_The Child That Haunts Us_ focuses on the symbolic use of the child archetype through the exploration of miniature characters from the realms of children’s literature. Jung argued that the child archetype should never be mistaken for the ‘real’ child. In this book Susan Hancock considers how the child is portrayed in literature and fairytale and explores the suggestion from Jung and Bachelard that the symbolic resonance of the miniature is inversely proportionate to its size. We encounter many (...) instances where the miniature characters are a visibly vulnerable ‘other’, yet often these occur in association with images of the supernatural, as the desired or feared object of adult imagination. In _The Child That Haunts Us_ it is emphasised that the treatment by any society, past or present, of its smallest and most vulnerable members is truly revealing of the values it really holds. This original and sensitive exploration will be of particular interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics engaged in Jungian studies, children’s literature, childhood studies and those with an interest in socio-cultural constructions of childhood. (shrink)

Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of "time and memory", "repeating patterns", "identity formation", "morality", "labor", "playfulness and adventure", "power and subversion", "sound", "emotions", "coping with contingency", "home and unhomeliness", as well as "nature and environment", the book engages with a (...) broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts. (shrink)

The notion of the supernaturality of an event may be understood in various ways. Most frequently ‘supernatural’ means ‘separated from nature’, i.e. different from nature. Thus, what is meant here is the difference in ontological character. The definitions of miracle, present in literature, emphasize the fact that we may talk about a miracle only when the phenomenon takes place beyond the natural order or stands in opposition to it. The description of a miracle as a ‘supernatural event’ (...) contains in itself the reference to that which is natural. The supernaturality of an event means that it surpasses (transcends) naturality. Additionally, this transcendence contains a kind of opposition to that which is natural. However, the miracle as a supernatural event takes place within the scope of that which is natural, although it takes place in a different way from natural events. It seems that this supernaturality may involve two things: (1) the course of the miraculous event; (2) the cause of the miraculous event. We should consider each of them separately and specify what we understand by the supernatural course of the event and by the supernatural cause of the event. If we could prove that we can talk about supernatural events at least in one of the two signaled aspects of supernaturality, then we would be able to define the miraculous event as a supernatural one. The analyses proposed in the paper allow us to formulate the following statement concerning the miraculous event, which is, to a great extent, a critical correction of the traditional way of understanding it: the miracle may be correctly understood as a supernatural event, only when this supernaturality concerns the personal cause of the event and not its course. (shrink)

One challenge for cognitive, evolutionary and anthropological studies of religion is to offer descriptions and explanatory models of the morphology and functions of supernatural dreaming, and of the religiosity, use of experience, and cultural transmission that are associated with these representations. The anthropological and religious studies literature demonstrates that dreaming, dream experience and narrative are connected with religious ideas and practices in traditional societies. Scholars have even proposed that dreaming is a primary source of religious beliefs and practice. (...) Using Barrett’s coding system, we measured a high frequency of minimally counterintuitive dream content among Hindu Nepalese, and we aim to quantify the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported likelihood to communicate dreams in general and to religious experts, the relation between counterintuitive imagery and reported religiosity, and the proclivity to communicate SA dreams among those who are more or less religious. These aims will then be related to the broader topic of possible explanatory value of DPSR theory, or versions thereof, by framing the issue at the level of cultural transmission, religiosity and credibility of religious dream representations in relation to MCI theory. The article mainly draws upon data from ethnographic research among Hindu Nepalese. (shrink)

We evaluate the literature on the memorability of supernatural concepts, itself part of a growing body of work in the emerging cognitive science of religion. Specifically, we focus on Boyer’s Minimally Counterintuitive hypothesis according to which supernatural concepts tap a cognitively privileged memory-enhancing mechanism linked to violations of default intuitive inferences. Our assessment reveals that the literature on the MCI hypothesis is mired in empirical contradictions and methodological shortcomings which makes it difficult to assess the validity (...) of competing theoretical models, including the MCI hypothesis itself. In light of this fractured picture, we make the case for an account of the MCI effect which dispenses with a memory mechanism specific to supernatural concepts. This account has several desirable properties. First, it preserves Boyer’s pioneering insights regarding the ontological status of supernatural concepts and the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to their cultural prevalence. Second, our account is based on independently-motivated mechanisms that are well-established in the literature. Third, this account offers a principled resolution of the tension in the extant literature between studies that do replicate the MCI effect and those that seemingly fail to do so. Finally, because the proposed mechanisms are not specific to supernatural concepts, the scope of the MCI effect may be extended to account for a broader range of highly transmissible concepts than those it was originally intended to explain. We conclude with a set of theoretical and methodological prescriptions designed to guide future research on the memorability of supernatural concepts. (shrink)

For years Supernatural has gained the status of a cult series as well as one of the most passionate and devoted fandoms that has ever emerged. Even though the main concept of the series indicates that Supernatural should appeal predominantly to young male viewers, in fact, the fandom is dominated by young women who are the target audience of the CW network. My research is couched in fan studies and audience studies methodological perspectives as it is impossible to (...) understand the phenomenon of Supernatural without referring to its fandom and fan practices. However, it focuses on the series’ structure in order to explain how this structure enables Supernatural’s viewers to challenge and revise prevailing gender roles. Supernatural combines elements of divergent TV genres, traditionally associated with either male or female audiences. It opens up to gender hybridity through genre hybridity: by interweaving melodrama with horror and other “masculine” genres the show provides a fascinating example of Gothic television which questions any simplistic gender identifications. (shrink)

In the domestic literature, the beginnings of comparative ideas about supernatural belong to the writing of Kievan Rus. The most meaningful such representation is presented by "The Word of St. Gregory, reproduced in the interpretation of how the first pagans, that is, the pagans, worshiped the idols and laid them down, as they now do." The basis of this monument of the Kyivan culture of the 12th century, also known as the "Word of the Idols," was the sermon (...) of the prominent patriarch Gregory the Theologian on the Epiphany, in which he reacted negatively to ancient paganism. But "The Word," as Y. Anichkov noted, is not a preaching, nor a translation of the thoughts of Gregory the Theologian, but an attempt to study Old Believers: it gives an interpretation of the work of the Byzantine theologian "in the interpretation" of the local paganism. (shrink)

An appeal to the inexplicable has always been a favourite tactic of the Supernaturalist; and even today those Supernaturalists that remain seem to derive some comfort from it. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, the orthodox Protestant apologetic in this country laid great stress on the ‘inexplicable’ events allegedly associated with Christ's life as anthenticating the truths of revelation. A more general thesis has been put forward as often, and even more often assumed: that the occurrence of inexplicable (...) events demonstrates the reality of a ‘spiritual’ realm. And in current literature we can find it claimed that the hegemony of science or the tenability of materialism is threatened by those inexplicabilities which are now known as the phenomena of ESP. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to identify early and recent Pentecostal studies in the West and to highlight the main difference between them. Today there are more than 250 million Pentecostals in the world, and together with the charismatic movement there are more than 500 million. Having begun to spread in the 20th century, the movement claims to be the fastest growing religious phenomenon in human history. In attempts to interpret the phenomenon of the movement's growth, there have been (...) several gradually emerging approaches: explaining the origin of the movement as supernaturally "coming from heaven"; searching for the origins of Pentecostalism in other Christian movements; presenting the emergence of the movement as the result of social and psychological factors such as poverty, marginalization, and the desire to escape from modern society; and the multicultural approach. The paper analyzes the works of Western historians and theologians of Pentecostalism since the second half of the 20th century. The result shows a turning point between early and late studies, namely that late studies aim to revise the history and include participants in the movement around the world, not just in North America, explore the contribution to the development of the movement of local ministers who have long remained in the shadow of Western missionaries, emphasize the diversity of ideologies and social influences that have shaped the movement. It also highlights three major contemporary areas of research: historical, characterized by studies of Pentecostalism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; theological, focusing on the development and shaping of theoretical theology as a result of the movement's institutionalization; and religious studies, practiced primarily from the perspective of the sociology of religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005) 1-23 [Access article in PDF] Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach Brian Boyd University of Auckland Many now feel that the "theory" that has dominated academic literary studies over the last thirty years or so is dead, and that it is time for a return to texts.1 But many more outside literary studies—in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, and (...) religion—have recently come to recognize that the deep past that shaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past. Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than a solely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinism nor limitation to the status quo, I want to argue for a bio-cultural or evolutionary approach to literature, first in very general terms, and then through a few aspects of a single familiar example, Hamlet.2 Such an approach, I suggest, can offer both a more comprehensive theory of literature and a closer investigation of literary texts. I Traditional views of literature tended to see it as reflecting nature, especially human nature, all the way from Plato's discomfort with, or Aristotle's admiration for, mimesis to Shakespeare's or Stendhal's images of art as holding the mirror up to nature. Common-sense traditional views of art and literature have easily shaded into transcendental views, widespread because religious beliefs have been so pervasive and because both artists and their patrons in state or church benefit by nurturing a sense of awe at art's putatively divine origins and power.In the twentieth century, first in sociology, anthropology, and even [End Page 1] psychology, then by the 1960s in the combination of these with Saussurean linguistics that produced structuralism and its aftershocks, and therefore impacted on literature, there has been a rejection of human nature as a given and a stress on human nature as the product only of culture and convention. "Theory," or what the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism more pointedly calls cultural critique, rightly critiques traditional common-sense and transcendental views of art, pointing out that the nature, human nature, or supernature that art or literature was supposed to reflect was merely what was assumed of these things from within a local cultural perspective.3 Roland Barthes, for example, criticized "the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature."4 Modern Theory also rejects the individual as another bourgeois or capitalist or Western notion, as when Fredric Jameson echoed Barthes's Death of the Author by announcing the Death of the Subject.5 Criticism since the 1960s "has denied, on theoretical grounds, the relevance of the single historically definable author."6However, as many have lately realized, there are problematic ethical consequences of both the denial of human nature and the denial of the individual. After such denials, on what basis do we then claim equal rights for all humans, and on what basis do we assign responsibility for particular actions?7 If there is no "single historically definable author," does that mean that someone penning a racist screed cannot be held accountable?A critique of unquestioned Western assumptions about human nature was needed, but the post-1960s critique was shortsighted: it has not looked nearly far enough. While structuralism and its more or less rebellious offspring were continuing the lineage of early twentieth-century social sciences, the natural sciences were moving in the opposite direction, towards the first comprehensive scientific attempt to understand human nature in the context of evolution and human, animal, and artificial cognition and behavior.In the humanities there has of late been widespread skepticism about science. Some postmodernists have what they deem "a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims." But, as Daniel Dennett comments, "this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naïveté, made possible only by... ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power."8 Science does not generate only true answers: ideas proposed within it can of... (shrink)

Staying for an answer : the untidy process of groping for truth -- The same, only different -- The unity of truth and the plurality of truths -- Coherence, consistency, cogency, congruity, cohesiveness, &c. : remain calm! don't go overboard! -- Not cynicism, but synechism : lessons from classical pragmatism -- Science, economics, "vision" -- The integrity of science : what it means, why it matters -- Scientific secrecy and "spin" : the sad, sleazy story of the trials of remune (...) -- Truth and justice, inquiry and advocacy, science and law -- Trial and error : the Supreme Court's philosophy of science -- An epistemologist among the epidemiologists -- Fallibilism and faith, naturalism and the supernatural, science and religion -- The ideal of intellectual integrity, in life and literature -- After my own heart : Dorothy Sayers's feminism -- Worthwhile lives -- Why I am not an oxymoron -- Formal philosophy? : a plea for pluralism. (shrink)

The uncanny is the weird, the strange, the mysterious, a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Even Freud, patron of the uncanny, had trouble defining it. Yet the uncanny is everywhere in contemporary culture. In this elegant book, Nicholas Royle takes the reader across literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as he marks the trace of the uncanny in the modern world. Not an introduction in the usual sense, Nicholas Royle's book is a geography of the uncanny as it (...) manifests itself - and disturbs our thinking - in a range of disciplines. (shrink)

The "Kinsey Report" suggests the existence of such a mentality. Of 142 women with much homosexual experience, 70 percent reported no regrets. This consciousness has manifested itself in literature in two ways. First, in lesbian romanticism: fusions of life and death, happiness and woe, natural imagery and supernatural strivings, neoclassical paganism with a ritualistic cult of Sappho, and modern beliefs in evolutionary progress with a cult of the rebel. At its worst an inadvertent parody of fin de siecle (...) decadence, at its best lesbian romanticism ruthlessly rejects a stifling dominant culture and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a European civilization of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous. Woolf's Orlando is its most elegant and inventive text, but its symbol is probably the career of Natalie Barney, the cosmopolitan American who was the prototype of Valerie Seymour.23· 23. See Rubin, introduction to Vivien's A Woman Appeared to Me, and George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney .Catherine R. Stimpson, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the former editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The author of both critical essays and fiction, she recently co-edited, with Ethel Spector Person, Women, Sex and Sexuality. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into the ground of moral objectivity. My preliminary claim is that in order to be objective, moral properties must be real properties. The following question is, what kind of properties are moral properties? A number of recent philosophers have argued that moral properties are natural properties. ''Natural" in this context means " open to investigation and discovery by the senses or by empirical science." The natural properties proposed in the recent literature are connected to (...) the property of human well-being. The main project of my dissertation is to show that natural properties are not adequate as the foundation for moral objectivity, because there is no necessary connection between any natural properties and moral properties. Another answer to the question of what kind of properties moral properties are is that they are supernatural properties. "Supernatural" in this context means "not open to investigation and discovery by the senses, or by empirical science." It is my argument that a singular supernatural being who created the world and has particular ideas about what sorts of people/actions/states of affairs are good and bad or right and wrong is the only sufficient ground for moral objectivity. Given such a being, moral properties will be real and objective. They will also be moral properties, since the originator of these properties confers value on them. Using and expanding on work in Divine Command Theory, especially that of Robert M. Adams, my original contribution to this discussion is to propose that moral properties are relational properties. The relationship is between persons, actions, states of affairs, etc., in the physical world, and the ideas, desires, character, or commands of the supernatural being. An important limitation of my dissertation project is that I do not consider any practical issues such as "How do we know whether God exists?", "How would God communicate the content of morality to us?", or "What is God like?" These are important and worthwhile questions, but are not a part of my present investigation. (shrink)

This study investigates contemporary Mayan oral stories through the lens of Julian Jaynes's theory on the origin of consciousness, aiming to identify a potential connection between the literary elements of these narratives and traits of pre‐consciousness outlined by Jaynes. Jaynes's neuropsychological thesis argues that human consciousness emerged around 3000 years ago after a period of “bicameral mind,” characterized by auditory “hallucinations” that guided non‐habitual behavior. He claims that remnants of bicameral mentality linger to this day in all cultures. While his (...) theoretical framework has been applied to cultures in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, this research uniquely surveys early Mayan texts and focuses on 78 oral narratives from Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. Our findings reveal traces of bicamerality, evident in the gradual fading of inner voices replaced by divination, anomalous mental states, encounters with the supernatural, and spiritual possession. Contrary to pathologizing these phenomena, the narratives often present them as abilities the Maya may not have felt culturally compelled to suppress to the extent presumed in other societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard LOVE DELIGHTS IN PRAISES: A READING OF THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Valentine and Proteus have been friends since their earliest childhood in Verona, and their two fathers want to send them to Milan for their education. Because of his love for a girl named Julia, Proteus refuses to leave Verona; Valentine goes to Milan alone. In spite ofJulia, however, Proteus misses Valentine greatly and, after a (...) while, he, too, goes to Milan. The two friends are reunited in the ducal palace; the duke's daughter, Silvia, is present and Valentine briefly introduces Proteus. After she departs, Valentine announces that he loves her and his hyperbolical passion irritates Proteus. Once alone, however, Proteus has his own announcement to make: he no longer loves Julia; he, too, has fallen in love with Silvia: Even as one heat another heat expels, Or as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite forgotten.1 If there ever was a "love at first sight," this must be it, we think, but Proteus is not so sure: in three crucial lines, he suggests a different explanation: Is it mine eye, or Valentinus' praise, Her true perfection or my false transgression, That makes me reasonless, to reason thus? (Il.iv. 196-98) 231 232Philosophy and Literature The entire comedy massively confirms the crucial role of Valentine in the genesis of Proteus's sudden passion for Silvia. According to our romantic and individualistic ideology, a borrowed sentiment such as this one is not genuine enough to be really intense. This is not true in Shakespeare; Proteus's desire is so furious that he would actually rape Silvia if Valentine did not rescue her in extremis. When Shakespeare wrote his plays, the second-hand desire he portrays had no name, no official existence, but this is no longer true. We call it mimetic or mediated desire. Valentine is the model or mediator of this desire. Proteus is its mediated subject and Silvia is their common object. Mimetic desire can strike with the speed of lightning because it does not really depend upon the visual impact made by the object; it only seems to. Proteus desires Silvia not because their brief encounter made a decisive impression on him but because he is predisposed in favor of whatever Valentine desires. Mimetic desire is not some modern idea that I would force upon an unwilling writer; it is Shakespeare's own idea and we can see this again in Proteus's soliloquy, which keeps minimizing the role of perception in the genesis of his desire for Silvia: She is fair; and so is Julia that I love, That I did love,... (Il.iv. 199-200) IfSilvia is no more desirable objectively thanJulia, her only advantage is that Valentine already desires her. Shakespeare undermines the predominance of sight in the expression love at first sight. In A Midsummer Night's Dream as well, the two girls are said to be equally beautiful, also for the purpose of reinforcing the case for mimetic desire. II The dramatic context of this first mimetic desire, and of many others in Shakespeare, is the close and ancient friendship of the two protagonists. When Proteus is about to arrive in Milan, Valentine describes this friendship to Silvia and her father: I knew him as myself; for from our infancy We have convers'd and spent our hours together. (II.iv.62-63) René Girard233 When two young men grow up together, they learn the same lessons, they read the same books, they play the same games, and they agree on just about everything. They also tend to desire the same objects. This perpetual convergence is not incidental but essential to the friendship ; it occurs so regularly and inevitably that it seems preordained by some supernatural fate; it really depends on a mutual imitation so spontaneous and constant that it remains unconscious. When we think of imitation, we imagine two people copying each other's manners, habits, accents, and even their likes and dislikes in the still childish and innocent manner of two childish friends. We never think of what Proteus's desire for... (shrink)

Examines the theme of haunting in recent U.S. and postcolonial literature as a response to the dynamics of transnational literary circulation.

This study discusses copious early Arab literature of "wonders and marvels". The authors of such books found their materials in the Muslim religion, in the ancient Arab heritage and in strange facts about other cultures. The study examines the themes addressed by these works, including magic, fantasy, strange customs, curiosities, humor, the absurd, mockery, nightly chats, puzzles, riddles, rebuke, satire, defamation, battles, animals, angels, demons, etc. Composers of "wonders and marvels" books chose rhyming names for their works in order (...) to attract the reader. The study found that the popularity of such books was due to the fact that certain phenomena and customs were perceived as incomprehensible by Arabs, who therefore sought transcendental or supernatural explanations, giving free rein to their imagination. Some books of this genre were apt to arouse fear in the reader and the oft-repeated stories in them were eventually believed by many and became means for realizing Arabs' desires and dreams. The study found that at first such books were perceived with scorn, as collections of superstitions and myths, and were therefore popular mainly among the lower classes. Because the genre did not attract the interest of the more educated, its scholarly study was neglected for a long time. (shrink)

Within the context of sports, the term 'miracle' is regularly associated with game-winning shots, holes-in-one, completed Hail Marys and other improbable outcomes. These conceptions of miracles largely focus on the success of specific sport actions at specific times when such success is deemed highly improbable. While prominent in the popular sports literature, most scholars agree that this perspective on miracles is very simple and highly unsophisticated. Events portrayed as simply 'beating the odds' would represent pale versions of miracles at (...) best. Some conceptions of miracles, however, include characteristics that reach beyond improbable outcomes. From more sophisticated perspectives, miracles are often viewed as divine action guiding the ordinary course of human experience. To be considered 'miraculous', improbable outcomes in sport would need to be perceived as interactions between the supernatural (God or other divine entity) and the natural (physical world). In addition, miraculous occurrences would have to be a part of a divine master-plan. Scholars argue that without such connections, miracles would yield no direction or meaning to the evolving world. The differences between these two perceptions raises several questions: Why do some view these extraordinary athletic performances from spiritually sophisticated perspectives while others have not the 'ears to hear' or the 'eyes to see' the divine possibilities in these experiences? Why are common uses and perceptions of miracles in sport simplistic and thin? What is a sophisticated view of miracles? What human abilities and processes are needed for one to achieve a sophisticated perspective? And, finally, what is the purpose of the true or sophisticated miracle in sport? In this paper, I will examine the notion of the miracle in sport. At its core, this paper describes how an athlete intellectually and spiritually moves from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated conception of a miracle. Through the writings of James, Lewis, Polanyi and others, I will show how human intellectual operations allow one to have 'ears to hear' and 'eyes to see' the spiritually miraculous in sport. I will begin by presenting an unsophisticated version of miracles in sport. After critically examining several types of miracles, I will present a more sophisticated definition. I will then explore the human processes necessary to view miraculous experiences in sport as interactions between the natural and the supernatural rather than interpreting these experiences simply as improbable outcomes. Finally, I will show how miracles present opportunities for spiritual conversion and have a use and place in the divine's master plan. (shrink)

The first scene-by-scene philosophical study of any Shakespeare play, this book demonstrates why Shakespeare's poetic writings still arouse and sustain serious inquiry and reflection. Using a combination of philosophical rigor, political insight, and textual thoroughness, Jan H. Blits delineates the competing forms of virtue within Macbeth--the courageous public virtue of warriors like Macbeth and the internal Christian virtue evoked by Duncan. This new interpretation of Macbeth explains crucial paradoxes overlooked by previous scholars and will serve as a model for future (...) scholarship in the field. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to approach the long literary tradition of catastrophic or apocalyptic narratives in relation to natural disasters and to explore examples of ecological threats to human species in contemporary Anglophone literature. By using the concept of ecophobia – a widespread irrational fear for nature – the author analyses novels by George R. Stewart ( Storm and Earth Abides ) and by Margaret Atwood ( Oryx and Crake ). Among the shared traits of these novels, (...) the author highlights the uncertain relationship with supernatural entities or divinities, the presence of surviving characters acting like last men of a disappearing human civilization, and the role of the humanities in the survival of the human species. (shrink)

The popular image of Japanese society is a steroetypical one - that of a people characterised by a coherent set of thought and behaviour patterns, applying to all Japanese and transcending time. Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto found this image quite incongruous during their research for this book in Japan. They ask whether this steroetype of the Japanese is not only generated by foreigners but by the Japanese themselves. This is likely to be a controversial book as it does not (...) contribute to the continuing mythologising of Japan and the Japanese. The book examines contemporary images of Japanese society by surveying an extensive sample of popular and academic literature on Japan. After tracing the development of "holistic" theories about the Japanese, commonly referred to as the "group model", attention is focused on the evaluation of that image. Empirical evidence contrary to this model is discussed and methodological lacunae are cited. A "sociology of Japanology" is also presented. In pursuit of other visions of Japanese society, the authors argue that certain aspects of Japanese behaviour can be explained by considering Japanese society as the exact inverse of the portayal provided by the group model. The authors also present a multi-dimensional model of social stratification, arguing that much of the variation in Japanese behaviour can be understood within the framework as having universal equivalence. (shrink)

Two of the tales mentioned in the title are in many ways typical of the great collections of stories to which they belong. What makes them conspicuous is no doubt the intensity of the erotic desire presented as the ultimate law which justifies even the most outrageous actions. The cult of eroticism is combined there with a cult of youth, which means disaster for the protagonists, who try to combine eroticism with advanced age. And yet the stories in question have (...) roots in a very different tradition in which overt eroticism is punished and can only reassert itself in a chastened form, its transformation being due to sacrifices made by the lover to become reunited with the object of his love. A medieval example of the latter tradition is here the Middle English romance, Sir Orfeo. All of the three narratives are conspicuously connected by the motif of the enchanted tree. The Middle Ages are associated with a tendency to moralize ancient literature, the most obvious example of which is the French anonymous work Ovide moralisé, and its Latin version Ovidius Moralizatus by Pierre Bersuire. In the case of The Merchant’s Tale and The Tale of the Enchanted Pear-Tree, we seem to meet with the opposite process, that is with a medieval demoralization of an essentially didactic tradition. The present article deals with the problem of how this transformation could happen and the extent of the resulting un-morality. Some use has also been made of the possible biblical parallels with the tales in question. (shrink)

The chapter is a comparison of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of artistic value in literature, with particular focus of the appropriate role of the divine and supernatural. The issue is explored through the lens of Neil Gaiman's popular fantasy novel, American Gods. It is argued that Aristotle’s less restrictive model of literary value better allows literature to benefit us as human beings. In particular, Aristotle's appreciation of the need for dark themes and counter-factual portrayals of the universe (...) allows for much richer art. The discussion of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of art is demonstrated to be relevant to modern artistic debate though consideration of how their views apply to modern fantasy literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cognitive Error and Contemplative Practices:The Cultivation of Discernment in Mind and HeartWesley J. WildmanBrains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors can be diagnosed (...) and corrected when they occur. This will involve noticing that error diagnosis and correction is a process that certain social groups have a vested interest in resisting or neglecting, in some respects, while the very same social groups may furnish resources that support the detection of cognitive errors, in other respects.This presents a moral quandary for both secular and religious groups. Should we educate children to be fully aware of their cognitive vulnerability to advertising, thereby learning how to resist and eventually become immune to one of the fundamental power sources of modern market economies? Should religious groups explain to young people their cognitive tendencies to posit the action of supernatural beings whether or not any such action exists, even though this may disrupt the power of religious groups to forge bracing social togetherness that supports psychologically useful coping skills? While I do not seek to answer such complex moral questions in this paper, I do argue that knowledge of cognitive biases and the resulting tendencies to cognitive error, self-defeating behaviors, and self-deception should be made available to those individuals and groups who are interested in promoting a high degree of critical self-awareness in the analysis of beliefs and behaviors in both secular and religious contexts.The term "error" is a potentially problematic one in that it misleadingly suggests that there might be a uniquely correct way in which cognition should work. I do not wish to suggest such a binary opposition. After all, biases exist in the human cognitive system either because they have been selected in the evolutionary process for their survival benefits or because they are side effects of other traits selected for their usefulness. My concern is with the wondrous human discovery that we can analyze [End Page 61] our behaviors and beliefs with such precision that we can sometimes detect when our cognitive biases produce mistaken beliefs and self-defeating behaviors. This forms the basis for my contention that cognition can often work better than it does—more accurately, less self-destructively—when tendencies to cognitive error are diagnosed, corrected, and perhaps even systematically resisted.The profound irony here is that the very same social groups (secular and religious) with an obvious vested interest in resisting such enlightenment in some respects can also promote processes of discernment and insight in other respects. Existing literature in the cognitive psychology of religion rarely bothers with such subtleties. It is common to assume that simply to notice the operation of cognitive biases in religion—say, in supporting belief in supernatural entities who providentially interact in human affairs, or in establishing and reinforcing people's willingness to defer to certain kinds of religious authority—is at the same time to establish the presence of rampant cognitive error, massive resistance to diagnosing and correcting it, and thus the infliction of pernicious cruelties on young children who have no way of escaping the resulting irrational indoctrination.This moral reflex to condemn religious groups because of their characteristic reluctance to acknowledge the role of cognitive biases in their beliefs and practices is understandable given the irrationality, ignorance, or denial that such reluctance suggests. I frankly acknowledge that I share this moral concern. But the actual complexities of religious practice demonstrate that the situation demands a subtler evaluation. Resistance to awareness of cognitive biases exists both inside and outside religious groups; economic and political practices in all eras and of all types have every bit as much to gain from neglecting to enlighten people about their cognitive operations as religious groups do—just consider the techniques employed in commercial advertising and political campaigns. Moreover, religious groups also promote methods of discernment and self-awareness that have historically been, and continue to be, the dominant method by which... (shrink)

Focusing on narratives with supernatural components, Karen J. Renner argues that the recent proliferation of stories about evil children demonstrates not a declining faith in the innocence of childhood but a desire to preserve its purity. From novels to music videos, photography to video games, the evil child haunts a range of texts and comes in a variety of forms, including changelings, ferals, and monstrous newborns. In this book, Renner illustrates how each subtype offers a different explanation for the (...) problem of the “evil” child and adapts to changing historical circumstances and ideologies. (shrink)

This article shows how eco-theology could and should be indigenised in an African context using the Copperbelt in Zambia as a case study. The ecological crisis worldwide has given rise to the call for everyone to work together to start caring about our natural environment. In theology, the response to this call received the name eco-theology. By means of a literature review, ethnographic information and governmental legislation, the article tries to illustrate how eco-theology could and should be indigenised in (...) an African context using the Copperbelt in Zambia as a case study. This article makes an attempt to contribute to the needed ecological renewal by reinterpreting two traditions that inform thinking on the Copperbelt: Christianity and African traditional religion. The supernatural belief of the Lamba people is no longer embodied in this creation, and it is not too late for the people to form any indigenous environmental protection movement to protect the sacredness of mother Earth from further contamination and exploitation by strengthening, maintaining and respecting the traditional teachings and the cultural laws. Obedience to God’s command to tend creation is a quest for continued creation by humans, so that value is added to what is already in existence. This is embodied making the place we live in more beautiful, appealing and peaceful. Fruitfulness with sustainability becomes core values for interdependence and earth keeping.Contribution: We wish to address the ecological situation of the mining industry in Zambia from a theological perspective by assessing the impact of the copper mining and processing industry on humans, their environment and nature and by showing how the traditions of African traditional religion thought can be transformed into tools to oppose this ecological disaster. (shrink)

The empirical literature seems to indicate that prehistoric humans did not believe in God or anything like God. Why is that so, if God exists? The problem is difficult because their nonbelief was natural: their evolved mind and cultural environment restricted them to concepts of highly limited supernatural agents. Why would God design their mind and place them in their environments only to hide from them? The natural nonbelief of prehistoric humans is much more surprising given theism than (...) naturalism. Thus, it constitutes strong evidence that theism is false, or so Jason Marsh (2013) has argued. The "problem of natural nonbelief" is a debunking argument that invokes the genealogy of religious belief to cast doubt upon theism. In this chapter, we put it to the test. First, we argue on empirical grounds that it is not clear that natural nonbelief was prevalent: the empirical jury is still out on what prehistoric humans believed about gods. Second, we argue that even if natural nonbelief was prevalent, it would not be very surprising given theism. We conclude that natural nonbelief presents no problem for theism. We also turn the tables and suggest that the real problem is the problem of widespread belief in a High God (common consent), which is a problem for naturalism. (shrink)

E. T. A. Hoffmann is one of the most famous representatives of early German horror literature. He has been both, inspired by its predecessors, as well as having influenced the work of many of his successors, and hence the development of the whole genre. The present article examines a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Vampirismus” from the collection of short stories “Serapions Brüder”. Emphases are, on the one hand, on the mechanisms that cause readers’ fear and uncertainty and, (...) on the other hand, the peculiarity of the vampire or Nachzehrer figure and their function in the story. Firstly, it will be shown that the vampire depicted in the work is not actually a vampire. We find here a ghoul; that is a demon from Arab culture. However, the ghoul has more to do with the monster outlined by Antoine Galland in his translation of the “One Thousand and One Nights” than with traditional folk beliefs. Secondly, the author comes to the conclusion that Hoffmann has functionalized the Horrible. This element does not work by itself, but serves the author as the background of the action. And he is using this background to let the characters reveal all their weaknesses and dark sides. The violation of the order ruling in the world as it is represented engages the reader and at the same time raises his fear. The resulting excited feelings and general alienation are further reinforced for the figure of the Nachzehrer that occurs instead of a formerly innocent, graceful girl. The emergence of the supernatural – the final confirmation of the breach of order – is responsible for the effect just described. (shrink)

In the 7th century, when Islam emerged, the Arabian peninsula was under the influence of the Sassanid empire, one of the two great world powers, culturally as well as economically/politically. Like the Sasanian/Zoroastrian belief system, the Arabs of the Ignorance period had a dualist cosmology in essence. In the world of the Arabs of Ignorance, who think of man as a being between "good" and "evil" forces, it is believed that evil forces such as "jinn and devils" can have an (...) effect on people, as well as Allah. In the period of ignorance, which is generally accepted to be understood through "idol worship", idols actually function as a form for the embodiment of these metaphysical powers. Therefore, idols themselves are not gods; Just like the manifestation of the human spirit in the body, they are worshiped because they enable metaphysical entities to "take on flesh and bones", that is, to occupy a place in the visible realm. However, in accordance with the dualist belief, the polytheists place idols around the Kaaba in the center of the city so that the angels can be incarnated, they also place idols in the wild and desolate places and build temples and altars for demonic forces. According to Ibn al-Kalbī, for example, the idol of al-ʻUzzā is a female devil and its altar is located in the Batn al-Nahle valley, 45 km northeast of Mecca. As a result, the main characteristic feature of the cosmology of the Age of Ignorance is the belief that evil metaphysical beings can affect human life as well as benevolent forces. What happens to human beings caught between these two metaphysical powers is also explained by the concept of "Dahr", which means time, which occurs as a result of the synthesis of the conflict between the two. Islam flatly denies the ability of a power other than Allah to have such an effect on existence in the universe. Polytheism, which Islam qualifies and condemns as "shirk", is essentially this dualism. In the Qurʾān, this is emphasized as " Take not (for worship) two gods: for He is just One Allah." (an-Naḥl, 16/51.). By making only the will of Allah valid in the universe, Islam also unifies the order in the physical world and the mind. Thus, an important step has been taken towards rational thinking in the universe where the rule of a single mind is valid. Even in the Qurʾān, it is emphasized that the Prophet was a "human" like other people, did not have any supernatural abilities, and did not know the "unseen", that is, events beyond what time or material means allowed. As a matter of fact, since the Prophet did not have any superhuman claims, the polytheists accuse him of "ordinariness" and claim that what he tells is only the "word of man". However, Islam does not stay here either, it declares the end of prophethood with Muhammad. According to this, it will not be possible for Allah to address another person after Muhammad as the carrier of a divine message that must be socially obeyed. From now on, human beings will walk the rest of the way on their own in a world where a single rational, consistent mind is valid. Of course, in this journey, the light of the Qur'an, the last revelation, and all the acquis of humanity up to that time will be benefited, but the guidance of a living prophet will no longer be in question. This situation, which is described as the "sealing of the prophethood" in the classical literature, represents a new stage for human beings in terms of the history of thought. However, all this rationalization fails when the parties to the conflict in the history of Islam after the death of the Prophet tend to justify their political positions with occultist arguments. Especially in the Umayyad period, political legitimacy is based on metaphysical claims rather than being taken from the society itself. According to classical sources, the expression "the shadow of God on earth" is used for the first time for Muʿāwiya. With the same method, it is possible to provide theological explanations for tragic events such as the events in Karbala. This situation leads to the reproduction of the dialectical relationship between good and evil forces, which were known in the Ignorance period and revealed the concept of Dahr, this time by attributing "evil" (shar) to Allah. Objections to all these interpretations also form the basis of the first debates about the essence of God in Islamic thought. (shrink)

This article compares and contrasts the representation of epiphany and inspired divination in Greek literature. Narrative provides a way to compare epiphanic and oracular tales, and to investigate the cognitive processes at their cores. Both oracular tales and epiphanic tales not only contain similar themes, topoi, and narrative structures, but also revolve around common problems of cognition and human knowledge of the supernatural. This suggests that oracular tales constitute a form of epiphanic tale. Cognitive analysis ultimately reveals that (...) epiphanic and oracular tales accentuate different aspects of the same challenges individuals face when trying to make sense of the supernatural. (shrink)

Men and women “possessed by unclean spirits” throng the pages of the Acta sanctorum, just as they had for centuries thronged the shrines of miracle-working saints. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, however, the literature of edification shows a sudden upsurge of interest in demoniacs. They begin to proliferate not only in saints' lives but also in the new genre of the exemplum, associated with the friars and the rise of vernacular preaching. At the same time that these (...) sources are directing heightened attention toward the possessed, the symptoms of possession itself conspicuously alter. Unlike the violent and self-destructive persons who had always qualified for saintly exorcism, the energumens of the new exemplum literature are lucid and articulate, inspiring responses more of curiosity and respect than of pity or horror. Speaking in persona diaboli, they were viewed as sources of supernatural authority, treated with circumspect awe by priests, and sometimes even allowed to preach. In their diabolically inspired, charismatic role, such demoniacs bear a startling, if superficial, resemblance to prophetic female saints, who gained their religious authority by speaking in persona Dei. (shrink)

Recent work in moral and philosophical psychology provides valuable resources for religious ethicists, and this review examines contributions by Julia Annas, Annette Baier, John Bowlin, John McDowell, and William Wainwright. This literature raises important questions about the character of human moral being as naturalistic, about whether an explicitly supernatural morality can be other than inevitably "moralistic," and about how that might be so. Nonetheless, religious ethicists should appropriate it only with care, particularly in its emphasis on naturalism, and (...) the partiality of its appropriation of ancient thinkers. (shrink)

Do farmers in the southern Mexican highlands practice science? The anthropologist Roberto González argues that they do in his well‐written and solidly researched account of Zapotec farmers' cultivation of corn, sugarcane, and coffee. This book speaks to enduring questions concerning the nature of science through its focus on the often‐overlooked sophistication of traditional farming. Historians of science interested in agriculture, international development, and definitions of science more broadly will find in Zapotec Science a rich store of wide‐ranging questions and provocative (...) answers.González aims to move beyond the limitations of many sociological and anthropological studies of traditional societies. Many ignore international “cosmopolitan” influences, and most that do deal explicitly with these treat the traditional and the cosmopolitan as separate spheres. González finds no reason to treat these categories as nonoverlapping, as he documents how Zapotec farmers have experimented with and adopted techniques, implements, and crop varieties from many parts of the globe. And the flow goes both ways. Many so‐called cosmopolitan scientists are beginning to recognize the importance of traditional knowledge for solving problems in industrialized nations. But though the boundaries may be blurred, González argues that the conceptual bases of Zapotec agriculture are “culturally incommensurable with those predominating in industrialized societies” .In Chapter 1, González elaborates his position relative to other anthropological work on local science and traditional ecological knowledge and poses comparative questions about Zapotec and cosmopolitan science. Chapters 2 and 3 richly detail the daily practice of Zapotec agriculture and its environmental and geographical, cultural, and historical contexts. González emphasizes campesinos' craft, the refined skills that underlie every aspect of home, community, and agricultural life.González's research comes to the fore in the middle chapters on maize, sugarcane, and coffee cultivation. Here he clearly illustrates how Zapotec farming is founded on five fundamental values: household maintenance , mutual aid among families, personification of the earth and supernatural beings, an understanding of physical work as normal and desirable, and an emphasis on the quality of food over its quantity. For each crop he shows how present agricultural practices have emerged from an evolving balance between local crop development over hundreds or thousands of years and carefully weighed periodic opportunities to adopt new practices or plant varieties. Sugarcane cultivation, for example, illustrates how Zapotec farmers' decisions grow out of the five core values rather than a more narrow “economic rationality.” Zapotec communities do not consume cheap, white, processed sugar; rather, they produce and use an older, less processed, more expensive form called panela. Panela's persistence in their diet is due to its role in reciprocal social relationships and to Zapotecs' preference for high‐quality, good‐tasting food. The book concludes with a critique of Green Revolution development strategies and a lively discussion of the fertile borderlands between traditional and cosmopolitan knowledges.González's definition of science, closely related to Bronislaw Malinowski's, centers on practical knowledge. González argues that Zapotec farmers practiced science as they experimented with new techniques and implements from beyond Oaxaca's borders. Although traditional and cosmopolitan knowledge are conceptually distant, the author places great weight on what they share: both are systematic searches for practical knowledge. Traditional agriculture offers materials and methods that cosmopolitan scientists increasingly need.This book's strength lies, not surprisingly, near González's expertise: his careful description and analysis of Zapotec farmers' practices, logic, and values. As with all ambitious and worthwhile projects that pull together scientific enterprises that are culturally, geographically, and conceptually distant, González's book leaves questions unanswered. His characterization of cosmopolitan science is at times contradictory and often narrow. While Zapotec scientists are said to consider a variety of procedures and techniques and “adopt what seems to work according to their own categories, and reject what does not,” cosmopolitan scientists operate according to “one view, one procedure” . A more thorough characterization of cosmopolitan science would strengthen the comparisons with Zapotec farming and would complement the direct treatment that González provides for cosmopolitan science's exceptions, sustainable agriculture and alternative medicine. This would also help to clarify differences between natural scientists and development economists, whose values are often not distinguished. Furthermore, cosmopolitan science seems to dwell outside of Mexico. What would it look like to widen the lens to include the Mexican urban academic scientific community? How does this book speak to the wider literature on scientific practice that largely focuses on cosmopolitan science?Zapotec Science is an important contribution to our understanding of nonindustrialized agriculture outside of the United States. It will, I hope, prompt historians to delve into the historical relationships among people who employ agricultural knowledge toward divergent goals: scientists, farmers, and government leaders dwelling in different national and professional cultures. (shrink)

The value of this essay is not to reiterate the extant views on horror literature, but to make available for the first time to the world at large the textual foundations of considering horror literature as a genre by itself. The Gothic is a different genre altogether though most of us want to conflate and confuse between these two genres. Someday I shall write at length about the nature of the horrific. Suffice to say for now that the (...) focus is that long ago, H. P. Lovecraft in his essay mentioned within this essay distinguished between the gothic as a literary genre and horror literature as another literary genre. And Lovecraft showed us that the horror as a literary genre is by far the greater of the two genres. This essay does not get into the literary values of either the gothic or the horror novel. That has been treated in a fuller manner by this author in his PhD thesis. (shrink)

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to investigate the impact of religion on values and behaviour in Kenya.Methodology: The paper adopted a desk top research design. The design involves a literature review of existing studies relating to the research topic. Desk top research is usually considered as a low-cost technique compared to other research designs.Results: Based on the literature review, the study concluded that religion has positive impact on values and behavior. The study further concludes that a (...) belief in fearful and punishing aspects of supernatural agents is associated with honest behavior, whereas a belief in the kind, loving aspects of gods is less relevant.Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study recommended that policy makers should review policies involving religion by changing commonly held beliefs regarding the Constitution and religion. The study also recommended that religious leaders and parents take special care of the religious formation of children, especially during the transition period from childhood to adolescence, when they are most likely to lose their religious faith. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erictho and Demogorgon: Poetry against Metaphysics DAVID QUINT Epic without the gods? The Roman poet Lucan (39–65 ce) created a secular counter-epic inside classical epic, removing the genre’s usual pantheon of Olympian deities and replacing them with Fortune. His Bellum civile (titled De bello civili in manuscripts, alternately titled Pharsalia) a poem about the conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey, thereby delegitimizes the emperors who succeeded the dying Roman (...) republic, including Nero, the reigning emperor of Lucan’s day.1 They are not part of a divine plan: no such plan has ever existed. In an epic where the gods are silent or refuse to speak, Pompey’s son, Sextus, anxious to know the future, has to seek other means. In Book 6, he consults the Thessalian witch Erictho about the outcome of the approaching battle in Pharsalia. She reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier on Pompey’s republican side and makes it talk (BC 6.419–830).2 Lucan’s scene of necromancy gave birth to a major antimetaphysical strain in the European literary tradition. Among others, Dante, Cervantes, Marlowe, Spenser, Goethe, and Shelley confronted this episode of the Pharsalia and pondered its implications. Erictho’s magic is a figure for poetic making itself. It turns the supernatural into theater— the divine machinery of epic exposed as a deus ex machina— and these authors’ responses to Erictho will shift from epic into dramatic forms. In place of the gods, in place of the epic visit to the underworld, particularly in place of and in response to Aeneas’s trip to the realm of the dead arion 28.2 fall 2020 2 erictho and demogorgon in the corresponding Book 6 of the Aeneid, Lucan presents Erictho’s macabre performance: human witchcraft and intimations of an alternate, eerie numen residing in the earth, a force of nature. Subsequent readers would give this latter power a name: Demogorgon.3 Lucan links republicanism and freedom to a kind of atheism and to historical contingency. He unmasks and strips the props of religion from Caesarism and monarchy. (In vain for the poet: Lucan was forced to commit suicide in 65 ce, after he was implicated in the failed Pisonian conspiracy against Nero.) Lucan desacralizes poetry itself, which here confesses its limits, which are the limits of human mortality, even as Erictho seems, however briefly, to overcome them. No, poetry cannot literally raise the dead: it is a magic trick that makes the words on the page form into images, take life, and speak to us. Lucan answers the criticisms the philosopher and theologian make to poetry by openly acknowledging the false bottom of the hat from which poetry pulls its rabbits. It has no access to a real bottom, an underworld beyond death; it is all representation.4 The philosopher and the theologian may be poets no less than he is, but they do not want to know it, too busy, perhaps, in supporting tyranny over human minds and bodies. Plato and Augustine are two such critics on either historical side of Lucan, and they help us to understand the stakes of the Roman poet’s project. Both were dissatisfied with literature and they wanted to be something more than the great rhetoricians that they were. In the Symposium, Plato demystifies the archetypal myth of poetry, the singing of Orpheus that sought to bring Eurydice back from death: the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed and showed him the mere shadow [eidolon] of the woman he had come to seek: Eurydice herself they would not let him take, because he seemed, like the mere minstrel that he was, to be a lukewarm lover, lacking the courage to die as Alcestis died for love, and choosing rather to scheme his way, living, into Hades. And it was for this that the gods doomed him, and doomed him justly, David Quint 3 to meet his death at the hands of women. (179d)5 Behind the words of his shallowly sentimental speaker Phaedrus we can detect Plato’s familiar hostility to poetry, his objection in Book 10 of the Republic that the poet merely imitates the appearances of things and is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adrian Del Caro PAUL CELAN'S UNCANNY SPEECH On October 22, 1960, Paul Celan was in Darmstadt, West Germany, to accept the prestigious Georg-Bûchner-Preis. Winners of this prize are required by custom to give a speech on some aspect of Georg Büchner's writings, and Celan followed suit with a speech entitled "Der Meridian." The speech itself, as an address given in German in Germany to German listeners, was uncanny, but (...) it was Celan's "uncanny" discourse that had earned him this prize in the first place. In his poetry die uncanny takes on a life of its own. In the Meridian speech, dimensions of the uncanny in Büchner's writings are explored for the purpose of shedding light on the artistic impulse, and on poetry in particular. The poetic of Paul Celan is difficult to define from the aggregate of his poems, and hardly transparent in the Meridian speech, either. But it is the concentration on the uncanny in "Meridian" that makes the effort worthwhile. I will use the Meridian speech, examples from German literature, and examples of Celan's poems to unpack this uncanny. "Meridian," like so many words chosen by Celan, is full. Among the things it can mean are highest point, prime of life, circle from pole to pole, and lines numbered according to degrees of longitude. We speak also of a prime meridian, namely Greenwich, having the property of a center, of a locus from which we determine our bearings. Celan the linguist and etymologist knew and considered all meanings. "Uncanny" as a translation of German das Unheimliche is not quite sufficient, but it is a good starting point. German heim is English home, and unheimlich, unheimisch would be unhomely or unhomey—at least in the etymological spirit. When things are not as they are at home, they are unheimlich. Grimm's dictionary tells us that it wasn't until die end of Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 211-224 212Philosophy and Literature the eighteenth century that an emotive quality was added to this formerly cognitive adjective; it began at diis time to be associated with feelings of terror, dread, and anxiety. The Romantic Ludwig Tieck was among the first German writers to treat supernatural, uncanny themes, and as unheimlich became associated with the supernatural, it began to lose its sense of homeliness. Later on, E. T. A. Hoffmann became a master of die uncanny in his numerous weird tales. English "uncanny," which is still the best translation we have for unheimlich, experienced a similar development away from its origins in Scottish, where canny meant quiet, snug, cozy, and pleasant. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that "supernatural, mysterious, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar" were properties ascribed to "uncanny" after 1850. Poe's writings are uncanny in this modern sense. Freud devoted an essay to the uncanny in 1919. He made die point diat das Unheimliche is merely das Heimliche that we have repressed. Ifwe romanticize this idea, dien in the beginning all things were heimlich or homey to us, and it is only after consciousness thatwe become alienated from our home in nature, a condition which makes us feel unheimlich. Celan certainly had strong reason to focus on the earliest meaning of unheimlich, since he experienced homelessness in virtually every conceivable sense of the word, but then, so did his people, dieJews; first in their experience of the Diaspora, then in their "final" eradication during the Holocaust. The people without Boden or land became, by 1945, a people no longer of die earth. Freud linked the concept of das Unheimliche to its origin in heimlich. After exhaustively quoting the lexicologists Sanders and Grimm, Freud concluded that only Schelling had added a new dimension to das Unheimliche: "Uncanny would be everything that is supposed to remain a secret, remain concealed, but has emerged."1 This is credible enough, and fits Freud's repression theory. Freud's statement at the conclusion of the first part of his long essay would have appealed to Celan: "Heimlich is a word according to whose meaning an ambivalence develops until finally it corresponds in any uncanny way with its opposite. Unheimlich is somehow a kind ofheimlich... (shrink)

"Romanticism, when attains a fullness of complexity..there occurs of the supernatural unique". http://philpapers.org/profile/112741.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back InTony E. JacksonAd Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In, by Brian Rotman; xii & 203 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, $39.50 cloth, $12.95 paper.Brian Rotman’s book attempts to pull mathematics—the last, most solid home of metaphysical thought—off its absolutist (...) foundations and into the roiling current of postmodernism. His argument works in what has by now become a rather standard manner. He shows how the grounding ideas of mathematics rest upon the insupportable assumption of a realm of absolute truth, “truth perfect, truth outside time, outside space, outside the material world of matter, energy, and entropy, truth somehow able to be discovered or apprehended but never invented” (p. 19). Rotman questions this Platonic grounding in a number of ways.First, with the help of linguistics (de Saussure, Benveniste, Wittgenstein, and Peirce) he provides a semiotic analysis of mathematical arguments as real-world linguistic events. Proof he looks at “not as a form of inference engaged in preserving eternal truths, but as an historically conditioned species of rhetoric” (p. 35). Secondly, Rotman argues that one idea has most secured the fortress-like solidity of mathematical Platonism: the idea of ad infinitum or infinite iteration. Mathematics takes off from the givenness of the natural numbers, our everyday 1, 2, 3 and so on to infinity. It is the “so on to infinity” that frames up the house of arithmetic as it has stood since Euclid. (Euclidean in this context is equivalent to Platonic in the context of philosophy.) But what is the referent of these numbers? Ultimately they are said to be the symbolic representation of the action of counting, which is the “mathematical ur-cognition” (p. 51). And yet we cannot imagine any material human situation in which counting could actually go on to infinity. Therefore, some impossible, supernatural agent (the ghost of the title) must be projected in order for this conception to exist. Similarly, Rotman argues against the assumption of “perfect repeatability” because this notion depends upon some purely imaginary, ideal identity of object or action that could possibly be repeated. Ad infinitum requires and assumes both a disembodied, metaphysical counter and a disembodied, metaphysical counted.So Rotman sets about putting the body back into this symbolic system by rejecting the idea of ad infinitum. Instead of assuming the existence of counting activities that run, in principle, out to infinity without changing their nature, Rotman posits what he calls “realizable iteration,” that is, counting that admits the necessary dissolution or change of whatever repetitive function you begin with. Put simply, he includes the fact that quantitative accumulation or repetition always eventually brings about a qualitative change: at some point in everyday life a difference of degree of the “same” thing or action inevitably becomes a difference of kind. The natural numbers and the ad infinitum [End Page 390] remain blissfully sheltered from this inescapable real world truth, but Rotman reformulates mathematics so as to include this truth in the very idea of numbering.In fact (and he acknowledges this) he theorizes counting after the model of chaos or complexity theory in the physical sciences. Realizable iteration, he says, will bring in the “qualitative differences” forgotten or repressed (the language of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud runs throughout) in the metaphysical version of number, and “display [the qualitative differences] as the emergent effects of repetition” (p. 131). Even numerical addition, for instance, which had been the most linearly continuous of activities, now will be linear beginning from some initial point, but will become increasingly nonlinear as quantitative increase tends towards some point of qualitative discontinuity with what had come before. The point of discontinuity, though certain to appear, is by its nature not specifiable beyond a horizon of probability, and in this, Rotman aligns his arithmetic not only with chaos theory, but also with quantum mechanics. In an appendix, Rotman elaborates at least to a degree the “pre-elements” of his non-Euclidean arithmetic.As chaos theory does not destroy everyday cause... (shrink)

How does literature illuminate the way we live? Maurice Natanson, a prominent champion of phenomenology, draws upon this method's unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, Natanson reveals the "uncanny" that lies at the core of the ordinary. Phenomenology--which involves the questioning of that which we usually take for granted--is for Natanson the essence of philosophy. Drawing upon his philosophical predecessors Edmund Husserl, (...) Alfred Schutz, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Natanson paves his own way with stories and examples that themselves bear witness to how phenomenology occurs in literature. In considering such works as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Natanson shows how literature opens us to the domain of possibility and how metaphor offers philosophical power when we think about freedom and change. This book, written by one of the twentieth century's leading phenomenologists, will interest students in philosophy and in literature. They will value the work particularly for its clarification of concepts and terms that frequently emerge in the contemporary intellectual climate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 A NOTE ON SMITH'S TERM "NATURALISM" The reader of contemporary Hume literature may feel exasperated when reading recent authors. A conspicuous example is A.J. Ayer (Hume, 1982; see index, Art, Natural beliefs), who declares they endorse Kemp Smith's view of Hume's "naturalism" without sufficiently clarifying what they — or Smith — might exactly mean by this term. Charles W. Hendel, in the 1963 edition of his 1924 (...) Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume, adds eight pages of a new preface and thirty-one pages of a review of Hume scholarship between 1925 and 1962, and he speaks at great length there of his life-long friendship and cooperation with Norman Kemp Smith and appreciation of his work. He says (p. xlviii), "There is a disposition today to assimilate Hume's thought to naturalism as understood in the contemporary sense." He does not say what this "contemporary sense" is, and the statement just quoted seems to have served as the seal of approval and the legitimation of this questionable practice. Hendel's new, 1963, material mentions Smith's discussion of Hume's "naturalism" — but refers only to Smith's early work, "The Naturalism of Hume," Mind, 14, 1905, 149-173 and 335-347, not to Smith's famous The Philosophy of David Hume of 1941, even though he deems that work "of great consequence for Hume scholarship" (p. xxxviii) and a "masterwork" (p. xxxix). The early work (1905) of Smith is already mentioned by Hendel in the body of the 1924 work (p. 361), although there, clearly, the word "naturalism," whatever its meaning is, and however contemporary then, is not necessarily the "contemporary sense" of 1962. The work which clearly (if implicitly) distinguishes between the traditional sense and Smith's 1905 sense of "naturalism" is John Laird's Hume's 93 Philosophy of Human Nature, 1932, 1967. We find there a discussion of Hume's naturalism (beginning of Chapter II), as well as of Hume's "Naturalism" (Chapter VI, fifth and fourth paragraphs from the end), with reference to Smith's 1905 work. Now, the traditional sense of "naturalism" is straightforward and seems to have been instituted by Pierre Bayle to designate the view of the world as devoid of all supernatural intervention, the view of the world as "disenchanted," to use the equivalent term accredited to Max Weber. Clearly, all Epicureans and neoEpicureans, Hume included, were naturalists in this sense. This is not the sense in which Smith uses it in his 1905 essay, "The Naturalism of Hume." The first part of this essay opposes T. H. Green's traditional reading of Hume as a philosopher who streamlined the ideas of Locke and Berkeley and proposes to replace it with the view of Hume's view as "naturalism." "Hume's... naturalistic view of reason," we are told (p. 158), "is a new theory of belief": Humean belief, on Smith's new reading, "is not caused by knowledge but precedes it, and as it is not caused by knowledge it is not destroyed by doubt" (p. 165). Smith declared his reading quite revolutionary, yet it may be endorsed without rejecting Green's reading. Smith does not even attempt to re-interpret in detail the passages which prima facie conform to Green's reading. The second part of his essay is the application of his revolutionary reading to psychology and to ethics. Smith devotes the preface of his The Philosophy of David Hume (1941) to a revision of his 1905 study. It seems he did not alter his attitude towards the first part but only to the second: he thought the starting point of Hume's study was his concern not for "naturalism" but for "moral philosophy, or the science of human nature" (opening words of Hume's Inquiry, cf. Hendel, op. cit., p. xlvi). This statement has to do 94 with emphasis, not with the meanings of terms or with ascriptions of views (and it is erroneous, or at least limited; but this is another matter). This is not to deny that Hume was a naturalist in Bayle's sense, as everyone today agrees. Most philosophers today share this naturalism with Hume. "His attitude and way of... (shrink)

Numinous spaces in British literature from William Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett -- Jesus figures in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edward Albee -- Using Bakhtin's definitions to discover ethical voices in Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy -- René Girard's categories of scapegoats in literature of the American South -- Hopkins's metaphysics of nature as sacred disclosure -- The book of job as mirrored in Hopkins's metaphysics -- Beckett's mythos of the absence of God.

This paper finds its origin in a debate between Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) on what is central to the idea of eroticism. Bataille posits that violence and transgression are fundamental to eroticism, and without prohibition, eroticism would cease to exist. Paz, however, views violence and transgression as merely intersecting with, rather than being intrinsic to, eroticism. Paz places focus on imagination, and transforms eroticism from a transgressive, to a ritualistic act. Eroticism thus functions as an intermediary, turning (...) animal sexuality into ceremony and rite. In this paper, I argue that Paz and Bataille are not fundamentally at odds in their conceptualisation of eroticism. Instead, Paz redefines the locus of eroticism by subverting its unsettling aspects. His conception of eroticism gives precedence to the imagination, which in itself is an act of violation. Imagination transgresses normal life, but this transgression – the violation of the habitual world – also introduces a glimpse of the numinous that Paz associates with belongingness. The paper further explores eroticism, as this is perceived today, and argues that it ultimately eliminates the threshold marked by transgression. The rise of the contemporary pornographic society is marked by a loss of imagination and transcendence, which ultimately reduces the subject into a mere automaton that demands instant gratification. (shrink)