Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice (...) in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers. (shrink)

Critics of literary Darwinism like to point out the weaknesses of its scientific scaffolding, but the real flaw in this research program is its neglect of literary history and stylistic evolution. A full-fledged scientific approach to literary criticism should incorporate the kind of work being done by Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab—a quantitative analysis of the history of literary form. While Moretti and the literary Darwinists are almost never mentioned together, I (...) contend that their work is not only compatible but also necessarily so for a more consilient literary criticism. The Darwinian aesthetics promoted by Denis Dutton can help to unite these two approaches. (shrink)

Several recent books have claimed to integrate literary study with evolutionary biology. All of the books here considered, except Robert Storey’s, adopt conceptions of evolutionary theory that are in some way marginal to the Darwinian adaptationist program. All the works attempt to connect evolutionary study with various other disciplines or methodologies: for example, with cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, the psychology of emotion, neurobiology, chaos theory, or structuralist linguistics. No empirical paradigm has yet been established for this field, but important (...) steps have been taken, especially by Storey, in formulating basic principles, identifying appropriate disciplinary connections, and marking out lines of inquiry. Reciprocal efforts are needed from biologists and social scientists. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 221 Seiten: 71-103.

This book combines approaches from science, literary theory, and philosophy to examine the canon of Stephen King’s fiction from a Darwinist hermeneutic perspective in one critical study.

Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism. By Dirk R. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) In this substantial and incisive monograph, Dirk R. Johnson traces in minute detail Nietzsche’s stance towards Darwin at the various stages of his intellectually productive life. Johnson’s book is in two principal parts: Part 1 is on Nietzsche’s early Darwinism, which turned into anti-Darwinism, and Part 2 is a close reading of all three essays of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals in their historical context since together they (...) constitute “his most systematic, thorough, and far-reaching analysis of the theories of Darwin and their followers” (81, 111). The author concedes that Nietzsche’s exchange with Darwin (1809–82), who was a contemporary of Nietzsche (1944–1900), is often implicit only and that he leads his explicit discussions of Darwin mostly in his unpublished notebooks. I agree with Johnson’s view that Nietzsche knew Darwin’s thought and its implications both “early and well’ (3). Johnson provides compelling evidence of the “increased personalization” of Nietzsche’s opposition to Darwinism during his last productive years after Zarathustra. For instance, Nietzsche entitled section 9,14 of Twilight of the Idols “Anti-Darwin,” and explained that “his position at this stage resulted both from his critical reappraisal of Darwin’s genealogical perspectives in the middle period and his attempt in Zarathustra to define the parameters of an affirmative, anti-metaphysical vision beyond Darwinism” (79). He argues that Zarathustra trans-values Darwinian categories such as “reason.” For him, “the work’s literary self-expression is the message,” since the superior well-being of the future higher type “can only be conjured through poetic affirmation” (48, 50). (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This essay responds to Darko Suvin by focusing on his observations on self hood and personality. Antiutopias are defined as narrative texts framed by fear and anxiety regarding the self-preservation of individuality and by subscription to the principle of relentless struggle for survival amid resource scarcity. The ambiguities that insinuate themselves within this framework include: first, the conflation of “self-preservation” with domination over others; second, the oscillation of self-preservation between a “biopolitical” pole and a “cultural” one. Turning to Adorno and (...) Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the article explicates why, in their view, “self- preservation” destroys “the very thing that is to be preserved.” The conclusion involves examining a few literary texts both as instances of the “pleasures of misery” imposed by the antiutopian obsession with “self-preservation,” and—contrastively—as ways of exploring the high cost and risk involved in a utopian transformation of self hood beyond the dictates of “self-preservation.”. (shrink)

Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting (...) integration often involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways. (shrink)

Galatea, or the Future of Darwinism W Russell Brain Originally published in 1927 "A brilliant exposition…of the evolutionary hypothesis." The Guardian "Should prove invaluable…" Literary Guide This non-technical but closely-reasoned book is a challenge to the orthodox teaching on evolution known as Neo-Darwinism. The author claims that although Neo-Darwinian theories can possibly account for the evolution of forms, they are quite inadequate to explain the evolution of functions. 88pp ************** Daedalus or Science and the Future J B (...) S Haldane Originally published in 1924. "The essay is brilliant. Sparkling with wit and bristling with challenges." British Medical Journal "Predicts the most startling changes." Morning Post This volume examines the future of scientific research from religious, philosophical social and economic standpoints. 94pp Automaton, or the Future of Mechanical Man H Stafford Hatfield Originally published in 1928 "It is impossible to do justice to his volume in a brief review…"Daily Herald At the time of original publication mankind’s chief inventions had been extensions of his senses or limbs. This work prophesies the dawn of an era in which substitutes will gradually be found even for the human brain. 96pp Gallio or the Tyranny of Science J W N Sullivan Originally published in 1927 "So packed with ideas it is not possible to give any adequate résumé of its contents." Times Literary Supplement "Remarkable monograph…devastating summary of materialism…" Spectator An attack on the values which science is so successfully imposing upon civilization. 90pp. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 255-268 [Access article in PDF] The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study Jonathan Gottscha I THE BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE are not strewn randomly on the ground; they are part of a coherent, interconnected tree. Physics is the most fundamental of all the sciences, so it is the trunk of the tree. The branch of chemistry emerges from physics, because the laws of (...) chemistry depend on the laws of physics: chemical reactions occur the way they do because of the physical properties of atoms. Biology's branch splits off from chemistry's: the molecules that comprise living things are bound by the rules of chemistry. Scientists, while grasping this fundamental interconnection of the broad boughs of the natural sciences, 1 have rarely craned their necks sufficiently to glimpse the upper reaches of the tree of knowledge: the green canopy of human culture that is the traditional jurisdiction of the social sciences and humanities. In fact, scholars from all disciplines have mostly proceeded as though the greenery above was the outgrowth of a neighboring tree from a fundamentally different species.Since the 1960s, however, a maverick band of Darwinian neck-craners have been demonstrating that the stuff of human culture, studied in the humanities and social sciences, is a contiguous part of the tree of knowledge: human culture and behavior grow out of human biology. 2 These scholars and scientists continue to define themselves by different names depending on subtleties in their particular approaches: Darwinian psychology, sociobiology, Darwinian anthropology, biosociology, human behavioral ecology, human ethology, and evolutionary psychology. 3 However, sacrificing some precision on the alter of clarity, I will refer to all of the above approaches with the umbrella term of human [End Page 255] behavioral biology, understood in its most expansive sense as the study of how millions of years of evolution shaped the human mind, and thus human behavior, and thus human culture. No matter how human behavioral biologists define their work, they all share the conviction that human behavior, psychology, and culture cannot be fully understood separate from human bio-evolutionary history.Darwinian excavation of the foundations of human nature has inspired a revolutionary movement in the social sciences that proceeds to this day. Like most revolutions, this one has seen its share of rolling heads and intellectual bloodshed. Starting with the "sociobiology debates" of the late 1970s through mid-80s and continuing through the "science wars" of the early-mid 1990s allegations and recriminations of the most serious sort have been almost casually poured into the air: racism, sexism, Social Darwinism, biological determinism, disciplinary colonialism, disciplinary xenophobia, and "biophobia." 4 However, despite entrenched, sometimes zealous opposition, evolutionary thinking has firmly established itself in the social sciences. Thumbing through leading social science journals, it is no longer a shock to encounter articles exploring traditional topics with shiny new Darwinian tools. This stands in stark contrast to the situation in the decades immediately following World War II, where applying biology to human behavior and culture was virtually taboo. In fact, the UNESCO statement of 1952 explicitly tabooed human behavioral biology as scientifically and politically incorrect. Moreover, this phenomenon is in marked contrast to the mainstream social science of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was in the midst of a wicked backlash against the resurgence of biological inquiry into behavior represented in sociobiology.Currently, while human behavioral biology retains many social scientist critics, and while certain social science fields remain largely hostile or indifferent, invoking biology to explain social behavior is moving toward the mainstream. Almost thirty years after E. O. Wilson made, in Sociobiology (1975), his first call for a merger of disciplines under a new biological synthesis, biology-savvy social scientists and social-science-savvy biologists have provided startling new insights into a host of topics traditionally examined in isolation from biology: gender differences, criteria for mate choice, resource acquisition and allocation, aggression, cooperation, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, sexual politics, religious sensibilities, social hierarchy, moral codes, etc. 5Though one must be careful not to overstate the progress, we are [End Page 256] witnessing... (shrink)

Through a close analysis of socio-biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work on motherhood and ‘mirror neurons’ it is argued that Hrdy’s claims exemplify how research that ostensibly bases itself on neuroscience, including in literary studies ‘literary Darwinism’, relies after all not on scientific, but on political assumptions, namely on underlying, unquestioned claims about the autonomous, transparent, liberal agent of consumer capitalism. These underpinning assumptions, it is further argued, involve the suppression or overlooking of an alternative, prior tradition of (...) feminist theory, including feminist science criticism. (shrink)

Like a number of other writers, [Gunther S.] Stent contends that in essential ways science and art are comparable. As he puts it: "Both the arts and the sciences are activities that endeavor to discover and communicate truths about the world" . Although one cannot but sympathize with the desire to bring the so-called Two Cultures together, a viable and enduring union will not be achieved by ignoring or glossing over important differences. Using the behavior of scientists, artists, and laymen (...) as empirical evidence, the first part of this essay will argue that Stent's union is a shotgun marriage, not one made in heaven, and that his attempt to wed different disciplinary species results not in fecund insight but barren misconception. In the second part, I will suggest that this misunderstanding arises because, like many scientists Stent fails even to recognize the existence of the humanist - that is, the theorist and critic of the arts. Yet the humanities must be included, and areas of inquiry within them differentiated, if diverse disciplines are to be related to one another in a coherent and consistent way. Leonard B. Meyer's most recent book is Explaining Music: Essays and Explanations. He is also the author of Emotion and Meaning in Music, The Rhythmic Structure of Music , and Music, The Arts, and Ideas, awarded the Laing Prize in 1969. See also: "Against Literary Darwinism" by Jonathan Kramnick in Vol. 38, No. 2. (shrink)

In recent debates in moral psychology and literary Darwinism, several authors suggested that narrative art plays a significant role in the process of the social learning of moral norms, functioning as storage of locally salient moral information. However, an integrative view, which would help explain the inner workings of this morally educative function of narrative art, is still lacking. This paper provides such a unifying theoretical account by bringing together insights from moral psychology, educational sciences, cognitive/evolutionary narratology, and (...) cultural evolution. A study of contemporary American rap music is included to showcase the benefits of this integrative approach in the context of one particular type of narrative art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pleasures of FictionDenis DuttonHuman Beings Expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment—music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual (...) attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new.The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners—rhapsodes, novelists, playwrights, actors—and is governed both informally with stylistic conventions and sometimes formally—for example, by censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance, marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo. [End Page 453]The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, $85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same time, Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds, in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints, however, are not to the fundamental notion that evolution by natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwin's revolution. However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll remains a Darwinian through and through.Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that "is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts." Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure.Some of the mental processes that grow from... (shrink)

This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry that inspired nineteenth-century Swedish National Romanticism. We show that the characters featured in two of Erik Gustaf Geijer’s poems, “The Viking” and “The Yeoman Farmer”, display patterns of time perspective, mating effort, and parental invest­ment that are now recognized as central life history attributes: a fast strategy and a slow strategy, respectively. These patterns were identified by undergraduate participants who read excerpts of the poems that had (...) been stripped of identifying information and mentions of romantic or sexual relationships. Participants read each poem and rated each character on validated scales of the life history dimensions of mating effort and paren­tal investment, relationship interests and attractiveness, characteristics of his developmen­tal environment, and physiological characteristics. Results are consistent with generally accepted associations in life history theory and also inform current theoretical develop­ments and debates. Geijer had an intuitive understanding of life history patterns, which he used to create recognizable characters for his Romantic depiction of Swedish history. (shrink)

Although existentialism and evolutionary biology might appear to be polar opposites, with the former denying a role for “human nature” and the latter emphasizing it, there are some unrecognized parallels. One in particular is that both disciplines assume that human life is not inherently meaningful, such that any attribution of meaning must arise from human actions. The present article traces some of this intellectual correspondence in the realm of literature.

Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism and the folly (...) of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and (...) economist Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How The Mule Got Its Tale: Moretti’s Darwinian BricolageGeoffrey Winthrop-Young* (bio)Franco Moretti. Atlas Of The European Novel. London: Verso, 1998. [AN]Franco Moretti. Modern Epic: The World System From Goethe To García Márquez. Trans. Quentin Hoare. London: Verso, 1996. [ME]1. Darwinian Preliminaries1805: Cousin de Grainville, Le dernier homme. A world in which humans have displaced the oceans dies from ecological exhaustion. 1836: Louis Geoffroy, Napoléon et la conquête du monde. (...) A history in which Napoleon wins at Waterloo and becomes emperor of the world. 1854: Charlemagne-Ischir Defontenay, Star ou Psi de Cassiopée. A distant planetary system filled with its own mythologies, histories and migration patterns.... A litany of lost names and titles: dead, discarded, ignored, out of print, reduced to pulp and brief entries in reference books, known only to experts specializing in early French science fiction. Cut off from each other with little sense of coherence or continuity, two generations of writers had been probing the many possibilities of a new literary form, some of them in highly imaginative ways, but nobody could have foretold the fate of what Félix Bodin had named littérature futuriste. Suddenly, the literary equivalent of a mass extinction wiped out a broad spectrum of conjectural imaginations. Did they deserve their fate? Wrong question. Who is to blame for their disappearance? Cui bono? The prime suspect, no doubt, is Jules Verne. “It was as if SF had for sixty years sought in vain for an institutional ‘landing point,’” surmises Marc Angenot, before pointing out that Verne’s success coincided with, indeed was based on, the repression of a wide array of promising alternatives [64]. Displaying that jovial bluntness which in his days passed for commendable virility, he extracted certain formal features from his environment, eliminated the rest, and engineered his selections into a highly marketable literary model. A lot began with Verne, but a lot ended with him, too.At the outset a rapidly emerging set of random and undirected variations opens up a multiplicity of future possibilities; then a choice is made, a selection that locks in one particular variant while locking out the competition. Subsequently, a winner—who need not be the best or most promising candidate, but who by virtue of his selection manages to impose definite constraints on future developments—spawns a tradition that coasts along until another crisis is heralded by yet another round of proliferation and selection. Readers familiar with Franco Moretti’s work will recognize this Darwinian scenario, which provides the theoretical backbone for his analyses. In the programmatic essay “On Literary Evolution” in the revised edition of Signs Taken for Wonders, it allows him to whittle down the development of the European novel from its experimental phase in the eighteenth century to the victory of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century and its subsequent disintegration to what must be the shortest account of the history of the novel ever written: “Novels/novel/novels” [264]. In The Way of the World it helps explain how it was possible for the Bildungsroman “to emerge victorious from that veritable ‘struggle for existence’ between various narrative forms that took place at the [End Page 18] turn of the eighteenth century” [10]. Modern Epic, in turn, uses the Darwinian model to plot the evolution of the hybrid genre announced in its title, while Atlas of the European Novel explains the morphological change novels undergo when they move from one space to another. But why Darwin? Or, since “Darwin” means many different things to many different Darwinists: why this punctuated, nongradualist, highly contingency-tolerant Gouldian Darwin? How much do we gain by applying the proliferation/lock-in sequence to the development of devices, texts, and genres? What motivates the optimism that the Darwinian paradigm may “help us to explain in a new—and better—way numerous questions that literary history has never succeeded in resolving satisfactorily”? [ME 5].But then why raise these arcane questions? Surely, Moretti’s books center on more relevant issues. Atlas is about space—and given the current critical focus on space, what more timely topic could there be? And what more obvious criticism than... (shrink)

This innovative study of ethics in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) explores the intense struggle to define a common morality for the emerging nation-state. In the Social Darwinist atmosphere of the time, the Japanese state sought to quell uprisings and overcome social disruptions so as to produce national unity and defend its sovereignty against Western encroachment. Morality became a crucial means to attain these aims. Moral prescriptions for re-ordering the population came from all segments of society, including Buddhist, Christian, and Confucian apologists; (...) literary figures and artists; advocates of natural rights; anarchists; and women defending nontraditional gender roles. Each envisioned a unity grounded in its own moral perspective. It was in this tumultuous atmosphere that the academic discipline of ethics (rinrigaku) emerged—not as a value-neutral, objective form of inquiry as its practitioners claimed, but a state-sponsored program with its own agenda. After examining the broad moral space of "civilization," Richard Reitan turns to the dominant moral theories of early Meiji and the underlying epistemology that shaped and authorized them. He considers the fluidity of moral subjectivity (the constantly shifting nature of norms to which we are subject and how we apprehend, resist, or practice them) by juxtaposing rinrigaku texts with moral writings by religious apologists. By the beginning of the 1890s, moral philosophers in Japan were moving away from the empiricism and utilitarianism of the prior decade and beginning to place "spirit" at the center of ethical inquiry. This shift is explored through the works of two thinkers, Inoue Tetsujiro (1856–1944) and Nakashima Rikizo (1858–1918), the first chair of ethics at Tokyo Imperial University. Finally, Reitan takes a detailed look at the national morality movement (kokumin dotoku) and its close association with the state before concluding with an outline of some conceptual linkages between the Meiji and later periods. With its highly original thesis, clear and sound methodology, and fluid prose, Making a Moral Society will be welcomed by scholars and students of both Japanese intellectual history and ethics in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche, Biology and MetaphorBabette E. BabichGregory Moore. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 228. Cloth, $55.00.Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor is a well-written book on a topic of growing importance in Nietzsche studies. Not only concerned with offering an interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of biology and metaphor, Moore's approach offers a literary contextualization of Darwinism in the (...) history of ideas but also in terms of an important reflection on the idea of decadence so important to Nietzsche and so influential in theorizing public health and law in the twentieth century, most perniciously in its deadly expressions in Nazi propaganda. Moore is thus able to bridge the fields of the more specifically linguistic study of metaphor and source-scholarship. To Moore's great credit, he seeks to emphasize the extent to which Nietzsche's thought was developed in active correspondence with the scientific literature and debates of his age. But this reviewer thinks it important to warn those with classical or traditional interest in metaphor that the text presupposes that the reader (and this is also to say that Moore) knows a Nietzschean metaphor when he sees one.Moore begins with the question of Nietzsche's Darwinism, focusing on the physiology of power to explore the relations between Darwin, Spencer, Lamarck, and Rolph, but also Nietzsche's favorites, Malthus and Lange, etc. The discussion of the history of the reception of Darwin's ideas is careful and extensive and offers an insightful clarification of Darwin (necessary to distinguish Darwin from Darwinism, "social" and otherwise). Some readers will find it even more Anglophone than seems justified by Darwin's heritage, despite Moore's passing references to Cuvier and (at rather greater length) Haeckel and Roux.This reviewer notes that the latter references have been well-discussed in the German literature and to some great part Moore is fair to this tradition even if it is also true that the discussion never enters the level of the history of science as this reader, for one, might have wished. In the case of Moore's interpretation of Nietzsche's texts, the readings sometimes suggest a reprise of what has come to be the consensus (and not just among Nietzsche scholars) of views on Nietzsche's thinking. Thus where certain secondary authors are in force in Moore's well-documented account (Pick, Moles, and Ruse), others are missing. Indeed, in the case of Nietzsche and Darwinism, Frederick Gregory's Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992) offers an important supplement. Another book that seems to have been overlooked is Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982), and those interested in von Baer and other proponents of teleology in biology will find Lenoir's broader account useful.The second half of the book addresses degeneration and like most contemporary discussions, Moore's book is charged with the political history of the last century. Moore reviews the association of decadence with jazz music and—via physiognomy as its external signifier—to the ugly, the Jew, the Black, and, of course, to women who broke with the family role. As an instantiation, Moore uncovers the nineteenth century antipathy to "allegedly aberrant behavior such as masturbation and homosexuality" in Nietzsche's "restrictive" [End Page 348] (133) view of sexuality and precocious eroticism (134) as degeneration. However, the issue of masturbation is complicated. The nineteenth-century perspective on masturbation was less a matter of prudishness than a judgment backed with considerable social and medical force, which equated the practice with sickness or criminality, the counterpart to which today would be our judgment with regard to an addiction to cocaine or heroine. This censure drove Wagner's "exposure" of Nietzsche's personal dependence on this practice. Readers interested in this question can either take themselves to the easy-to-find because eponymous chapter in Marc Wiener's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, 1995) or to David B. Allison's account of this as the occasion for the break between Nietzsche and Wagner in Reading... (shrink)

Lecture 1. What is intellectual history? -- Lecture 2. The scientific origins of the Enlightenment -- Lecture 3. The emergence of the modern intellectual -- Lecture 4. The cultural meaning of the French Revolution -- Lecture 5. The new conservatism in post-revolutionary Europe -- Lecture 6. The new German philosophy -- Lecture 7. Hegel's philosophical conception of history -- Lecture 8. The new liberalism -- Lecture 9. The literary culture of Romanticism -- Lecture 10. The meaning of the romantic (...) hero -- Lecture 11. The Industrial Revolution and classical economics -- Lecture 12. Early critiques of industrial capitalism -- Lecture 13. Hegelianism and the young Marx -- Lecture 14. Marx's social critique -- Lecture 15. Feminism in the 19th century culture -- Lecture 16. Women's rights in a man's world -- Lecture 17. Tocqueville & Mill, rethinking liberal theory -- Lecture 18. Nationalisms and national identities -- Lecture 19. The novel as art and social criticism -- Lecture 20. Science and its literary critics -- Lecture 21. Charles Darwin and the new biology -- Lecture 22. Controversies of social Darwinism -- Lecture 23. The heroic critic in mass society -- Lecture 24. Nietzsche's critique of European culture. (shrink)

"Pioneers of Evolution" is a 1896 treatise by English Edward Clodd within which he explores the early proponents of evolution and the scientific answers to the origin of humankind. Looking at the world of such notable figures as Charles Darwin and Gerbert Spencer, this fascinating volume is not to be missed by those with an interest in evolution and the history of related ideas. Contents include: "Pioneers of Evolution From Thales to Lucretius," "The Arrest of Enquiry," "From the Early Christian (...) Period to the Time of Augustine," "From Augustine to Bacon," "The Renascence of Science," "Modern Evolution," "Darwinism and Wallace," "Herbert Spencer," "Thomas Henry Huxley," etc. Edward Clodd (1840 - 1930) was an English writer, banker, and anthropologist famous for his various and notable literary and scientific friends, including the likes of Edward Fitzgerald, Samuel Butler, Andrew Lang, and others. Other notable works by author include: "The Childhood of the World" (1872), "Jesus of Nazareth" (1880), and "Nature Studies" (1882). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold was a pragmatist in the vernacular sense of the word. Bryan G. Norton claims that Leopold was also heavily influenced by American Pragmatism, a formal school of philosophy. As evidence, Norton offers Leopold's misquotation of a definition of right (as truth) by political economist, A.T. Hadley, who was an admirer of the philosophy of William James. A search of Leopold's digitised literary remains reveals no other evidence that Leopold was directly influenced by any actual American Pragmatist or (...) by Pragmatism (although he may have been indirectly influenced by Pragmatism early in his career). A 1923 reference, by Leopold, to Hadley and Hadley's putative definition of truth, cited by Norton, is dripping with irony. Leopold, as he matured philosophically, regarded a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric dominionism and consumerism to an evolutionary-ecological worldview and an associated non-anthropocentric 'land ethic' to be necessary for successful and sustainable conservation. Hadley espoused a brutal form of Social Darwinism and his philosophy, as expressed in the book of Hadley's that Norton cites, is politically reactionary, militaristic and unconcerned with conservation. Leopold's mature philosophy and Hadley's – far from consonant, as Norton claims – are diametrically opposed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian GrayJoseph CarrollSince the advent of the poststructuralist revolution some thirty years ago, interpretive literary criticism has suppressed two concepts that had informed virtually all previous literary thinking: (1) the idea of the author as an individual person and an originating source for literary meaning, and (2) the idea of "human nature" as the represented subject and (...) common frame of reference for literary depictions. Under the tutelage of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, literary critics learned to speak of authors, characters, settings, and plots not as individuals situated in a natural world but as discursive formations constituted by the circulation of linguistic, cultural, and ideological energies. In the three decades during which poststructuralism has dominated academic literary study, a different kind of revolution—evolutionary, Darwinian, and naturalistic—has been transforming the social sciences. Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, cognitive archaeology, and behavioral genetics do not all agree with one another in every respect, but they are all nonetheless aspects or phases of a common research program. The central working hypothesis in this program is that the human species, like all other species, has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment and that as a consequence it has a distinct, genetically transmitted, species-typical set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral. That set of characteristics is what in common language is meant by "human nature." Literature has always given us subjectively evocative depictions of human nature, and Darwinian social science is now giving us a more comprehensive and scientifically precise account of it. The sense of [End Page 286] individual agency is one crucial aspect of human nature, and that aspect is now being explored in complementary ways by personality psychology and by cognitive neuroscience.1Over the past decade or so, a scattered handful of literary scholars has broken away from the dominant poststructuralist paradigm and has sought to make use of the new scientific information on human nature.2 The simplest and most obvious way to use this information is to examine the behavior depicted in literary texts and to correlate that behavior with "human universals," that is, with forms of behavior that appear in every known culture and that thus appear to be embedded in the nature of the species. Seeking depictions of universals has produced valuable results for literary study, but this first move in Darwinian criticism does not exhaust the range of possibility in the analysis of literary meaning. Human nature is complex and sometimes divided against itself; individuals vary, and some variations depart from species-typical patterns, even in the most adaptively crucial aspects of survival and reproduction. Moreover, literary meaning involves more than the represented subject matter. Authors imbue texts with meanings and affects peculiar to themselves; authors engage in communicative transactions with audiences; and texts have formal and aesthetic properties that are not reducible to represented subject matter. All of these aspects of the total literary situation are part of literary meaning, and all of them can and should fall within the range of analysis available to Darwinian literary study.3Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is. Wilde does not develop his themes in Darwinian terms, but the novel can still be read [End Page... (shrink)

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion leading to relentless hostility between the two emerged in the nineteenth century and has become a powerful narrative of modernity. Most historians of science trace the origins of the so-called ‘conflict thesis’ to the English-speaking world, more precisely to scientist-historian John William Draper and literary scholar Andrew Dickson White. Their books on the history of scientific-religious conflict turned into bestsellers. Yet, if we look beyond the Anglo-American world, the conflict (...) thesis appears in new historical settings. This paper argues that the science vs. religion narrative flourished already in Germany before Draper and White announced the warfare between science and religion in England and the USA. Focusing on Germany, we aim to show that the conflict thesis emerged in a polycentric process shaped by various political, cultural, and social struggles. It became a rhetorical weapon for liberal scientists in Germany to oppose Ultramontanism and, at the same time, to discredit their rivals as unscientific, fanatic, or even as ‘henchmen’ of the Pope. Our paper makes a case for a decentred approach to the history of the conflict thesis, which brings to the fore specific political and cultural tensions shaping this narrative in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Much has been written through the years of the clash between Darwinism and natural theology, and the basic tenants of this debate are well understood (Gillispie 1959; Bowler 1977; Ruse 2003; McGrath 2011). However, the literature is still growing, and one may wonder if anything new may yet be added. Of these new literary sources, one of the richest is the online Darwin Correspondence Project, which makes it possible to search and read the full texts of all correspondence (...) either sent or received by Darwin, up to the year 1868. (This project is ongoing and letters are still being recovered and added.) The purpose of this article is to outline the role of the intelligent design argument, as espoused by its principal .. (shrink)

This is the first of a two-part essay on the history of debates concerning the creativity of natural selection, from Darwin through the evolutionary synthesis and up to the present. Here I focus on the mid-late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, with special emphasis on early Darwinism and its critics, the self-styled “mutationists.” The second part focuses on the evolutionary synthesis and some of its critics, especially the “neutralists” and “neo-mutationists.” Like Stephen Gould, I consider the creativity of (...) natural selection to be a key component of what has traditionally counted as “Darwinism.” I argue that the creativity of natural selection is best understood in terms of selection initiating evolutionary change, and selection being responsible for the presence of the variation it acts upon, for example by directing the course of variation. I consider the respects in which both of these claims sound non-Darwinian, even though they have long been understood by supporters and critics alike to be virtually constitutive of Darwinism. (shrink)

This paper investigates Neoplatonist literary criticism by framing the special interest in the target of each dialogue within the context of cosmo-literary theory. The starting hypothesis is that the themes of Plato's dialogues do not fully meet the expectations of a new didactics based on isagogical schemes as an image of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Among these schemes is the target of each dialogue, whose relation to the theme can be explained, in a fruitful and innovative way, through a cosmic (...) analogy. Thus after examining the more or less explicit criticism of literary criteria of analysis by Plato's ancient exegetes, this article will focus on how Neoplatonists load the Greek termskopos(target) with metaphysical content and, accordingly, on how we should translate it in accordance with the commentators’ intentions. It will show that the target is the literary counterpart to the One, but that it should not be confused with the theme because the latter must be seen as the literary counterpart to the Intellect. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this Journal Hugo David discussed the possible sources for the comparison that Abhinavagupta draws between ritual and literary discourse at the beginning of his “critical reconstruction” of the theory of rasa in the sixth chapter of his New Dramatic Art. The question of Abhinavagupta’s sources raises more general questions about Abhinavagupta’s use of the concepts and analytical procedures of Mīmāṃsā in his literary-theoretical works. What, if anything, does Mīmāṃsā really have to do with (...) the analysis of literary texts? How, if at all, can we construct parallels between ritual and literary texts such that the hermeneutics of one can illuminate the hermeneutics of the other? And more specifically, what are the examples that might convince us that there are such parallels? With these questions I attempt, modestly, to reach a somewhat better understanding of the beginning of Abhinavagupta’s “critical reconstruction,” which has already received a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention. I also hope, however, that this passage might serve as an example for how to think of the “borrowing” of concepts typically associated with Mīmāṃsā into the realm of literary theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be (...) successfully discriminated from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

La lectura de obras literarias constituye una herramienta para contribuir al desarrollo cognoscitivo, valorativo y empático del estudiante, así como a la aprehensión y transformación de la realidad. Por lo que el objetivo consistió en valorar la importancia de los talleres de apreciación literaria como contribución a la praxis humana en la Educación Médica mediante el criterio de especialistas. Reading literary works is a tool to contribute to students' cognitive, assessable and empathetic development as well as to capture and (...) transform reality. Therefore, the objective is to assess the importance of literary appreciation as a contribution to human praxis in the educational context of a medical university. (shrink)

Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers (...) important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it. (shrink)