fichte, and Barthes's thought. And this is not the half of it. Tauber also weaves into his argument reflections on Augustine's discussion of time in the Confessions, themes from Polanyi's Personal Knowledge and James's Principles of Psychology, as well as Goethe's interpretation of what should constitute scientific activity. So Tauber's [End Page 361] book addresses itself to Romanticism, Transcendentalism, positivism, environmentalism, postmodernism, mysticism, idealism, solipsism, and the like. Though eclectic in their material, his discussions are grounded in copious references to and an interpretation of Thoreau's own words. (One pleasure of the book for this reviewer was the opportunity to become acquainted with more of Thoreau's journal entries.) Yet the variety of the book's sources and themes contribute to some repetition as well as diffuseness in the main arguments.Tauber sees his book as "structuring [Thoreau's] project on a philosophical edifice" and thereby making possible "critical insights into certain quandaries that reach into the very mainstream of contemporary science studies" (p. ix). He argues that his approach is novel (Tauber's own background is the history and philosophy of science) because most... (shrink)

INTRODUCTION. THE longer of the works that follow was left by its author almost finished, and, as far as it goes, in completed form, — the proofs having ...

This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family.

Jacques Barzun's account of William James is a rich-textured and wide-ranging combination of homage, exegesis and personal reflections. In many places it is more Barzun than James; in some it is difficult to tell them apart. Barzun's book is in effect a love offering to a revered master of philosophy, psychology and human relations. He quotes Whitehead's characterization of James as "an adorable genius"; John Jay Chapman's judgment that "I cannot believe that anyone ever met James (...) without feeling that James was a better man than himself"; Santayana's "He was so extremely natural that there was no knowing what his nature was, or what to expect next"; Henry James's description of his brother as "a creature who speaks another language from the rest of mankind, and who would lend charm to a treadmill"; and Charles Peirce's encomium: "Who could be of a nature so different from his than I? He so concrete, so living; I a mere table of contents, so abstract.... Yet in all my life I found scarce a soul who seemed to comprehend naturally... the main spring of my life better than he did. He was even greater in the practice than in the theory of psychology." Barzun tells us that Peirce, jesting in earnest, changed his middle name from Sanders to Santiago in recognition of James's tireless efforts on his behalf over half a lifetime. (shrink)

In working his way through his complex conception of the relation of fiction and reality, [Henry] James thus found the unconscious moral dimension inextricably embedded within "realism" itself. In following the threads of realism back to consciousness itself, James invariably found there intertwined with its roots those aspects and elements that other theorists kept carefully separate. By exploring experience to its source, he found imagination. By following objective life from "out there" to conception, he found individual vision. (...) By following the seeming oneness of the passing show back to perception, he found infinite variation and multiplicity. By following the uncolored flux and flow of events to their embodiment in the fictional medium, he found coloration of personality. And by following the "felt life" back to the artist's "prime sensibility", James found there the "moral sense" and the "enveloping air of the artist's humanity"—that which gives "the last touch to the worth of a work." James E. Miller, Jr., professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass; Walt Whitman; F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique; J.D. Salinger; Theory of Fiction: Henry James; and numerous articles on American literature and education. He contributed "Catcher In and Out of History" to Critical Inquiry, Spring 1977. (shrink)

Amid undulating conceptions of the role and prowess of federalism emerges its central constitutional role: protecting American liberties against unwarranted governmental intrusions. To the extent that federalism is used as a guise for withdrawing fundamental rights to abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, individual rights are sacrificed in contravention of constitutional structural norms.

Modal ontological arguments argue from the possible existence of a perfect being to the actual (necessary) existence of a perfect being. But modal ontological arguments have a problem of symmetry; they can be run in both directions. Reverse ontological arguments argue from the possible nonexistence of a perfect being to the actual (necessary) nonexistence of a perfect being. Some familiar points about the necessary a posteriori, however, show that the symmetry can be broken in favour of the ontological argument.

While naturalistic theories have come to dominate the philosophical landscape, there is still little consensus on what “naturalism” means. I trace the origins of contemporary naturalism to a view, called the “fundamental naturalistic impulse,” that originates in Quine’s turn against Carnap and which I take to be necessary for naturalism. In light of this impulse, some “substantively naturalistic” theories are examined: a weak version of non-supernaturalism, Railton’s a posteriori reduction of moral terms, and “Canberra plan” conceptual analyses of moral property (...) terms. I suggest that if we take the fundamental naturalistic impulse seriously, then there is no need to differentiate substantive versions of naturalism over and above methodological versions. Substantive thesis in ontology or semantics can be had on account of one’s methodological commitments. This not only cuts against the distinction between methodological and substantive naturalisms, but also demonstrates just how far method can reach. (shrink)

In another tumultuous term of the United States Supreme Court in 2022-2023 a series of critical cases implicate instant and forthcoming changes in multiple fronts that collectively shift the national public health law and policy environment.

This article uses behavioral theories to develop an ethical decision-making model that describes how psychological factors affect the development of unethical intentions to commit fraud. We evaluate the effects of the dark triad of personality traits on fraud intentions and behaviors. We use a combination of survey results, an experiment, and structural equation modeling to empirically test our model. The theoretical insights demonstrate that psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism affect different parts of the unethical decision-making process. Narcissism motivates individuals to act (...) unethically for their personal benefit and changes their perceptions of their abilities to successfully commit fraud. Machiavellianism motivates individuals not only to act unethically, but also alters perceptions about the opportunities that exist to deceive others. Psychopathy has a prominent effect on how individuals rationalize their fraudulent behaviors. Accordingly, we find that the dark triad elements act in concert as powerful psychological antecedents to fraud behaviors. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism makes the case that the conjunction of evolutionary theory and naturalism cannot be rationally believed, as, if both evolutionary theory and naturalism were true, it would be highly unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable. I present Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism and survey a theory of meaning espoused by Robert Brandom, known as semantic inferentialism. I argue that if one accepts semantic inferentialism, as it is developed by Brandom, then Plantinga's motivation for the (...) evolutionary argument against naturalism is undermined. (shrink)

The concept of religion necessarily splits into two categories, the substantive principles that are polarized about the idea of the revered object, and the manner of' applying them in the private behavior of the worshiper or in the public institutions of the state. Theory and practice are not conflicting terms. Philosophy, however, has its roots in principles and hesitates to shape the external forms in which its counsels may be expressed. Therefore the studies here are confined to the didactic issues (...) at stake, and religion is not defined except as the thinker defines it himself. The philosophers appearing in this book are: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Leibniz, Spinoza, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte--ten thinkers of the western world, from many ages and diverse stocks, who offer us their beliefs and conclusions. Though many distinguished names could be added to this list, the philosophies here expounded will serve to reflect the unflagging interest of humanity in this subject. (shrink)

Despite its intrinsic plausibility, the sensitivity principle has remained deeply unpopular on the grounds that it violates an even more plausible closure principle. Here we show that sensitivity does not, in general, violate closure. Sensitivity only violates closure when combined with further auxiliary premises—regarding which of an agent’s commitments constitute that agent’s beliefs—which are optional for the sensitivity theorist.

Victorian Critics of Democracy was first published in 1938. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.