After the horrendous events of September 2001, photographer Peter Elliott loaded his cameras and some clothes into his car and began a cross-country journey, looking for the flag. He found it everywhere: painted on a retaining wall in Tacoma, flying over a trailer in Bozeman, carried billowing by a lone man walking a sandbar in Florida, made of plastic cups stuck in a fence in Mississippi, draped over a fake horse in Salinas, immaculately hanging from a Beverly Hills mansion's window. (...) Home Front is both a tribute to the profound emotions of the country and a testament to Elliott's eye. His genius in these eighty-seven arresting images is to wed these serendipitous meetings with the flag to a language of light and composition that draws as much from classic landscape photography as it does from urban visual idioms. Elliott manages to convey here America's stirring and complex national character, one in which those who have not benefited from the nation's prosperity nonetheless feel the same sense of pride as those who have. With its inspiring introduction by Julia Reed, Home Front is the record—both somber and joyous—of Elliott's encounters with spontaneous patriotism. (shrink)

In First-World-War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient (...) popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters. (shrink)

An exceptional collection of letters, postcards, original writings, and photographs The First World War witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of philosophers and their families: as soldiers at the front; as public figures on the home front; as nurses in field hospitals; as mothers and wives; as sons and fathers. In Germany, the war irrupted in the midst of the rapid growth of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological movement – widely considered one of the most significant philosophical movements in twentieth century (...) thought. Philosophers at the Frontoffers a documentary history of phenomenology in the First World War. Through an exceptional collection of primary source materials (letters, postcards, original writings, photographs) from the Husserl Archives in Leuven, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Archives of the University of Göttingen, the complex narratives of how the war affected the lives and thought of central figures in the phenomenological movement are charted. Key figures such as Edmund Husserl, his sons Wolfgang and Gerhart, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Adolf Reinach, Martin Heidegger, and others are included in this collection of materials. The volume includes reproductions of original material, as well as German transcription of all texts and their English translation. (shrink)

Au demeurant très pointu et concernant l’histoire d’un pays méconnu en France – au-delà de quelques clichés se résumant aux pirates, au reggae et à l’athlétisme – cet ouvrage consacré aux Jamaïcaines dans les deux guerres mondiales se révèle à la lecture particulièrement stimulant. D’abord, il nous fait découvrir l’histoire de cette île dans le premier xxe siècle. L’étude de ce « Home front » lointain dévoile les enjeux de genre au sein de la société jamaïcaine. Les questions (...) posées stimulent... (shrink)

Hundreds of cottages and cabins, mansions and houses line the shores of Lake Minnetonka, one of Minnesota's most beautiful lakes and site of some of the state's most coveted properties. Legendary Homes of Lake Minnetonka invites readers into thirty of these dwellings - built by families like the Washburns, the Pillsburys, and the Daytons. Evocative words and stunning color photographs guide readers through these beautifully designed and furnished homes. Portrayed in elegant detail are interiors of renovated Victorian cottages and rustic (...) cabins, as well as those of houses designed by modernist masters like William Lescaze and Philip Johnson. Photographer Karen Melvin takes viewers through the front door, showing living rooms furnished with Mies van der Rohe couches and Frank Lloyd Wright chairs and walls adorned with works by Robert Motherwell and Damien Hirst. Author Bette Jones Hammel relates the homes' histories of ownership and details the many renovations they have seen over time, renovations that have attempted to retain the homes' character and extend their lifespan. For the best views of the exteriors of these homes, you would need a boat. To see the interiors, you would need an invitation. Hammel and Melvin have chosen the most interesting houses - both architecturally and historically - and painstakingly scouted out the best vantage points, both inside and out, to provide a personal tour of these spectacular homes. (shrink)

Nursing homes' ethics committees play a role in designing policies to assure ethical care. The administrative structure of nursing homes is not as large as that of hospitals. Nursing home staff and administration can respond to medical accidents in a way that treats family unethically and does serious harm to the facility. This paper describes incidents in which nursing homes attempted to conceal accidental deaths. It describes how such incidents are discovered, and the consequences of such efforts, and suggests (...) ways to prevent such incidents.This paper presents a retrospective review of a convenience sample of eight cases in which it was discovered that a nursing home attempted to conceal an accidental death. The effort to conceal an accidental death requires a coordinated effort to: [1] limit dissemination of information about the accident by staff and records, [2] decrease suspicion about the death, and [3] decrease the likelihood that an inquiry, if launched, will succeed. This effort begins as a reflexive, emotional and defensive response to the accident and consolidates as an institutional strategy to conceal both the accident and the concealment. The effort is coordinated by administrators who coerce cooperation from front line staff, alter medical records, and fail to follow reporting procedures. The attempt to conceal a lethal accident adversely affects the facility and the healthcare system. Ethics committees should work with professional organizations and administrator to assure proper management and disclosure of harmful accidents. (shrink)

“William Frederking's most effective photographs approach the everyday as still life, avoiding artful arrangement or self-conscious design. They are rich, elegantly photographed records of real life, lived-in and unkempt fragments that retain the echoes of a human presence.”—Michael Bonesteel What makes a house more than just a physical shelter? The old swing on the front porch? The garden in the backyard? The wall clock passed down through generations? We all have furniture, knick-knacks, and other items that represent for us (...) joys and pains, triumphs and tragedies, and the history of our presence in the world. William Frederking takes his own home in Oak Park, Illinois, as the site of such personal talismans, exploring through his photographs the intangible essence of the things that transform a house into a home. In striking black-and-white still-life portraits, Frederking captures the small and large elements that define the spirit of his home, as well as revealing why the home is at the heart of the American dream. Home is a place where objects become enlivened and symbolic—a newspaper lying askew on the kitchen table, a fluffy bedspread spilling through the iron lattice of a bedframe, a staircase spiraling down into mysterious shadows—and thus affirm our existence. Everything we buy or touch, renovate or borrow becomes a mark of our selves, and these marks are nowhere more concentrated than in the home. Frederking’s powerful visual sequence examines the simple backdrop that anchors our complicated lives—and ourselves. A moving photographic chronicle of the materials that shape the home, At Home offers an intimate and graceful meditation on the fragments and ephemera that help us navigate the world. (shrink)

Fiona Allon writes that “ home, now more than ever, is seen as firmly connected to the world of politics and economics, as actively shaped and defined by the public sphere rather than existing simply as a refuge from it.” 1 From this perspective, claims to home as they are located in a relationship to claims of both national and local belonging are often a contested site within Australia, where notions of who is seen to be at (...) class='Hi'>home in Australia are constantly being challenged and reworked. Structured around the desire amongst white people to retain Australia as a “white nation,” claims to home may be seen as operating in complex ways in regards to the rights that arise from the ongoing existence of Indigenous sovereignties, and the politics surrounding levels of immigration from groups of people perceived as belonging to minority racial groups. In this context, the notion of home is frequently drawn upon in relation to both how people perceive the way in which they, and others, belong in a country, and this raises questions surrounding who is legitimately able to call Australia home. Such discourses of home evoke feelings of ownership in people who feel that they have a legitimate claim to a country for reasons primarily of race or location of birth. In Australia, despite the powerful presence and voice of Indigenous peoples, popular perceptions of the country tend to place such homely rights firmly in the laps of white people, who, through images of white nuclear families in front of white picket fences, perceive themselves as already and rightfully at home in Australia. Yet such conceptions of Australia are not accepted without struggle. Notions of home are very much contested, especially in terms of Indigenous sovereignty and non-white immigration, both of which question the legitimacy of a normatively white Australia. Such ideas of home as being a contested space in which issues of national belonging are played out in Australia were seen quite clearly in relation to the 2005 Cronulla riots, in which thousands of white Australians gathered around Cronulla beach, shouting at and threatening those located as “Lebanese Muslim” people. The people involved in the riots made it quite clear that whilst Australia was a home for them, it ought not to be home to people who were identified as Lebanese Muslims. Such racist opinions exemplified the fact that Australia is seen to be a white country, and therefore as a legitimate home to white people rather than to non-white minority groups or even to Indigenous Australians. This is discussed in more detail later in this paper. (shrink)

The complex emotional work of nurses calls for more recognition of emotional labour and the incorporation of emotional labour in nursing education. Based on participant observation and semistructured interviews, we describe the experiences of student nurses in two nursing homes for elderly people with dementia in the Netherlands. We analyse their interactions using Goffman's dramaturgical view on the front and backstage behaviour and the distinction between surface acting and deep acting. The study reveals the complexity of emotional labour, as (...) nurses swiftly adapt their communication styles and behavioural strategies between settings, patients, and even between moments within one interaction sequence, which shows that the theoretical binaries fail to fully capture their skills. Although student nurses take pride in their emotionally taxing work, the societal undervaluation of the nursing profession negatively impacts their self‐image and ambitions. More explicit recognition of these complexities would enhance their self‐appreciation. This calls for a professional ‘backstage area’ that allows nurses to articulate and strengthen their emotional labour skills. Educational institutions should provide this backstage for nurses‐in‐training to strengthen these skills as part of the professional skill set. (shrink)

Greatly aided by an information age in which protesting laborers in a remote offshore outpost can capture front page headlines around the globe, theSarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SARBOX) has made corporate transparency the linchpin for good corporate governance. Under a SARBOX-enhancedregulatory framework, publicly traded corporations are required to rapidly disclose material changes in their financial conditions or operations—changes such as impairments to goodwill, a trademark, or some other intangible corporate asset. Especially challenging for multinational corporations (MNCs) with far-flung corporate (...) empires is the need to stay abreast of the ebb and flow of goodwill, at a time when transnational human rights groups are aggressively mobilizing world opinion against the sweatshop labor conditions that abound at the offshore production sites favored by MNCs. The author explains why the convergence of a digital age of free-flowing information and the advent of SARBOX, a legislative enactment of paraenetic design, is causing the boards of MNCs to more critically evaluate the long-term costs of their offshore operations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 12, 2013 (10:49 am) C:\WPdata\TYPE3202\russell 32,2 062 red.wpd 1 [For document sources and the pseudonyms used, see the entries in D.4 of the Malleson bibliography in this issue. The Wrst is under “Hemma Hos br”.z—zK.B.] 2 [Russell had given Malleson directions: “Festiniog is 3 miles from Blaenau Festiniog, along the road to Port Madoc; our cottage is a quarter of a mile from Festiniog, towards Port Madoc; the (...) inn, the Pengwern Arms, is at our end of the village. You would not Wnd our cottage on any map, but you might Wnd Bryn Llewelyn, a big house next door. Festiniog is on a ridge between two mountain streams, the Teigl and the Cynval” (24 Aug. 1948, ra3 596.200860). Find it at 52 57N32.17ON, 3 56N29.04OW on Google Earth.] 3 [Russell’s later secretary, Christopher Farley, attended the evacuated school.] russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (winter 2012–13): 161–9 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ocuments THREE PORTRAITS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL AT HOME1 Constance Malleson i.w“bertrand russell at home” (1949) A ysage in ancient times once said that the best and wisest men love ythe ymountains and the sea. So it is perhaps not surprising to Wnd yEngland’s ygreat philosopher, Bertrand Russell, living in a little grey stone cottage on the side of a mountain and within sight of the sea. At a bend in a steep road, you suddenly come upon it: a typically Welsh looking place, for it is situated not far from the village of Llan Ffestiniogz—zin North Wales. It is small-scale country, this north-western corner of Merioneth: small steep hills; small glistening-green oak woods; small compact purple mountains (about 2,000 feet high). Ffestiniog village stands upon a ridge with a deep valley on either side; and a river, with white churning waterfalls, in each valley. From the grey stone terrace in front of Russell’s cottage, the whole Vale of Ffestiniog opens out to the shining estuary and the sea.2 The terrace has three tall, clipped, very prim looking bay trees; and all the cottage’s eight windows and two doors open out onto it; and Russell will tell you (with a lightly sardonic tone in his voice) that there were originally six trees, but that A.yS. Neill’s small scholars cut down three of them. (A.yS. Neill’s famous “experimental” school was evacuated here during the war.3 ) While Russell is himself an advocate of a very great deal of freedom in education, he thinks it is a pity if small children grow up without any knowledge whatever in their heads. At the western end of the terrace, the cottage has a projecting wing and it is January 12, 2013 (10:49 am) C:\WPdata\TYPE3202\russell 32,2 062 red.wpd 162 constance malleson 4 [B.yH. Liddell Hart (1895–1970). Conrad Russell recalled him visiting in “Shaking OT the Family Curse” (interview), The Independent on Sunday, 13 June 1999, pp. 16–17.] 5 [Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars of England Begun in the Year 1641, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1704). The copy is still in Russell’s library.] 6 [It was the unique Doves type that T.yJ. Cobden-Sanderson disposed of in this way in 1916. He died in 1923. Many Doves Press publications remain in Russell’s library.] 7 [1817–1857. Finnish book collector.] 8 [The book was on loan to Russell from Malleson. She later sent a wedding oTering of what is probably the same copy to the Editor and his wife.] 9 [One such stone jar, with a screw-on top, is in ra.] there that Russell’s own small son, Conrad, age twelve, has his bedroom. Its walls are covered with delightful, large, coloured, historical maps of the world; and it once happened that, when the famous military expert of The Times, Liddell Hart,4 was visiting Russell and holding forth about some very remote and little known place, Conrad piped up and corrected him... (shrink)

Background Ethical principles behind prioritization in healthcare are continuously relevant. However, applying ethical principles during times of increased need, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, is challenging. Also, little is known about nursing home nurses’ prioritizations in their work to achieve well-being and health for nursing home residents. Aim The aim of this study was to explore nursing home nurses’ priority-setting for older nursing home residents in Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design, participants, and research (...) context We conducted a qualitative interview study. Data were collected through in-depth interviews (retrospective self-reports) between February and May 2021 with 21 nursing home nurses. To help respondents to recall their memories, we used the critical incident technique (CIT). We analyzed data within the theoretical framework and the methodological orientation of content analysis. Ethical considerations Written and verbal consent was obtained before the interviews, and information was given to participants informing them that participation was entirely voluntary. The Swedish Ethical Review Agency gave an advisory opinion stating that there were no ethical objections to the research project (Dnr. 2020-05649). Findings We identified an overarching theme—nursing home nurses struggling on multiple fronts, “just do it”—and seven categories: striving for survival and caring about a dignified death; responding sensitively to relatives’ expectations; ranking the urgency of needed care; responding to input from different actors; combating the spread of infection in unconventional ways; taking the lead and doing what is required; and following the ideals of person-centered nursing. Conclusions Nurses’ priority-setting for older nursing homes residents during the COVID-19 pandemic meant strain and struggle. In some cases, nurses had taken responsibility for priorities falling outside their statutory powers. Different demands and interests affected nurses’ priorities. Nursing home nurses need organizational and managerial support to prioritize. (shrink)

Color coded terror alerts, invasion, drone war, rampant surveillance: all manifestations of the type of new power Brian Massumi theorizes in _Ontopower_. Through an in-depth examination of the War on Terror and the culture of crisis, Massumi identifies the emergence of preemption, which he characterizes as the operative logic of our time. Security threats, regardless of the existence of credible intelligence, are now felt into reality. Whereas nations once waited for a clear and present danger to emerge before using force, (...) a threat's felt reality now demands launching a preemptive strike. Power refocuses on what _may_ emerge, as that potential presents itself to feeling. This affective logic of potential washes back from the war front to become the dominant mode of power on the home front as well. This is ontopower—the mode of power embodying the logic of preemption across the full spectrum of force, from the “hard” to the "soft". With _Ontopower_, Massumi provides an original theory of power that explains not only current practices of war but the culture of insecurity permeating our contemporary neoliberal condition. (shrink)

At the outset of World War I - the "Great War" - Freud supported the Austro-Hungarian Empire for which his sons fought. But the cruel truths of that bloody conflict, wrought on the psyches as much as the bodies of the soldiers returning from the battlefield, caused him to rethink his stance and subsequently affected his theory: Psychoanalysis, a healing science, could tell us much about both the drive for war and the ways to undo the trauma that war inherently (...) breeds, but its principles could just as easily serve the enemy's desires to inculcate its own brand of "truth." Even a century later, psychoanalysis can still be used as much for the justifications of warfare and propaganda as it is for the defiance of and resistance to those same things. But it is in the investigation of the motives and methods behind these uses that psychoanalysis proves its greatest strength. To wit, this edited collection presents published and unpublished material by analysts, writers, and activists who have worked at the front lines of psychic life and war from various stances. Set at a point of tension and contradiction, they illustrate the paradoxical relation of psychoanalysis as both a site of resistance and healing and a necessary aspect of warmaking, propaganda, and militarism. In doing so, we venture from the home front - from the trauma of returning veterans to the APA's own complicity in CIA "black sites" - across international borders - from the treatment of women in Latin American dictatorships to the resistance to occupation in Palestine, from mind control to an ethics of responsibility. Throughout, a psychoanalytic sensibility deconstructs the very opposition that it inhabits, and seeks to reestablish psychoanalysis as the healing discipline it was conceived to be. (shrink)

Evidence found in The New York Times from 1939 to 1945 and corroborating sources are used to demonstrate the impact of the Second World War on the progressive educational movement. We posit that December 7, 1941 initiated the waning of the progressive education movement in the secondary social studies curriculum. Progressive education emphasized a child-centered, experiential curriculum, an issues-centered approach to learning, and a critical analysis of society. Our findings indicate that the educational climate during the Second World War initiated (...) a shift from questioning American institutions to celebrating them. Education became more centralized and many educational organizations were mobilized to support the war effort. Specifically, the secondary social studies curriculum became one of several propaganda vehicles in support of the war. In addition, colleges and universities became training grounds for teachers, defense workers, and soldiers. A war on the home front ensued. The progressive secondary social studies curriculum itself was viewed as placing the nation at risk. While other factors such as the Back-to-Basics movement and the Cold War contributed to the waning of the secondary progressive educational movement, World War Two (WWII) set the decline in motion. (shrink)

In World War II, however, that lonely masculine authority of experience—the bitter authority derived from direct exposure to violence, injury, and mechanized terror—was rapidly dispersing among generally populations. Graves, notes, with some discomfort, that the Second World War soldier “cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher.”5 American culture was, obviously, characterized by far greater disjunctions between male and female “experience” of war than the British blitz society Graves describes, (...) and the modern tradition of soldier poetry, with its ironic emphasis on unmendable gaps between the soldier author and the civilian reader, retained its strong influence. Still, public discussions of war and literature in the United States dwell frequently on the new conjunctions between civilians and soldiers, front and home front, and men and women, focusing on their shared morale or effort as well as on their common deprivation and vulnerability.In a war newly perceived as “total,” [Marianne] Moore’s work could exemplify the power of a representative civilian voice. It could also represent modernism provisionally embracing realist and didactic functions, coming round to correcting earlier trends toward self-referentiality. Thus Richard Eberhart, arguing in his introduction to a well-known anthology of war poetry that “the spectator, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants,” praises Moore for abandoning the “complacencies of the peignoir” to write “In Distrust of Merits.”6 His phrasing links Moore with another civilian war poet, Wallace Stevens; by dressing Moore in Stevens’ Peignoir in order to show her doffing it, he represents her as a formerly feminine object of desire who has emerged from the coquetries of her sex into a new, superior, gender-free authority Now, Eberhart argues, “the bloodshed of which she writes has caused her to break through the decorative surface of her verse” to a “different kind of utterance.” For Eberhart, the poem’s value lies in its violation of Moore’s usual mannered aestheticism. She “breaks through” a feminine surface, as if puncturing skin, but the result is not a wound but a mouth: a “different kind of utterance,” in which “the meaning has dictated the sincerity.”7 Oscar Williams, in the preface to a comparable anthology, also reads the poem as a model of transparent earnestness, offering it as a solution to the problem of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the “bad” woman war poet who is excoriated in these discussions as often as Moore is extolled. Describing one of Millay’s war poems as “a sentimental piece of verse written by an American civilian, designed to be read by … people themselves out of danger because they are protected by a wall of living young flesh, much of which will be mangled,” Williams contrasts Moore’s “In Distrust of Merits”: But with true poets the poetry is in the pity …I ask the reader to study closely a war poem peculiarly fitted to illustrate my present thesis. It is also written by a woman, a civilian. “In Distrust of Merits,” by Marianne Moore, is the direct communication of honest feeling by one ready to search her own hear to discover the causes of war and accept her full share of responsibility for its effects.8 5. Graves, “The Poets of World War II,” p. 310.6. Richard Eberhart, “Preface: Attitudes to War,” in War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man’s Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present, ed. Eberhart and Selden Rodman , pp. xv, xiii.7. Ibid., p. xiii.8. Oscar Williams, ed., The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the Twentieth Century , p. 6. Susan Schweik is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book manuscript entitled A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Poets and the Second World War. (shrink)

How does war reconfigure women’s social roles and status? This article investigates how women’s volunteering during conflict can challenge gendered divisions within society and transform the binary of masculine protector and feminine protected. When the Donbas conflict erupted in Ukraine in 2014, women assumed central roles as civilian volunteers who aided populations affected by violence. They gained a high level of social status in the context of a weak state, distrusted by its populace. Based on ten months of fieldwork and (...) eighty-two interviews with civilian volunteers, this article argues that volunteering became a space of gendered negotiations over women’s position alongside wartime binaries of home/front and protector/protected. Ultimately, certain types of wartime volunteering created more opportunities for blurring these gendered divisions, enabling volunteer women to be framed as protectors of both soldiers and civilians. Moreover, age intersected with gender, as volunteer women’s life stage influenced their ability to become leaders within volunteer groups and their bodies were interpreted alongside gender roles within the family. (shrink)

In discussing warfare we tend to maintain a theoretical cleavage between the "home front" and the "battle front" that is supposed to parallel the physical distance that separates them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the academic literature that surrounds World War I, with each discipline for decades having studied its correspondent aspect of the war. While this has provided us with incredibly detailed research into the minutiae of battles and the changing attitudes of the masses, (...) it has done little to help us combine these details into a full-scale picture of what was actually experienced by civilians and soldiers alike. Therefore this paper will instead attempt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this war by looking at the alarmism that helped lead to the war and the censorship and propaganda campaigns that helped shape it. Thus it will be shown that only by returning to the concerted efforts of politicians and journalists years before the war can we see how the "war to end all war" eventually led to the creation of "shell shock" and the loss of a generation. (shrink)

During the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War Erich Maria Remarque’s bestseller “All Quiet on the Western Front” is surpassing successive records of popularity. Commonly considered as an antiwar and pacifist novel, the history of Paul Bäumer, a young soldier on the western front, is rather a novel about a war generation lost in the trenches. Remarque describes this written off generation on the stage of various war­-spaces. The first­-person narrator who very often switches to (...) the collective ‘we’, is the voice of virtually the whole community of combatants engaged on the side of the German recruits, describes 1) barracks in which it has been attempted to destroy their youth and build their new identity, 2) the latrine at the front that paradoxically secures relative peace for them, 3) earthworks as a prelude to hostilities, 4) trenches/dugouts that are only a waiting­-room for death, 5) the home front which is presented in the context of “La Grande Guerre” as an alien and impersonal space, and 6) the military hospital that from the narrator’s Bäumer’s perspective is the war in a minature format. The homodiegetic and autodiegetic method of narration in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is on the one hand based on the visualization of the war­-spaces, on the other – on showing, through the making of the narrative semantics of these spaces, the lost generation. Bäumer’s and his companions’s moral­-ethical­-human fall is related to, and dependent on, the spaces in which they exist and which affect their psychic and physical condition. With the death of the main narrator also dies the space of the narration, however the frame of the narrative spaces remains and documents the cruelty and savagery of the hell of 1914–1918. (shrink)

This article examines the processes through which civilian fear was turned into a practicable investigative object in the inter-war period and the opening stages of the Second World War, and how it was invested with significance at the level of science and of public policy. Its focus is on a single historical actor, Solly Zuckerman, and on his early war work for the Ministry of Home Security-funded Extra Mural Unit based in Oxford’s Department of Anatomy (OEMU). It examines the (...) process by which Zuckerman forged a working relationship with fear in the 1930s, and how he translated this work to questions of home front anxiety in his role as an operational research officer. In doing so it demonstrates the persistent work applied to the problem: by highlighting it as an ongoing research project, and suggesting links between seemingly disparate research objects (e.g. the phenomenon of ‘blast’ exposure as physical and physiological trauma), the article aims to show how civilian ‘nerve’ emerged from within a highly specific analytical and operational matrix which itself had complex foundations. (shrink)

The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 revolutionized the way infections were treated. In the context of World War II, the government of the United States politicized the production and use of penicillin as yet another weapon to win the war. It was carefully rationed on the home front, while being used with reckless abandon in the treatment battle wounds and venereal diseases on the battlefield. Penicillin was described as a miracle drug that would be able (...) to cure everyone, when in reality it was only being used to benefit the military and the American war effort, at the expense of civilian lives. (shrink)

The fate of women in times of war has always been considered something a non-issue, buried as it was, and made banal as part and parcel of the lot of civilian population in general, since women were non-combatants. But looking at more recent conflicts we can no longer pretend that women are in a home front of sorts, as opposed to soldiers in battle, because there is no home front anymore, and women are now right in (...) the middle of armed conflicts, as, for instance, in Algeria and in Bosnia. (shrink)

Rambam Medical Center, the only tertiary care center and largest hospital in northern Israel, was subjected to continuous rocket attacks in 2006. This extreme situation posed serious and unprecedented ethical dilemmas to the hospital management. An ambiguous situation arose that required routine patient care in a tertiary modern hospital together with implementation of emergency measures while under direct fire. The physicians responsible for hospital management at that time share some of the moral dilemmas faced, the policy they chose to follow, (...) and offer a retrospective critical reflection in this paper. The hospital’s first priority was defined as delivery of emergency surgical and medical services to the wounded from the battlefields and home front, while concomitantly providing the civilian population with all elective medical and surgical services. The need for acute medical service was even more apparent as the situation of conflict led to closure of many ambulatory clinics, while urgent or planned medical care such as open heart surgery and chemotherapy continued. The hospital management took actions to minimize risks to patients, staff, and visitors during the ongoing attacks. Wards were relocated to unused underground spaces and corridors. However due to the shortage of shielded spaces, not all wards and patients could be relocated to safer areas. Modern warfare will most likely continue to involve civilian populations and institutes, blurring the division between peaceful high-tech medicine and the rough battlefront. Hospitals in high war-risk areas must be prepared to function and deliver treatment while under fire or facing similar threats. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the pandemic spread of the Coronavirus, societies have been reminded that the impact of Covid-19 and public health measures of infection containment reflect known gradients of inequality. Measures focusing only the (acknowledged) frontstage of the pandemic and neglecting its (unacknowledged) backstage—understood as those framework conditions indispensable for societies to thrive—have worsened the impact of social determinants of health on the most vulnerable, as shown by the deleterious effects of prolonged social isolation of residents of nursing homes. (...) To reflect this phenomenon ethically, a framework is proposed which is inspired by the feminist philosopher Margret Little. At its core stands the assumption that caring for people and moral ends allows us to identify what is morally salient. This epistemological stance allows a critical look at the alleged dilemmas invoked to enforce brute, long-lasting policies of closing nursing homes in many places—especially in the light of their dubious effectiveness in preventing viral spread and the severe physical and psychological consequences for those affected. If moral salience is only fully perceived through the closeness of the caring relationship, the human suffering resulting from these policies reveals the utter inadequacy of the dilemma rhetoric used to justify them. This insight is illustrated by the personal experience of the author: He describes his role as an essential care partner of his mother living in a nursing home and forced into the role of a “visitor” who witnessed a constant deterioration of care. Based on an epistemological understanding of caring for making reliable moral judgments, potentially exclusionary effects of distinguishing essential from non-essential groups in care will be addressed together with the need to overcome strict boundaries between front- and backstage. Such efforts will strengthen the moral community of persons needing care, professional care givers and essential care partners. (shrink)

It is reassuring to this reviewer to find that there is at least one other unregenerate liberal, both politically and religiously, extant in the world. This is not to say, however, that the outlook of Munk’s book is particularly optimistic. Indeed, the weight of his evidence points to the real uncertainty as to whether there will be an American Tricentennial. In fact, Munk’s diagnosis of threats both from the home front and from the global front leads one (...) to doubt whether any human being will long remain extant. Of course, Munk’s avowed aim “is to awaken rather than frighten the American people”. (shrink)

During the Second World War, more than 60,000 Jewish members of the American, British and French armed forces became prisoners of war in Germany. Against all expectations, these prisoners were treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention, and the majority made it home alive. This article seeks to explain this most astonishing circumstance. It begins by collating the references to the experiences of Western Jewish POWs from the historical literature to provide a hitherto-unseen overview of their treatment in (...) captivity. It then asks what made their protection from persecution possible. To this end, it explores Germany’s wider motivations for its selective application of the Geneva Convention and highlights the role that military identity played in making its application seem necessary for all POWs from the Western front, including Jewish POWs. (shrink)

“Arisbe,” the Peirce home near Milford, Pennsylvania, belongs to the National Park Service, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is responsible for its care. In 1979 a geodetic triangulation station was installed in the front yard and named the “C. S. Peirce Station.” This was intended, at least in part, as a recognition of the fact that Peirce's scientific career was in the service of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and that the first of his more (...) than thirty years in its service was spent with triangulating parties along the coasts of Maine and of the Gulf states. It offers a suggestive metaphor for the present occasion. If the questions, methods, answers and reasons of another thinker, or of a whole movement of thought, whether earlier or later than Peirce, are illuminated by locating them, directly or indirectly, positively or negatively, in relation to those of the C. S. Peirce station, we may count that as part of the range of Peirce's relevance. In the case of an earlier thinker or movement, the relevance does not depend on Peirce's awareness or acknowledgment; in the case of a later thinker or movement, it does not depend on awareness or acknowledgment by that thinker or by one or more representatives of that movement. If the thinker is oneself, the triangulating will of course require a certain detachment. At least within limits, and perhaps even without limit, degrees of nearness or remoteness, likeness or difference, do not as such constitute degrees of relevance. And even if our interest is primarily in philosophical relevance, mathematical or scientific relevance may entail philosophical, and so be counted. (shrink)

When a young boy playing in a wooded area, I tripped over exposed roots extending from the trunk of a tree. I threw my arms out in front of me to break my fall and disturbed a nest of bees. As I lay on the ground, I was repeatedly stung by bees until I could regain my feet and run away. Frightened and in a great deal of pain - that is what I remember most vividly - I walked (...) home. My mother took me to the doctor, who undoubtedly gave me some sort of treatment and medication, but this has been lost to memory. The part of the visit to the doctor's office that I remember is his removing any stingers remaining in me; this too I remember for its pain. The doctor counted more than seventy stings. Although the exact number escapes memory, I believe it was seventy-one. In brief, the descriptive details of the day's experiences elude memory, but the affective dimension - the pain and fear - does not. (shrink)

How we experience space by listening: the concepts of aural architecture, with examples ranging from Gothic cathedrals to surround sound home theater. We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic (...) meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling. Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines—including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others—Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects. (shrink)

The book in front of you is the first international academic volume on the legal, philosophical and economic aspects of the rise of 3D printing. In recent years 3D printing has become a hot topic. Some claim that it will revolutionize production and mass consumption, enabling consumers to print anything from clothing, automobile parts and guns to various foods, medication and spare parts for their home appliances. This may significantly reduce our environmental footprint, but also offers potential for (...) innovation and creativity. At the same time 3D printing raises social, ethical, regulatory and legal questions. If individuals can print anything they want, how does this affect existing systems of intellectual property rights? What are the societal consequences of the various types of products one can print with a 3D printer, for example weapons? Should all aspects of 3D printing be regulated, and if so, how and to what ends? How will businesses (have to) change their way of working and their revenue model in light of the shift to printing-on-demand? How will the role of product designers change in a world where everyone has the potential to design their own products? These and other questions are addressed in high quality and in-depth contributions by academics and experts, bringing together a wide variety of academic discussions on 3D printing from different disciplines as well as presenting new views, broadening the discussion beyond the merely technical dimension of 3D printing. Bibi van den Berg is Associate Professor at eLaw, the Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Simone van der Hof is Full Professor at eLaw in Leiden and Eleni Kosta is Associate Professor at TILT, the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. (shrink)

In April, 2007, 15 Royal Navy sailors and marines were taken prisoner and held hostage for nearly two weeks by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Their crime? Allegedly crossing over into Iranian waters. Within 48 hours a British sailor was plastered all over Iranian TV publicly confessing that the Britons were entirely at fault in the matter. Another sailor wrote a letter—no doubt under some duress— calling for the UK to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq. Then to cap things off, (...) the British soldiers were paraded in front of the Iranian President, where they gave him a big “thumbs up” before being allowed to go home. If you were one of the captives, what would you have done? Would you have cooperated with your captors? Or would you have resisted them, possibly putting your own life at risk? Not surprisingly, the British people recoiled in shame. As one commentator put it, “The honorable thing would have been to renounce their coerced behavior, denounce the Iranians’ use of them for propaganda, and acknowledge that anything they endured was nothing.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Institutional AuthorityA Buddhist PerspectiveDhammanandā Bhikkhunī (Chatsumarn Kabilsingh)Rules and Authority in the Early Days of the SaṅghaAfter the Buddha gained enlightenment, he addressed the group of five people (pañcavaggīya) with whom he had once practiced austerities. Kondañña became enlightened, and eventually the whole group of five became enlightened, one after another. There was no need then to set any rules for them to follow, as they were all enlightened.In these (...) early days, there was no material gain in the monastic lifestyle. People walked the monastic path out of sheer commitment. They were serious in pursuing their own spiritual path. As time went by, the teaching of the Buddha became more popular and his followers increased. Even then the Buddha did not think it was necessary to lay down any monastic rules (vinaya). This was clear when he turned down a proposal from Sāriputta, his immediate disciple, that he should lay down some rules.Monastic rules came into existence only when specific problems arose in the community for consideration. The very first rule was laid down because Sudinna, a young monk, had sex with his own wife when he visited his parents’ home and was urged toward this by his mother so that she could have a grandchild to continue the family lineage. Sudinna, having met his mother’s request, was disturbed in conscience. As the days went by, he became pale and thin. When his friends asked what was wrong, he told them what was bothering him. The Buddha then laid down the first pārājika (defeat—action that requires expulsion from the Order) for bhikkhus (monks) and bhikkhuṇīs (nuns): that they should not have any sexual relationships. In settings such as this, rules started to come into existence.Even at the First Council, I do not think that the complete pātimokkha,1 as the bhikkhus and bhikkhuṇīs now have it, was in existence. It should be remembered that the Buddha gave permission for the modification of minor rules if the monastic saṅgha (community) should agree.2 At the First Council, however, the five hundred arahats could not agree as to which could be considered major and minor rules. As [End Page 147] a result, Mahā Kassapa, the chief monk, who presided over the council, proposed that all should be kept intact. That has become solidified and is now normative for Theravāda Buddhism.In the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, in the chapter on the last journey of the Buddha from Sāvatthi to Kusinagar, it is recorded that Ānanda, the Buddha’s attendant and cousin, asked the Buddha if he was going to choose anyone to lead the saṅgha after his passing away. The Buddha replied very clearly that he had given the dhamma and vinaya as dīpa (an island) for the bhikkhus and bhikkhuṇīs to follow. The sutta makes it very clear that the Buddha did not intend to appoint anyone to hold a position of complete authority.I would venture to say that if the Buddha had not made this point clear, Ānanda would have been given a natural position of authority after the Buddha had gone. After all, Ānanda had followed the Buddha, serving him, learning and absorbing the dhamma from him, continuously for twenty-five years of the Buddha’s life. He was the only one praised for being foremost (etadagga) with many abilities, for instance the ability to remember most of the Buddha’s teaching. He was indeed qualified for the position. We read also that during the three months between the passing away of the Buddha and the First Council, people were already seeking him out as their spiritual guide. The only drawback was that, during the Buddha’s lifetime, he was not enlightened. However, he attained enlightenment just in time for him to participate in the First Council, which five hundred arahats are recorded as attending.During the Buddha’s lifetime, if disagreement arose in the saṅgha, the case was always brought to the Buddha, who, having called both parties together, would settle the case in front of them... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Il y a and the UngrundLevinas and the Russian Existentialists Berdyaev and ShestovJames McLachlan (bio)Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other than remains other — with an insurmountable allergy. It is for this reason that it is essentially a philosophy of (...) being, that the comprehension of being is its last word, and the fundamental structure of man.... The God of the philosophers... is a god adequate to reason, a comprehended god who could not trouble the autonomy of consciousness, which finds itself again in all its adventures, returning home to itself like Ulysses, who through all his peregrinations is only on the way to his native island.— Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other”Levinas is well known for his assault of the history of Western ontology and its allergy to otherness. In seeing all in terms of Being, philosophy subordinates ethics to ontology by reducing the other to an object of knowledge within Being. Recent work by Fiona Steinkamp, Joseph Lawrence, and Drew Dalton has called attention to a possible [End Page 213] dialogue between Schelling (especially the middle Schelling of Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom and The Ages of the World) and Levinas.1 Joseph Lawrence shows both Schelling and Levinas struggle with the difficulty of thinking the Good beyond being. Schelling thought that the very quest for reality forces us to philosophize from the point of view of practical rather than theoretical reason. He thought there is no adequate theoretical refutation of solipsism but there is a perfectly good practical refutation: to the extent that I treat others as real they reveal themselves as real to me. Lawrence points to Schelling’s claim in Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, “This is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each exist in itself, and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other.”2The parallels between Schelling and Levinas are rooted in the latter’s appreciation of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. In the introduction to Totality and Infinity, Levinas famously notes that Rosenzweig’s masterpiece was “too often present in this book to be cited” (TI 28). Rosenzweig’s debt to Schelling is well documented. He carried The Ages of the World to the front with him in World War One and refers to it in correspondence. He even wrote, “It’s a great book to the last, had it been completed nobody except the Jews would give two hoots for the Star.”3 This is, without doubt, the correct historical stream to follow in connection with the relation between Schelling and Levinas and the proper way to see the connections between such Levinasian notions as the “there is” and hypostasis and the Schellingian conceptions that reflect similar ideas as the Ungrund, the emergence of the personal from the impersonal ground, and, above all, the importance of the practical ethical move beyond ontology.But there were also contemporaries holding such philosophical views in the Paris of the 1930s, and they can be seen to reinforce such positions. What is more striking is they come from Levinas’s fellow émigrés: Lev Shestov, Nicolas Berdyaev, and Alexandre Koyré. In one way or another, each either championed positions that emphasized the emergence of the particular from the general, rejected ontology, [End Page 214] or attacked the entire Western metaphysical tradition stemming from Parmenides for reasons similar to those held by Levinas. Levinas’s appreciation of Dostoevsky is also an important in connection to some of the ideas shared by Levinas, his fellow émigrés, and Schelling.4The Russian émigrés Shestov and Berdyaev were both Dostoevsky disciples; each offered major and influential studies on Dostoevsky and each viewed the novelist in quite different ways through the lens of each one’s philosophical position that had, in part, been formed by each thinker’s reading of Dostoevsky.5 Levinas’s friend, a student of Edmund Husserl, the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré’s 1929 dissertation later... (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. A CONTINUOUS ACT Nico Jenkins In Pierre Hadot’s extraordinary book, Philosophy as a Way of Life , the practices of philosophy—that is the exercise of what we can term pre-institionalized love of wisdom, what Philo of Alexandria described as a training towards wisdom—are described as, following the Stoics, “a continuous act, permanent and identical with life itself, which had to be renewed at each instant.” This renewal of thinking, this coming to be of being itself —meeting itself on its own ground, concerns the way philosophy is practiced, and more often, taught, or rather not taught. Hadot continues his thinking with a description of what happens to the structure of thought in the medieval ages as it becomes adopted—co-opted— by the university, and by extension, by the institution of the church. Philosophy becomes no longer a way of living, no longer a praxis as such but becomes a condition that is locked in a theoretical construct, one which was literally removed from life (and in life we read then love, wisdom, being etc, also the home, the market, the field, the street) and secured behind the high walls of the monastery (which were shortly replaced by the high walls of the Academy) where thinking unfortunately rests for the most part today. Hadot writes further that this dangerous movement of removal reduces thinking to a theoretical practice akin to the mythical Ouroborous; “education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might learn how to train other specialists.” Thought then is trapped behind the walls of the academy, and with the exception of such thinkers as Spinoza, Descartes, and Liebnitz as well as others who think from an outside in, thought remains, in the form of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, a practice reduced or removed from life and restricted to what Schopenhauer will call “mere fencing in front of the mirror.” This is of course the tendency today and philosophy remains, for the most part, a discourse produced and thought inside the academy and disseminated, in seminated through university presses and of course the academic journal. It seems necessary to me that we have to have a place, a return, to a thinking which is closer to the Stoics, closer to the pre-Socratics, to a thinking which is a practice of becoming, a training to think, to live, to die. this is not south romantic than imperative . This thinking is one of a deep ir responsibility because it is not known, it is not figured out. It requires a risk and what Heidegger calls a leap (for there is no bridge to it). I call it irresponsible because for too long sanctioned thought has had as its premise the idea that thinking has a goal, a direction, a telos ; that it is not an activity but a process which gives a product; that the responsibility of thinking in turn demand an answer. In my mind, only freed from that goal can thinking, in contrast, bask in its own thinking, bask in a state in which the unknown can remain unknown, that mystery can rest as mystery. This is not to say that the world needs no answers, or to promote a Whitmanesque “leaning and loafing” as the only valid practice. It is only to say that for too long, thinking has been validated by the academy, by the answerable, by the already decided. To me, this requires—as an answer— the ir responsibility of thought, what Nancy calls, “a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor entirely still to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).” This is a thinking not sanctified by the academy, made sacred by the church or the palace but rather it takes place on the périphérie , beyond the ring road, in alleyways behind the marketplace, in cafes stained with the syphilitic patina of irresponsible talk, of loose talk, the kind of talk made loose not only by the tankard and the goblet by the practice and training of attuned thinking. continent. was formed as a collective of thinkers coming out of the European Graduate School (also known as the University of Disaster) three years ago, in an effort to combat, or challenge, the dominant paradigm which isolates thinking from the street, from life, from where perhaps wisdom tends to emerge. We feel that not only is the university herself no longer the privileged site of where true thinking takes place—and where only official thought can take place—but that the very artificiality of the academy denies thinking—at times—authentic, thought. Our goal at continent. is to create a media agnostic publication which is rigorous in its intellectual underpinnings but which will remain permanently beyond and out of reach of the academy. Though many of us butter our bread with academic paychecks (maid!) we attempt to keep continent. as a refuge—and a refugee—from the University in ruins, from the University as a site of preformed and institutionalized pre-set dialogues. In concert with other publications-both cyber and print—as well as various blogs we are attempting to re-dialogize the dialogue of thinking. We are attempting both to speak to— as well as with and against —the university as a site of accreted knowledge. We have not been utterly successful and continue to attempt to define what that role of being perpetually beyond is (while still trying to maintain rigorous intellectual standards) but it is just that, a goal, which is perpetually opening, perpetually unanswered, perhaps even by design, perpetually unanswerable. (shrink)

Past, present, and future are reversed in the reader's encounter with the illustrations selected by Gertrude Stein for her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.1 After the table of contents there is a table of illustrations that encourages everyone to look at the pictures before they begin reading. During that initial examination, the illustrations forecast what is to be discovered in the text. Expectations are aroused by photographs showing Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door, rooms hung with paintings, (...) Gertrude and Alice in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral, and both with a car in front of Joffre's birthplace. It is natural—although, as it turns out, not altogether correct—to assume that the accumulation of paintings will be explained, that the life lived within the rooms will be fully depicted, and that conventional narrative explanation will be provided to account for the presence of Gertrude and Alice together in such disparate settings as Venice and the French marshal's home. · 1. For useful comments on several pictures as well as evidence that "even the book's sixteen photographs were carefully placed in the first edition," see Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces , p. 219. Paul K. Alkon, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is author of Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Among his recent articles are "Boswellian Time" and "The Historical Development of the Concept of Time." He is writing a book about time in Defoe's fiction. See also: "The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein" by Catharine R. Stimpson in Vol. 3, No. 3; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fear and Loathing in Academe:Gonzo Scholarship and the War Against TourismDaniel StempelIWhen I retired in 1985 I chose as my mantra an academic version of a famous general's farewell to his troops: "Old scholars never die—they just fade away into the stacks." Now that I am an octogenarian, I have faded away into total invisibility, but, like Tithonus, I am not inaudible. I hope my voice will be strident (...) enough to disturb the utopian dreams of a new generation, although I doubt that it will wake them from their dogmatic slumbers. My decision to return to the wars of intellect was occasioned by a chance discovery as I haunted the periodical stacks. I noted the name of an old friend in the title of an article and was surprised to find him pilloried as both a "liberal white Protestant" and a "white supremacist," terms which do not, in my experience, necessarily go together.The article, "Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day," written by Paul Lyons, a member of the University of Hawai'i English department's Cultural Studies group, uses bell, book, and candle of the new postcolonial faith in a rite of exorcism to dispel the evil influences of commercial tourism.1 As every exorcist knows, the rite demands that a demon must be called by his name and Lyons has chosen to demonize a deceased member of the English department. Grove Day came to Hawaii in 1944 and retired in 1969. He served as chairman from 1948 to 1953 and taught the course in Literature of the Pacific until his retirement in 1969. He began as a freelance writer long before he decided to enter graduate school at [End Page 95] Stanford and continued to publish more than fifty books on Hawaii and the Pacific. In 1979 he received the State Award for Literature. He died in 1994 in a plunge from an upper floor of a retirement home. Paul Lyons, by his own admission, came to Hawaii in 1990 knowing nothing of its history and culture but soon became a self-appointed authority on Hawaii, its colonial past and present, and its postcolonial future, eagerly embracing the ideas disseminated by the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the university.His article begins with a pretentious elaboration of the method he plans to use to raze the Potemkin village of tourism. Invoking the authority of Hegel on appearance and reality in a passage he has found cited by Žižek, he follows Dean MacCannell, who has adapted Erving Goffman's distinction between dramatic front and back: the entertaining scene presented to the tourist public contrasts with the backstage machinery of the stagehands who put it all together to deceive gullible visitors.2 He combines this with a quotation he has found in a book by William V. Spanos, the founder and former editor of Boundary 2, taken from a journalist's view of the Vietnam War, complaining that they had all been "deeply backgrounded." These are enlisted in the service of MacCannell's quest for "authenticity" as the touchstone of all encounters with other cultures, including the tourist experience.Had Lyons, instead of accepting MacCannell's interpretation of Goffman's early work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), taken a closer look at this witty and ironic study of social behavior in a small community in the Shetland Islands, he would have found that Goffman makes no judgment on the comparative authenticity of either front or back. He utilizes what may be called the J. Alfred Prufrock theory of interaction between individuals and the groups in which they find themselves: "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet...." MacCannell, in contrast, sees the tourist as a Tennysonian Ulysses in pursuit of a horizon of authenticity that recedes into infinity, "whose margin fades / Forever and forever as I move."Of course, the front/back and foreground/background binary oppositions and the insistence on authenticity are commonplaces rooted in the ubiquitous literary and philosophical tradition of "All the world's a stage" and require no... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:More Evidence that Hume Wrote the Abstract David Fate Norton In the preceding paper, David Raynor has offered several reasons for discounting J. O. Nelson's unfounded claim that Adam Smith was the author ofAn Abstract of..."A Treatise ofHuman Nature." Prior to the discovery ofa copy ofthis work, it may have been plausible to suppose that the Abstract was written by someone other than Hume, but the internal evidence ofthe (...) pamphlet is so strongly in favour of Humean authorship that not even Nelson can bring himself to question this evidence—although he now chooses to ignore it. Given that Nelson's argument rests on the far from compelling assumption that in 1740 there were two and onlytwoMr. Smith's ofwhom Humehadknowledge and whomayhave had an interest in writingor publishing philosophy, it is especially useful to have William Smith, publisher of the Bibliothèque raisonnée, brought again to our attention, and especially since it is obvious that a copy of the Abstract had been sent to that journal prior to the pubUcation ofthe review ofthe Treatise published there in the spring of1740.1 In short, Raynor nicely shows why Keynes and Sraffa were wrong to suppose that Hume, Hutcheson and John Noon were all involved in a conspiracy to undercut Noon's interest by publishing an Irish edition ofthe Treatise2 and why Nelson is wrong to suppose that ifthe "Mr Smith" ofHume's letter is not John Smith of Dublin, then he can only be Adam Smith, and that thelatter musthave written the Abstract. I wish to consider further evidence, some of it circumstantial, relevant to this discussion. This evidence adds probability, I submit, to the conclusion that Hume wrote the Abstract. 1. In the autumn of1737 Hume told Henry Home that he could not give him a "general Notion ofthe Plan" or "Abridgement" ofwhat was to be the Treatise. A careless reading ofthe Abstract might lead one to suppose that this is evidence that Hume did not write this short work. But in fact the Abstract is not an abridgement. It is an effort to make clearer, by carefully tracing "one simple argument... from the beginning to the end," a work thathad been "complained of as obscure and difficult." 3 The available evidence confirms one in the belief that Hume could not abridge the Treatise, but on several occasions he did recast parts ofit in more accessible form. The first such recasting was theAbstract. That this briefworkis not merely an abridgement makes Volume XIX Number 1 217 DAVID FATE NORTON itless likely, I suggest, thatit was written by anyone other than Hume himself.4 2.The Abstract, although said to be "Printed for C. [C]orbet,B at Addison's Head, over-against St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet-street," wasinfactprintedbyWilUam Strahan, fornone otherthanJohnNoon, the publisher of the Treatise.6 This we know from Strahan's ledgers. These are preservedin the British Library.7Moreover, onApril 19 and 20, 1739, Corbett placed the following advertisement in the London Daily Post and GeneralAdvertiser: Gentlemen, As I have very lately undertaken the Business ofa PubUsher, so will I as faithfully execute it, if at any time you please to employ, Your most Obedient, Humble Servant, Charles Corbett, Who will Inviolably keep secret all Names of Authors, Proprietors, &c. whatever. The fact that Corbett indicates his willingness to undertake clandestine, vanity publishing gives all the explanation one needs of his willingness to become front man for a puffproduced by Hume, and financed, as the Abstract was, by Hume's publisher.8 The fact that it was Noon who arranged for the London printing of the Abstract in no way proves that this work was written by Hume, but it is another bit ofevidence supportive ofthatconclusion,foritindicates thatNoon was in on the effort to publicize the poorly selling volumes ofthe Treatise that he had published.9 3.Robert Connon found a copy of volume three of the Treatise containing extensive manuscript amendments in Hume's hand. As he has also reported, a copy of the Abstract is bound together with this copy ofvolume three, and this copy ofthe Abstract is also amended by Hume. These amendments appear to be those of an author, not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophers' Walks by Bruce BaughTim IngoldBaugh, Bruce. Philosophers' Walks. Routledge, 2022. 252pp.Yesterday evening, much to my satisfaction, I finished reading Bruce Baugh's Philosophers' Walks. The author ends by putting down his pen. It is time, he declares, "to put my boots on and walk out into the world" (236). For me, it was bedtime, but knowing that I was to write this review, I resolved to sleep on (...) it. On waking, I set out, as is my wont, for the short walk I take every morning before breakfast. The walk itself is nothing special: it takes in the streets of my neighborhood and a nearby park. Yet every day is different as the weather changes, trees come in and out of leaf, blooms flourish and wilt in front gardens, children on their way to school throng the streets in term-time only to vanish in vacations. Lately, a nineteenth-century fountain in the park has been lovingly restored, and every morning I am refreshed by its water-jets and tinkly sound. Most days I am writing in my head, on whatever I have on the go at the time. Walking briskly and on my own, I find that words that had tied me in knots the day before miraculously straighten themselves out with a rhythm and fluency matching my pace. I cannot, however, walk and write at the same time. It is physically impossible. So as the words come, I have to keep repeating them to myself, until I make it home. With no time to lose, I seize notebook, pencil, and spectacles to jot them down. Only when I have done so can I finally sit down to breakfast. And that's exactly what happened this morning. With my hastily scribbled notes, some good words, and the odd finished sentence, I am ready to write this review.I am not, of course, the first to have discovered the benefits of thinking-while-walking. Countless predecessors have done so before me, including some of the most celebrated figures of the past four centuries of European intellectual history. And so has Baugh. The idea behind his book is that if by walking, philosophers have arrived at many of their most cherished insights, then perhaps we could better take the measure of these insights not merely by reading their words but by retracing their steps, walking the same paths as they did. And this, precisely, is what [End Page 131] Baugh, often accompanied by his wife Diane Lindsay, set out to do. Each chapter, barring the introduction and conclusion, is devoted to one or sometimes two characters, and each blends reflection on their ideas and life-histories of walking with the author's recollection of attempting to follow in their footsteps, and of the experience and even self-knowledge gained from doing so. Some walks are in verdant countryside, or more spectacular Alpine scenery, others are in big cities like London and Paris. Baugh does not pretend that the walks of his chosen characters can be replicated exactly when so much has changed, in both rural areas and the urban fabric, since their heydays. Nor can we ever know exactly what was going through their heads at the time. It is nevertheless surprising how many echoes you can pick up from the past, so long as you keep your ears to the ground, and Baugh is an astute listener. For us, his readers, the book is an invitation to join in his travels, albeit at a distance, and by doing so, to enrich our understanding not only of his characters and of how they thought, but of ourselves as well.Though the book is called Philosophers' Walks, Baugh has cast his net wide to include characters for whom the epithet "poet," "artist," or "writer" might sooner come to mind than "philosopher." No matter: all such labels are a touch arbitrary, and it's the thought that counts. So here they are, in chronological order (not the order in which they appear in the book): Pierre Grassendi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wisdom's Flowering Cherry:William Johnston's Charismatic ZenLucien Miller Click for larger view View full resolutionIn 1976, when I was about to leave Taiwan after a sabbatical in Taiwan, I happened upon a tattered poster on a telephone pole: [End Page 133]CHRISTIAN-ZEN RETREAT DIRECTOR: WILLIAM JOHNSTON, S.J. ST. BENEDICT'S CONVENT, TAMSUI, TAIWANSunday-FridayI knew that Father Johnston was the well-known Irish Jesuit theologian at Sophia University in Tokyo, widely honored for his (...) studies of mysticism and his major contributions to the development of Buddhist-Christian encounter. I was totally intrigued. Instantly, I decided to attend the retreat.1day oneI was late when I arrived at Saint Benedict's chapel, where the retreat was underway, announcing my presence with a mighty thud of its door to a full gathering of retreatants sitting silently in the pews. Suddenly, here I was, the sole layman among a group of Catholic priests and sisters, most of them American-born, who were serving as missionaries in Taiwan. I looked and felt like a misfit, especially since Father Johnston had to wait to begin the retreat because of me. The chapel setting was Far Eastern in its simplicity and decor. Square in shape, it had a low altar in its center, about a foot and a half high. A plain, muted oil lamp hung to one side, softly gleaming in the semidarkness of late afternoon. Tatami mats and cushions were placed on the spacious floor around the front and two sides of the altar, so that after today's introduction, participants could sit on cushions according to zazen form and face the altar.As I dashed into a pew and looked up, I experienced a Catholic's shock. To my utter surprise, Father Johnston appeared in black Japanese yukata robes, instead of a priest's black suit. He bowed deeply before the altar, where he placed the Eucharist in a ciborium in plain view instead of in the tabernacle where it belonged. Turning to face us, he sat zazen style with his legs crossed on a Zen cushion with the ciborium behind his back. There was no "In the Name of the Father" or "let us pray." We simply maintained a long silence. In imitation of Japanese monks, many of the religious women and men retreatants were wearing robes, while the priests among them had on cassocks. Everyone but me had dressed appropriately for a Zen sesshin. I guessed many were fellow neophytes like me, as we all awkwardly sat zazen with legs crossed as best we could. We would quickly discover together that, for the uninitiated Westerner, zazen would initially prove a painful affair.Father Johnston was partly bald with longish hair at the temples, bushy white eyebrows, and wore a gray-brown beard and radiant smile. While born in Ireland and definitely Irish, you could tell by his clothing, carriage, and bearing that he had been profoundly touched by Japanese culture and language through his long years in Japan. Nonetheless, you readily knew by his sparkling blue eyes amidst his ruddy complexion that the Irish remained in the Japanese.I had brought my Zen sitting cushion all the way from my home in Pelham, MA, to Taiwan, and had practiced daily morning zazen in our Japanese-styled residence while teaching and researching at Tunghai University near Taichung. But feeling late and a bit shy about being up front with esteemed Father Johnston and among the clergy and [End Page 134] religious, I placed my cushion at the back of the chapel, sat down, and crossed my legs. Father Johnston noticed that I was off by myself, and came over. "Good," he laughed, complimenting my sitting posture. "But pretty hard to sit on a marble floor!"He explained to the participants that the schedule he set would be followed beginning the next morning, and that it was entirely voluntary. You could practice crosslegged zazen on your cushion and mat on the chapel floor or sit in the pews. The general atmosphere would be both disciplined, Zen-style, and relaxed. "Please keep silence at all times," he requested. Morning zazen was very early—from... (shrink)

The first, Ali Elovic, fought on several fronts in World War II and was forced to endure the horrors of Nazi and Communist prisons, but still maintained his thirst for life, emerging as a successful businessman. The second, Nobel Prize-winning virologist Carleton Gajdusek, used his extraordinary scientific talent to escape conventional life and to provide a home and education to more than thirty youths from "primitive" cultures in New Zealand, Australia, and other places.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hurricane Gloria LAWRENCE DUGAN A screaming northern gale flew past his wild words And slammed the sails, and pulled a wave toward heaven. —Aeneid, i.102–3 (Sarah Ruden, trans.) i. A phalanx of weather tools at the door, A shovel, an ice-pick, an umbrella, A new cane, leaning against each other, Plastic fabricated to resist storms, Reminds me of a storm I rode out years ago, The Nor’easter of 1985, (...) On the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Center Across the street from where the Fox Theater Spread the bright wings of its marquee, folded Now forever, torn down, and then replaced With a glass-box not unlike the office I looked out of, watching the rain lashing Windows, tearing at the flags hung on poles On other buildings, solitary banners Left up as if to challenge the weather To do its worst, to refute the young storm Tearing northeast out of the Atlantic, Predicted only a few days before As a hurricane, that didn’t happen, But leaving the high-rise building nearly Deserted, with the ticker still running Across the wall; the market had opened Empty office or not, unoccupied Desks giving it that strange quietude Peculiar to such spaces, which the mind Expects to be filled, even while seeing Otherwise. arion 28.2 fall 2020 66 hurricane gloria I felt like a sailor for The only time in my life, stepping off The elevator at 21, and then Walking into the main hall and sensing The building swayed slighty, barely feeling It but knowing it distinctly, hearing It creak exactly as I had heard ships At sea in dozens of movies, and with The sound, the sway, the massive grid of pipes And beams giving and taking. jms Old timers hadn’t warned me about this Although some had ridden out several Storms as bad, real or metaphorical, Not even old Harris who remembered Moving down from Susquehanna county In ’29, to Wall Street and the Crash. ii. Future archaeologists of urban Storms will study pictures of umbrellas Taking flight, wrecked synthetic shapes blooming Against resistant hands, then abandoned, Stuffed into trash cans, twirling down alleys, Pastels, stripes or old-fashioned banker-black, The edge of the story, the windy street’s Last rebuke to those daring to stagger To lunch but caught in the nor’easterly Gale’s grey wall of wind and rain that rattled Doors and buckled windows. The building held Two dozen companies, and I still like To think one fronted for an anchorite, Some isolated individual Up on 24, alone at his desk In a skyscraper office for ten years Praying, sometimes looking down the cliff walls At the peregrine falcons sweeping home Lawrence Dugan 67 To their massive nest stuffed tight in the bronze Lap of a statue seated on City Hall, One of the allegories of Founders And Lenape chiefs placed high over Broad, The hawks diving downward athwart the storm Coming on in grey curtains wavering Over the city and the Delaware Valley. Across the river in Jersey The pines begin, in Camden the street dirt Is sand; halfway to the shore the forest Runs above the expressway, farms below, The pines flourishing in sandy barren Earth lacking nitrogen, incinerating Every dozen years, thousands of acres Blowing away in flames seen at the shore. After that rain those woods were safe for weeks. iii. Ten years and two jobs later I needed Census material and found it online On a rainy day in Center City In a high-rise office nearby, a halfDay ’s work done to my surprise in only Twenty minutes, then realizing as I Stood up from a computer that the view Was familiar. I was back on 21 In my old office; jms had moved But the grey sky cleared with a sweep of wind And the view north and south looked as before Wherever the market’s ticker-tape rolled now. The weather had surprised me again; The only full rainbow I ever saw, The ancient sign that spares the world from floods, A pure unblemished iridescent span, Appeared late in spring, in a sun shower.... (shrink)

On a dreary spring morning in late October 2006, two policemen drove their cruiser up Nkonjane Road in the K Section of KwaMashu, a former “Africans only” township about fifteen kilometers northwest of Durban. As the cruiser passed over K Section’s softly sloping hills, two men sat handcuffed together in the back. The officers parked the car in front of a house where a woman had reported being raped a few days prior. Leaving the two suspects in the car, (...) the officers alighted and walked up to the home. After greeting the victim, they asked her to step outside to identify the men. The victim, upon seeing the two men seated in the squad car, loudly screamed that they were the rapists... The crowd... (shrink)

As the world held its breath for news surrounding COVID-19 and hunkered down amidst stay-at-home orders, medical students across the U.S. wondered if they would be called to serve on the front lines of the pandemic. Medical school administrators faced the challenge of protecting learners while also minimizing harm to their medical education. This balancing act raised critical questions in medical education as institutions reacted to changing guidelines. COVID-19 has punctuated already contentious areas of medical education and has (...) forced institutions and organizations to take quick action. From the perspectives of a recent medical school graduate and current resident and a practicing clinician-educator, we examine the pandemic’s impact on undergraduate medical education through an ethical lens. First, we explore the value of medical education, what drives this value, and how COVID-19 may alter it. We next consider student choice and how shifts toward utilitarianism in healthcare during a pandemic may affect learning and career exploration. Then, we inquire how access to technology may impact the experience of medical students from diverse backgrounds and varied institutions during a rapid shift to socially distanced learning. We identify vulnerabilities for students at several phases of the journey: premedical, preclinical, clinical, and preparation for residency. Finally, we address the hidden curriculum of COVID-19, its potential erosion of empathy among current medical students, and possible long-term consequences for future physicians and patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Mother's Love"Katie L. GholsonWho is going to teach my daughter about becoming a woman?" S said to me. S was 38 and diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She and her husband were high school sweethearts, and she had a young son and a daughter. She had been told that there was no cure for her cancer, and at the point of meeting her, very little was able to be (...) done to manage her symptoms.As a mother of a young daughter, I was humbled by the question she asked me. Her daughter was 12 and was just beginning to learn about becoming a woman. The anticipatory grief of not having the opportunities to care for one's own children in the crucial moments of their development was devastating to S. Her ability to name what she grieves the most was profoundly sad to me and the other team members who witnessed it.As a palliative care chaplain, I am used to sad and tragic cases, but this one felt different. S and I had [End Page 80] a lot in common. I am also 38, married to my high school sweetheart, and I have a son and a daughter. Of course, it was not just these reasons that I felt a connection to S. It was also the tangible despair I felt when I was with her. As a chaplain, I am trained to meet people where they are and not to hurry them from a place of despair and anguish. I visited with S nine different times and watched the progression of her existential distress. Her distress was not always linear. Some days, it took a backseat and other days, it was front and center, but I was there to be a witness to whatever she was thinking and feeling, and a lot of times, it was inexpressible grief.S did not want to meet with "palliative care" initially. She was terrified of her diagnosis and believed that there were treatments that would give her back the life she desired. She was fierce and determined. S was also religious and believed that there was a miraculous cure for her that would allow her the time she desired to spend with her children and her husband. S was a softball mom and loved to watch her daughter play. While in the hospital, she missed many games, and this weighed on her.Along with being an athlete, S's daughter was very artistic and made S a bouquet of paper flowers. Each flower contained an encouraging phrase. S opened one while I was in her room. She had lost her hair, much of her body weight, and was wearing a hospital gown, but when she opened the flower, her daughter had written, "You are beautiful, Mom." In that moment, two 38-year-old women understood that beauty transcends outward appearances. S was beautiful: her story, her life, and her courage.S loved to walk around the hallway of her unit. I think she felt if she could keep moving, she could stay alive. She was able to take a walk outside a few times while she was inpatient and getting fresh air was very positive to her. These walks not only gave her the ability to widen her environmental space, but they also gave her space to think and consider the difficult situation she was faced with. I accompanied her on one of her walks. It was while we walked next to each other that she was able to finally share with me that she was afraid. She told me that the fear of not getting home, and the fear of death was overwhelming. I find that sometimes people can be vulnerable when they are not feeling interrogated by a medical team staring at them as they lay in a hospital bed. The "normal" activity of taking a walk and being side-by-side humanized the experience and I think S felt that at that moment, she could talk to me human-to-human—like friend-to-friend.When S finally decided to go home on hospice, I collected some legacy project supplies. I went to the hospital... (shrink)