This chapter begins with a narration of a slave ship's arrival from the Dutch Gold Coast, today's Ghana, to a South American seaport, Suriname, with about 40 blacks. The uprooted Africans used what was at hand, both culturally and materially, to cobble together the beginnings of an African American culture. It appears that these cultures are not so much born as assembled. This introductory chapter attempts to answer four preliminary questions: to paraphrase cultural theorist and sociologist Stuart Hall: (...) what is the black in black aesthetics; in the same spirit: what is the aesthetic in black aesthetics; what good is a philosophy of black aesthetics; and why discuss any of this in terms of assembly. The idea of assembling black aesthetics presupposes that there is a responsible way of appealing to racial blackness. The chapter also indicates the content available in other chapters of the book. (shrink)

In several of John Dewey's works on education, including Democracy and Education and The School and Society, he models the ideal school after the ideal community, conceiving the former as a microcosm of the latter. More recently, James Fishkin in Democracy and Deliberation and The Voice of the People renders a deliberative poll design with an eye to making its randomly selected deliberators representative of much larger groups, and in this way microcosms of the population-at-large. Thus, the smaller group deliberates (...) as if it were the much larger population assembled together to deliberate in mass-scale citizen assemblies. Although random selection is not widely accepted as a legitimate method for selecting political representatives, it has many desirable features, the most important of which is its ability to constitute bodies that resemble, and in this sense, represent larger populations. This last notion that smaller deliberative bodies can perform as if they are the larger populations represented-which I call the 'microcosm concept'-is not distinctly American, though many commentators trace it back to the musings of John Adams and some of the Anti-Federalists. In this paper, I argue that insights derived from Dewey's model of an educational microcosm can be appropriated and employed as resources to defend Fishkin's model of a deliberative microcosm against contemporary critics, such as Robert Goodin and Cass Sunstein. Besides defending Fishkin's deliberative poll design against its critics, I also argue that a Dewey-Fishkin partnership can help to improve actual deliberative institutions. I show how the Dewey-Fishkin microcosm concept operates in an actual deliberative event: the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, whereby a group of randomly-selected citizens were assembled and charged to deliver recommendations on whether to change the existing electoral system in the Canadian province of Ontario. (shrink)

Locke’s views on religious toleration are a “tremendously important contribution” on this subject, which anticipated the First Amendment to the Constitution and subsequent Supreme Court decisions. Professor Konvitz argues that religious liberty is a prerequisite to all the liberties of the human spirit including freedom of speech, press, and assembly. He further asserts that, historically, revolts against oppressive governments often bring with the struggle for religious liberty. Locke’s basic concepts regarding religious freedom are explained. These include the right of (...) individuals to maintain their personal religious beliefs free from the interference and persecution of either an established ecclesiastical order or the state, the nature of churches as voluntary self-governing organizations, the importance of the separation of church and state, and the importance of religious tolerance for the religious opinions that differ from the norm. For Locke, religious freedom is not absolute. Intolerant sects that call for the dissolution of the state unless it accepts their religious viewpoint, that serve foreign governments, that advocate practices violating the laws of civil society, or that deny the existence of God should not be tolerated. (shrink)

The question of what kind of city we are trying to have is an urgent one as the world continues its dramatic urbanization. Urban Visions presumes that an understanding of our urban experience is a prerequisite for envisioning what the city could be. In assembling work by distinguished authors from different disciplines and countries, Urban Visions offers a patient examination of what urban experience is and of the city’s necessity, with explicit and implicit propositions about what it could be. The (...) book is illustrated in full color. (shrink)

This is a slightly, revised version of a paper delivered at the General Assembly of Sapporo Cool Seminar in American Studies. Japan 1981. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the publisher of the lectures in Japan.*2 †From Ideas. Faith, and Feelings: Essays on American Intellectual and Religions History, 1952–1982 by Henry F. May, Copyright © 1983 by Henry F. May. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the (...) minds and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

Lives of the Prophets: The Illustrations to Hafiz-i Abru’s ‘Assembly of Chronicles’. By Mohamad Reza Ghiasian. Studies in Persian Cultural History, vol. 16. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xv + 343. $159, €132.

This book presents the author’s many and varied contributions to the revival and re-evaluation of American pragmatism. The assembled critical perspective on contemporary pragmatism in philosophy emphasizes the American tradition of cultural pluralism and the requirements of American democracy. Based partly on a survey of the literature on interest-group pluralism and critical perspectives on the politics of globalization, the monograph argues for reasoned caution concerning the practical effects of the revival. Undercurrents of “vulgar pragmatism” including both moral (...) and epistemic relativism threaten the intellectual and moral integrity of American thought – and have contributed to the present sense of political crisis. -/- The text chiefly contributes to the evaluation of the contemporary influence of the philosophy of John Dewey (1859–1952) and his late development of the classical pragmatist tradition. In comparison to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), William James (1842–1910), and earlier currents of American thought, Dewey’s philosophy, dominated by its overall emphasis on unification, is weaker in its support for the pluralism of cultural and religious contributions which have lent moral self-restraint to American policy and politics, both foreign and domestic. With all due homage to Dewey’s conception of philosophy, centered on human problems and the need for our ameliorative efforts, the argument is that in the contemporary revival, Dewey’s thought has been too often captured by “post-modernist” bandwagons of self-promotion and institutional control. -/- This work defends democratic individualism against more collectivist and corporatist tendencies in contemporary neo-pragmatism, and it draws upon up-to-date political analysis in defense of America’s long republican tradition. Pragmatism will not and cannot be removed from, or ignored, in American intellectual and moral history; and its influence on disciplines from law to politics, sociology and literary criticism has been immense. However, pragmatism has often been weak in commitment to cultural pluralism and in its accounts of truth. (shrink)

This is a slightly revised version of a paper delivered at the General Assembly of Sapporo Cool Seminar in American Studies, Japan 1981. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the publisher of the lectures in Japan.

Throughout the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray and his close friend George Engelmann of St. Louis engaged themselves with recruiting men who sought to make a living by natural history collecting, sending these men into the field, searching for institutions and individuals who would subscribe to incoming collections, compiling catalogs, and collecting subscription fees. Although several botanists have noted Gray and Engelmann’s bold experiment as having introduced America to a mode by which European naturalists had (...) devised to organize scientific expeditions, historians of science have not taken the “subscription mode” seriously. I argue that it was specifically by undertaking the labor of cataloging species and charging subscription fees for the cataloged species that Gray established himself as a metropolitan botanist. One crucial consequence of Gray’s rising profile was that he acquired sufficient “cataloging power” to secure his status as an authoritative cataloger of species, and as a kind of “mint” or “storehouse” :1–28, 2001a) who produced well-pruned lists of American species to enable transactions between American and European botanists. But this essay is not focused on the Europeanization of American taxonomy. Drawing on work by scholars who place emphasis on how new forms of knowledge get produced when knowledge travels, my focus here is the evolution of the subscription mode when Gray and Engelmann adapted it to American natural history. My conclusion examines what historian of science Vanessa Heggie :318–334, 2014) identifies as the “danger of category dominance” in today’s historiography of science and shows how a kind of “assemblage thinking” may help historians cope with this danger. (shrink)

This book is about the eminent behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, the American culture in which he lived and worked, and the behaviorist movement that played a leading role in American psychological and social thought during the twentieth century. From a base of research on laboratory animals in the 1930s, Skinner built a committed and influential following as well as a utopian movement for social reform. His radical ideas attracted much public attention and generated heated controversy. By the (...) mid-1970s, he had become the most widely recognized scientist in America, surpassing even Margaret Mead and Linus Pauling. Yet Skinner himself was an unassuming family man from a modest middle-class background, a machine-shop tinkerer whose tastes ran to English and French literature. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and historical styles appropriate to the evidence, the authors assembled in this volume examine Skinner's remarkable rise to prominence in the wider context of America's intellectual, cultural, and social history. (shrink)

Race in the United States is most often talked about in terms of black and white, sometimes as a spectrum running from whiteness to blackness. Such a conception does not map onto actual racial structures in the United States and excludes Native Americans. This article will criticize this binary, detailing a theory of race in which colonialism and racism are prior to racial formation, following Patrick Wolfe and Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In assembling this theory, this article attempts to (...) bridge philosophical critical race studies and Native American and Indigenous Peoples studies. It argues that to be a member of a race is to be in a relationship of dominance and resistance with settler colonialism. It discusses the implications of a political mode of Native race in greater detail, including how it can be differentiated from ethnicity and tribal identity, and how it might be politically useful in anti-domination solidarity. Finally, the article examines the similarities and differences between Native race as construed here and concepts of being Indigenous, suggesting that what Indigenous is at the global level, Native race may be at the local. (shrink)

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

Given the rise in transnational problems and the inadequacy of the old, intergovernmental system, scholars are searching for a new, post-cold war global architecture. The 2001 anti-terrorism coalition presents a new architecture - the semi-empire - which is dominated by one nation (or a small group of nations) that pressures other nations to follow the course it sets, and has a limited number of missions. The article explores the possibility that the coalition could expand to tackle other transnational problems besides (...) terrorism. Given the coalition's lack of scope and legitimacy, other options are explored that might be more effective and legitimate. The alternatives turn out to be either based on the old system (e.g. transgovernmental agencies), unrealistic except in the very long term (a global nation), or implausible (e.g. a global constitutional assembly). The article argues that an expanded coalition, or semi-empire, might gradually become more effective and legitimate over time. (shrink)

This paper reports on a micro-ethnography of social interaction in an urban plaza in Colombia, focusing on the plaza’s role as an arena for the acquisition of interaction skills. We investigate how children of different ages initiate and sustain interactions with same-age and older peers and the efforts they make to be recognized and ‘visible’. We interpret our data in light of three theories of socialization: Corsaro’s conception of childhood as “interpretive reproduction”, Vygotsky’s model of the “zone of proximal development”, (...) and the “structural approach” to social cognition and development. While a social form like the plaza, which is collectively enacted by members of all age groups of the local community, provides children with an extraordinarily rich array of opportunities to develop social communication skills by interacting with older and younger peers, our analysis also demonstrates that children, as they are building zones of proximal development for themselves, play a central role in assembling, integrating, and sustaining the neighborhood as a face-to-face society. In this fashion, the paper illustrates how the micro-analysis of social interaction can contribute to the analysis of social ‘macro’ forms. (shrink)

The Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force was assembled by the American Psychological Association (APA) to guide policy on the role of psychologists in interrogations at foreign detention centers for the purpose of U.S. national security. The task force met briefly in 2005, and its report was quickly accepted by the APA Board of Directors and deemed consistent with the APA Ethics Code by the APA Ethics Committee. This rapid acceptance was unusual for a number of reasons (...) but primarily because of the APA's long-standing tradition of taking great care in developing ethical policies that protected anyone who might be impacted by the work of psychologists. Many psychological and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as reputable journalists, believed the risk of harm associated with psychologist participation in interrogations at these detention centers was not adequately addressed by the report. The present critique analyzes the assumptions of the PENS report and its interpretations of the APA Ethics Code. We demonstrate that it presents only one (and not particularly representative) side of a complex set of ethical issues. We conclude with a discussion of more appropriate psychological contributions to national security and world peace that better respect and preserve human rights. (shrink)

The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business has called for stronger ethics programs. There are two problems with this battle cry. First, the AACSB rejects, with weak arguments, the single best way to get ethics into the curriculum. Second, the AACSB can only vaguely describe some unpromising alternatives to that strategy. A number of leading business ethicists have challenged the AACSB to defend and clarify its views, to little avail. The proposed Procedures and Standards cannot by themselves (...) bring about any significant change in the teaching of business ethics. There is a gap between the AACSB’s professed objectives and the means for achieving the objectives and determining whether they are being achieved. The Statement about Curriculum Content gives great prominence to the teaching of business ethics, but the interpretation of the statement, especially in the standards for measuring achievement, shows how improbable it is that the proposed Procedures and Standards will have the desired impact. We must recognize the constraints on the AACSB as we consider current standards and the controversy over a free-standing course versus an integrated curricular approach. The evident conclusion is a call, not only to the AACSB but to all business school educators, to set the stage for strengthened ethics education rather than to have standards imposed on us from outside. (shrink)

This Article applies the concept of "legal transplant" to the slavery regimes that sprang up in all regions of settlement during the first two centuries of English colonization of mainland America. Using a distinction between "extrastructure" and "intrastructure," we can divide the Anglo-American law of slavery into discourses of explanation/justification and technologies of implementation. The two components were produced from distinct sources. English law possessed few intellectual resources that could be mobilized to justify and explain slavery as an institution. (...) Here we find the law of nature and nations uppermost. English law offered many resources, however, for the management, distribution and control of movements of people. Thus, the Anglo-American law of slavery combined two transplanted resources within itself. As colonial settlements turned into slave societies, local innovations increasingly supplemented original transplants, compensating for their deficiencies and limitations and becoming, in turn, a third species of transplant. Assembly laws moved from colony to colony, creating commonalities within regions of settlement, and also — more interestingly — among regions usually thought quite distinct. Together the three species of transplants created densely instrumental slave regimes that enumerated all the ways in which summary mutilations and executions defined the slave’s life on the edge of death. (shrink)

This article, which will appear in three parts over three issues of Historical Materialism, presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the class structure of the country, the changing character of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers, at (...) a general level, the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. These considerations are then grounded in analyses of the 2000–5 revolutionary epoch, the 18 December 2005 elections, the social origins and trajectory of the Movimiento al Socialismo as a party, the complexities of the relationship between indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation, the process of the Constituent Assembly, the political economy of natural gas and oil, the rise of an autonomist right-wing movement, US imperialism, and Bolivia's relations with Venezuela and Cuba. The central argument is that the economic policies of the new government exhibit important continuities with the inherited neoliberal model and that advancing the project of indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation will require renewed self-activity, self-organisation and strategic mobilisation of popular left-indigenous forces autonomous from the MAS government. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:African American Theological Ethics: A Reader ed. by Peter J. Paris and Julius CrumpCory J. MayAfrican American Theological Ethics: A Reader Edited by Peter J. Paris and Julius Crump LOUISVILLE, KY: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2015. 350 PP. $45.00African American Theological Ethics: A Reader (AATE) is a thought-provoking title that piqued my interest upon first sight. I am an African American Christian who studies (...) African American Christianity, culture, history, and black theology. I wondered how the book would discuss African American theological ethics in terms of its articulation, embodiment, and practice. I also had reservations regarding the book's structure, the diversity of themes emphasized, and the balance between discussion of theology and of ethics. A few questions surfaced as I reflected upon the contents of the book. How is the term "theology" defined? Would the book discuss the particular ethical systems derived from monotheistic and polytheistic religions? How have African Americans contextualized their ethics in relation to God(s)? What is the central role of God(s) in this volume?The aim of the editors "is to provide a collection of resources that depict a broad range of theological and ethical reasoning that African Americans developed during two centuries of slavery, a subsequent century of racial segregation and discrimination, and another half century of continuing inequalities of opportunity and achievement" (xvii–xviii). Thus, the book has a strong sociopolitical emphasis. The reader should not expect theological ethics emphasizing the worship of God(s), religious doctrines, or proper religious living. Rather, AATE is a book of loosely interpreted political theologies and sociopolitical theological ethics. The themes of liberation, oppression, race, slavery, and white supremacy are governing hermeneutics that saturate the book's content. As Peter Paris and Julius Crump suggest, "it is important to note that African American theological ethics is not an abstract theoretical enterprise. Rather, it is a form of inquiry that is clearly related to African American studies in history and sociology both of which either imply or reveal a normative bias for racial justice" (xviii).AATE is a collection of thirty-seven essays and excerpts written by influential thinkers in African American history. Works are presented by such popular figures as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King Jr., Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois. The first four sections of the book are ethical in their approaches and display works emphasizing opposition to white supremacy. Part 1, titled "Opposing the Doctrine of White Supremacy," has a solitary essay from Martin R. Delany's work, The Origin of Race and Colour. Parts 2, 3, and 4—"Opposing Slavery," "Opposing Racial Segregation," and "Opposing Racial Discrimination," respectively—contain works from Shirley Chisholm, Barack [End Page 217] Obama, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Barbara Jordan, and more. The last two parts change the focus of the book from the theme of opposition and theologically center the discourse on African American ingenuity toward different aspects of life. Part 5 assembles essays from scholars such as Jacquelyn Grant and James Cone under the title of "African American Religious Creativity." The last section displays essays from James Weldon Johnson and Peter J. Paris under the banner of "African American Themes and Perspectives."AATE is a good anthology of discourses that have a strong emphasis on social justice. It would be greatly complemented by other selections that emphasize African American theological ethics apart from sociopolitical issues. It is an informative book that contributes to the genre of African American anthologies; it would strengthen any introductory course on African American theology and is beneficial for anyone seeking broad exposure to the development of African American theological ethics. AATE could be read alongside titles such as Katie G. Cannon and Anthony B. Pinn's The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, or Paul E. Johnson's African American Christianity: Essays in History.Cory J. MayThe University of AberdeenCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The authors of the ELSIcon special issue have advanced the conversation on ethics and genetics. Nevertheless, we have some concerns. Here, we respond specifically to Conley et al. (2023). We choose...

Este artigo apresenta uma breve reflexão sobre a politização do fundamentalismo protestante norte-americano e sua possível influência no tipo de práxis sociopolítica que vem caracterizando o pentecostalismo brasileiro a partir de meados da década de 1980. Partindo de uma discussão sobre o que seria, de fato, o fundamentalismo e sobre os desenvolvimentos e reconfigurações desse movimento ao longo da história norte-americana, buscar-se-á analisar a influência e os possíveis paralelos entre o fundamentalismo e o recente engajamento político-eleitoral que vêm marcando o (...) pentecostalismo brasileiro. Observando-se a história recente do pentecostalismo brasileiro, pode-se perceber, especialmente após 1986 (ano em que as igrejas pentecostais se organizaram para eleger seus representantes na Assembléia Nacional Constituinte), tal influência do modelo fundamentalista na utilização da mídia, no conservadorismo político, na formação de grupos de pressão, na defesa dos “valores da família”, nos projetos de eleição de políticos comprometidos com os posicionamentos das igrejas, na busca do estreitamento das relações com o Estado na busca de influir em suas decisões. Palavras-chave: Pentecostalismo; Fundamentalismo; Religião e Política; História Contemporânea.This article presents a brief reflection about the politization of the American protestant fundamentalism and its possible influence on the socio-political praxis that has characterized the Brazilian Pentecostalism from the mid-1980s. Starting with a discussion of what would fundamentalism be and about this movement’s developments and reconfigurations throughout American history, the text seeks to analyze the influence and the possible parallels between fundamentalism and the recent political engagement that have characterized Brazilian Pentecostalism. Observing the Brazilian Pentecostalism in recent history, we notice, especially after 1986 (the year in which the Pentecostal churches organized to elect their representatives in the National Constituent Assembly) such influence of the fundamentalistic model in several ways: in the use of media, in the political conservatism, in the formation of pressure groups to defend the "family values​​", in the projects of electing politicians committed to the churche’s positions and in the pursuit of closer relations with the state in seeking to influence their decisions. Keywords: Pentecostalism; Fundamentalism; Religion and Politics; Contemporary History. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and KuhnDavid GormanThe American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, by Giovanna Borradori; translated by Rosanna Crocitto; xii & 177pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, $32.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.The idea for this book, first published in Italian in 1991, was good—to assemble a collection of (...) interviews with the key figures in American philosophy. And the list of philosophers whom Giovanna Borradori chose as representing the best in contemporary American thought was very good—as becomes especially clear when in her introduction she mentions the ones who, for whatever reason, got away: Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Nelson Goodman, Saul Kripke, John Rawls, and John Searle (p. 5). Add these names to those of the philosophers whom she was able to interview for this volume, and you have an impressively complete roster of the thinkers who have made the postwar era in the United States arguably one of the great periods of philosophy.Unfortunately, the execution of the book does not fulfill the promise of its conception. And perhaps nothing could have; the fact remains, however, that Borradori proves herself singularly ill-equipped, in terms both of background knowledge and of intellectual orientation, to bring out very much of importance in these important philosophers’ ideas, either in the interviews that she conducts with them or in the prefatory material that she supplies to bind the collection together.The essence of Borradori’s problem is that she approaches these professional academic philosophers with the incongruous assumption that they are [End Page 388] people with interesting general ideas about history, society, art, religion, or whatever—she assumes in short that these professors are intellectuals. But that is scarcely a term that describes your typical American philosopher. Nor do I mean this condescendingly: on the contrary, just what is significant and valuable about contemporary philosophers in the analytic mold (as almost all of Borradori’s interviewees are) is the narrowness of their focus on problems and methods of logic and the natural sciences, the two Archimedean levers by which analytic philosophy has come far closer than anyone could have predicted to moving the conceptual universe decisively.Of course, not everyone views matters this way, and Richard Rorty in particular has made a spectacular career out of disputing this image—largely a self-congratulatory one, as he takes it—of the analytic tradition. Whether his dissent is justified or not, his role in the collection constitutes another of its problems, because he is not just one of the group of thinkers whom Borradori is interviewing: beyond this, it is Rorty’s ideas which supply Borradori with an intellectual program (in default of one of her own), which necessarily distorts her presentation of the other philosophers’ thoughts, and her line of questioning in these interviews. So, for example, all the interviewees are subjected to questions about American Pragmatism generally and John Dewey in particular, not because these things are of any inherent significance to most of them (as several of them point out, politely), but because Rorty thinks that they should be, and because Borradori follows his line unquestioningly. Thus most of the conversations recorded here are at cross-purposes to start with.Borradori provides brief introductions for each interview, betraying little familiarity with the work of the philosophers, particularly when the work involved is at all technical, or more than about ten years old. Except to summarize these summaries her general introduction for the volume does no more than to indulge in the kind of military and cartographic metaphors made tiresomely familiar by such recent European thinkers as Foucault. Little seems to have been lost in the retranslation of this volume from the Italian, except that the historian of science George Sarton has somehow become “Georges Sardon” (p. 31).David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

A masterful new account of old regime France by one of the world's most prominent political philosophers France before 1789 traces the historical origins of France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789, providing a vivid portrait of the ancien régime and its complex social system in the decades before the French Revolution. Jon Elster writes in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described this tumultuous era with an eye toward individual and group psychology and the functioning of institutions. Whereas (...) Tocqueville saw the old regime as a breeding ground for revolution, Elster, more specifically, identifies the rural and urban conflicts that fueled the constitution-making process from 1789 to 1791. He presents a new approach to history writing, one that supplements the historian's craft with the tools and insights of modern social science. Elster draws on important French and Anglo-American scholarship as well as a treasure trove of historical evidence from the period, such as the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the journals of the lawyer Barbier and the bookseller Hardy, the Remonstrances of Malesherbes, and La Bruyère's maxims. Masterfully written and unparalleled in scope, France before 1789 is the first volume of a trilogy that promises to transform our understanding of constitution making in the eighteenth century. Volume 2 will look at revolutionary America in the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 while the third volume will examine all facets of the French and American assemblies, from how they elected their delegates and organized their proceedings to how they addressed issues of separation of powers and representation. (shrink)

In light of the continued erosion of business ethics in America, the ongoing question is what are the nation's business schools doing to prepare ethically responsible future leaders of industry and government? This paper reports the findings of a survey mailed to every program accredited by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. The curriculum treatment of business ethics is identified at the undergraduate and the graduate levels in public as well as in private colleges and universities. (...) In addition, the paper presents the status (required versus elective), credits, and enrollment patterns associated with institutions offering a special course whose primary focus is the ethical or moral component of business decisions. Depending on one's perspective, the results range from encouraging to disappointing and suggest that more can and should be done within the curriculum of American post-secondary higher education. (shrink)

Schools of business are being blamed for much of the unethical behavior in business today (Harcourt, 1990: p. 17); Ethics can and should be integrated into coursework throughout students' college careers (Spencer and Lehman, 1990: p. 7); ... business schools have been charged with inadequate attention to ethics (Bishop, 1992: p. 291); The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) encourages schools of business to incorporate business ethics throughout the curricula (Davidet al., 1990: p. 26). These quotations (...) indicate the concern for providing ethics education in today's business curriculums. In 1976, the AACSB urged business educators to include ethics in their course curricula, however, over 15 years later there is still concern as to whether the coverage of this topic in the business curriculum is adequate.A review of the literature indicates that professors are beginning to integrate this topic into its curriculum. But what are the techniques that work? And is the topic of ethics truly being integrated into the entire business curricula? (shrink)

American auteur Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams's genius for creating densely plotted scripts has won him broad commercial and critical success in TV shows such as Felicity, Emmy-nominated Alias, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Lost, and the critically acclaimed Fringe. In addition, his direction in films such as Cloverfield, Super 8, and the new Mission Impossible and Star Trek films has left fans eagerly awaiting his revival of the Star Wars franchise. As a writer, director, producer, and composer, Abrams seamlessly (...) combines geek appeal with blockbuster intuition, leaving a distinctive stamp on all of his work and establishing him as one of Tinsel Town's most influential visionaries. In The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams, editors Patricia L. Brace and Robert Arp assemble the first collection of essays to highlight the philosophical insights of the Hollywood giant's successful career. The filmmaker addresses a diverse range of themes in his onscreen pursuits, including such issues as personal identity in an increasingly impersonal digitized world, the morality of terrorism, bioethics, friendship, family obligation, and free will. Utilizing Abrams's scope of work as a touchstone, this comprehensive volume is a guide for fans as well as students of film, media, and culture. The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams is a significant contribution to popular culture scholarship, drawing attention to the mind behind some of the most provocative television and movie plots of our day. (shrink)

American Trypanosomiasis, known as Chagas disease, was discovered in 1909 under peculiar circumstances: its discoverer, Carlos Chagas, was sent to a small village of Central Brazil to carry out an anti-malaria campaign when he came across a blood sucking insect—the vector for the parasite infection. He had been alerted to the coincidence of peculiar symptoms and the presence of this insect in the wood and earth dwellings of the region. He was deeply involved in theoretical controversies in international protozoology; (...) he was engaged in the consolidation of a scientific role and corresponding institutional conditions in Brazil, and equally immersed in the nationalist sanitary struggles of his days. In these contexts, Chagas assembled a remarkable discovery discourse, regarding the biology of the parasite, its life cycle and mode of transmission. Furthermore, he provided the clinical description of a new disease. Despite immediate international recognition, however, the unstable institutional arrangements surrounding his work damaged its local legitimacy for decades. His authority was widely recognized abroad, but rejected at home. (shrink)

Freedom of speech, press, assembly, and petition have long been celebrated as crucial to democratic government. United States Supreme Court decisions have, quite rightly, justified strong protection of these freedoms because of their crucial role in the functioning of American democracy.

Humanitarian maps assembled using digital technology are indicative of transformations underway in how the world is made knowable, sensible, and actionable, including for international legal purposes. These transformations are exemplified by the Missing Maps Project (MMP), an initiative of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a U.S.-registered non-profit, and three other non-governmental organisations operating internationally: American Red Cross; British Red Cross; and Médecins Sans Frontières. Projects such as the MMP make it harder for international lawyers to lay claim to, and seek (...) to imaginatively reorient, shared repositories of common sense. Meanwhile, international legal scholars continue to propagate ideas that the world may be reimagined with their help, largely without regard to such transformations. In lieu of imagination’s standard evocation to the end of enhancing critical agency in international legal writing, this article contends that the idiosyncratic notion of imagination advanced in the writings of Walter Benjamin may be better attuned to ongoing shifts in sense-making apparent in international humanitarian mapping. Walter Benjamin’s atypical rendering of imagination as a ‘purely receptive, uncreative’ force in a field of technological reproduction offers international legal scholars another way of thinking about agency and prospects for re-forming their field in the face of its burgeoning digitalisation. (shrink)

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs. Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions--sometimes they are vivid (...) polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics. Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nonviolence—A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures by John Howard YoderCarter AikinNonviolence—A Brief History: The Warsaw Lectures John Howard Yoder Edited By Paul Martens, Matthew Porter, and Myles Werntz Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010. 150 pp. $29.95This helpful collection of lectures, delivered during a 1983 Polish Ecumenical Council (PEC) conference in Warsaw, displays John Howard Yoder’s emerging conviction that nonviolent action is not only a faithful response but (...) also an anthropologically natural and effective instrument of social change. Yoder constructively narrates the joining of theological and philosophical clarity about the importance of nonviolence with realizations of its social effectiveness as this connection blossomed in the turmoil of the twentieth century.The introduction nicely situates these lectures in their original social and ecumenical contexts, both of which turn out to be tremendously important. Yoder gave these lectures just weeks before Pope John Paul II met with the PEC for the first time and during the period when the US Catholic Bishop’s letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” was being formed. Additionally, in 1983 the vulnerable Polish Communist Party was trying to suppress the rising Solidarity Movement, the country’s first noncommunist trade union. The movement’s protests and strikes had only recently gained media attention [End Page 216] and had, thus far, stopped short of violence. In its setting alone, the collection offers a Yoder rarely seen through his modern interpreters: Yoder is socially relevant in the highest degree, concerned with the effectiveness of non-violence as a means of change, more than willing to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian masters, and attentive to the response of the entire church catholic. Here Yoder is no more the resident alien than Martin Luther King Jr. was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.Yoder begins with a three-lecture equation: Tolstoy + Gandhi = MLK. Tolstoy’s corrective interpretations of the Gospels—emphasizing the personhood of Jesus and “the ‘key’ to the Scripture message: the cure for evil is suffering” (21)—used nonviolence and the suffering of the persecuted as the fabric of moral progress. Gandhi “moves with Tolstoy, but beyond him” (24); he sees the power of truth and suffering as a natural force of good. Martin Luther King Jr. becomes Tolstoy + Gandhi, championing the power of love and non-violence as faithful but also practical and metaphysically natural. Much of the book provides theological, scriptural, socioanthropological, and historical arguments for why this is the case. Yoder’s treatments of the “powers” (chap. 8), just war (chap. 4), and the political nature of Jesus (chap. 7) are all paralleled elsewhere, but their inclusion is important to the modern reader who wishes to trace the logic of Yoder’s present argument and the evolution of his overall thought.In the closing chapters Yoder turns to flourishing nonviolence movements in Roman Catholicism that exhibit a “restoration of original Christianity” (120). He highlights several facets of Catholic nonviolent spirituality including the valuing of the cultivation of virtues (and the people who best exhibit them), the growth of the nonviolence movement among American Catholics, and the emergence of the Catholic Worker movement. In the final two chapters, Yoder brings into conversation a few Western theologians, the “increasingly important” products of American bishops (especially in their argument for the limits of just war thinking in the nuclear age), and two prophetic Latin American theologians: Dom Hélder Câmara and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. Together this assembled chorus expresses the unique and hope-giving character of modern Catholic theologies of nonviolence: “love, not violence... will have the last word in history” (145).As a collection these lectures represent a part of Yoder’s emerging hope in the natural logic of nonviolence and its potential for effective social change. The fact that these lectures were delivered in such a highly charged setting provides a courageous and pastoral backdrop for what amounts to a rich metaphysics of nonviolence. [End Page 217]Carter AikinHastings CollegeCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This article theorises the relationship between 1970s US Third World queer and feminist movements and Latin American anti-imperialist revolutions of the late twentieth century. I focus upon the historically occluded relationships between Third World feminists and queers in Chile and the United States throughout the transition to neoliberalism. My archive includes June Jordan’s little-known writings on Chile, the writings of Audre Lorde, and, primarily, a 1973 Third World feminist poetry reading staged in San Francisco shortly after the Pinochet coup. (...) By assembling this unconventional archive, I intervene into the domestication of US anti-racist queer, black and feminist of colour politics. I argue for the profoundly internationalist foundation of these formations. I work to re-animate a moment when the affective economies of anti-colonial ‘global revolution’ opened up space for the imagination of joint struggle – allowing a visceral sense of struggle’s urgency and vitality in ways that have since been partially eclipsed. (shrink)

Courts reviewing gun laws that burden Second Amendment rights ask how effectively the laws serve public safety — yet typically discuss public safety narrowly, without considering the many dimensions of that interest gun laws serve. “Public safety” is a social good: it includes the public's interest in physical safety as a good in itself, and as a foundation for community and for the exercise of constitutional liberties. Gun laws protect bodies from bullets — and Americans' freedom and confidence to participate (...) in every domain of our shared life, whether to attend school, to shop, to listen to a concert, to gather for prayer, or to assemble in peaceable debate. Courts must enforce the Second Amendment in ways that respect the public health and constitutional reasons a democracy seeks to protect public safety. Lawyers and citizen advocates can help, by creating a richer record of their reasons in seeking to enact laws regulating guns.This inquiry is urgent at a time when the Supreme Court's new conservative majority may expand restrictions on gun laws beyond the right to keep arms for self-defense in the home first recognized inDistrict of Columbia v. Hellerin 2008. (shrink)

Peter Hare and Edward Madden's collaborative book Evil and the Concept of God (968) has become a staple in literature about the problem of evil and remains frequently cited by supporters and critics alike. The major concepts of the work arose out of earlier papers in which they first began to formulate their arguments about the problem of evil. Their article "Evil and Unlimited Power" embodies many of their arguments against quasi-theist attempts to resolve the problem of evil.1 Assembled from (...) these and other papers, their compendium frames a thorough synthesis of the long history of debate regarding the problem of evil, and contributes their own exhaustive, point-by-point attack on modern defenders of three main .. (shrink)

Sorokin, Pitirim Alexandrovich, born January 21,1889, in the small village of Turia in Russia [died 1968]. Student at the Teachers' Seminary in the province of Kostroma in Russia, at the evening school in St. Petersburg, at the Psycho- Neurological Institute in St. Petersburg ; Magistrant of Criminal Law ; Ph.D in Sociology ; Privatdozent at the Psycho-Neurological Institute, at the University of St. Petersburg ; Professor of Sociology at the same university ; Professor of Sociology at the Agricultural Academy, at (...) the University of Minnesota ; Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University from 1930. Member of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Peasant's Soviet ; Secretary to the Prime Minister [ Kerensky ] ; member of the Russian Constitutional Assembly ; sentenced to death and finally exiled by the communist administration ; emigrated to the United States, naturalized. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Sociological Association; honorary member of the International Institute of Sociology of the Czechoslovakian Academy for Agriculture, of the German Sociological Society, and of the Ukrainian Sociological Society; President of the International Institute for Sociology. Member of the Greek-Orthodox Church. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 23-42 [Access article in PDF] Overcoming the Grip of Consumerism Stephanie KazaUniversity of VermontFor fifteen years the Worldwatch Institute of Washington, D. C. has been publishing a review of the declining condition of the global environment (Brown et al. 1998). For the most part, the picture is not good. Much of the deterioration can be traced directly to human activities--urban expansion equates to species loss, (...) industrial manufacturing to air pollution, factory farming to water pollution, chemical agriculture to poisoned soil. Accelerating these environmental impacts are rapidly rising population numbers, increasingly efficient technologies, and consumption rates beyond the planet's capacity. These three have been linked by the equation I=PAT, or environmental impact=population size multiplied by affluence (or degree of consumption) multiplied by technology. Reduce any one of these and the impact drops; increase one or all three, and the impact rises, in some cases dramatically.Much of the conversation among scientists and technologists has focused on the P (population) and T (technology) parts of the equation, with grave concerns that rising population numbers are swamping earth systems, yet often with buoyant optimism that technological breakthroughs will solve everything. These two perspectives dominated political discussion for much of the 1960s and 1970s (Ehrlich et al. 1977 and Lovins 1977, among others). But by the 1980s the facts were incontrovertible: high rates of consumption were driving environmental destruction just as fast if not faster than rising population. At the 1992 Rio Summit in Brazil, representatives of southern countries demanded that high-consuming northern countries examine their own contribution to the environmental crisis rather than placing blame elsewhere. It is our obligation in the North to respond to these serious requests.How much do people in northern industrialized countries consume? Here are some indicator figures: Americans consume their average body weight (120 pounds) every day in materials extracted and processed from farms, mines, range lands, and forests (Ryan and Durning 1997, 5). In the United States, the number of shopping malls (close to 35,000) eclipsed the number of high schools in 1987 (Dunning 1992, 130). Since 1950 the per capita consumption of energy, meat, and lumber has doubled, use of plastic has increased five times, use of aluminum seven times, and average airplane miles per person has soared 33-fold (Durning 1992, 29). As products have proliferated, we see the swelling ecological footprint behind each new thing: clear-cut forests replacing paper plantations in Thailand, toxic oil polluting native lands of Ecuador, women earning poverty wages assembling computer chips in [End Page 23] Malaysia--the stories are not as pretty as the products. Materials extraction, production, distribution, use, and waste disposal--all of these have ecological costs, many of which are life threatening.Why should Buddhists and Christians address consumption? For starters, it is a nonsectarian issue; responsibility cuts across denominations and religious belief systems. Collaboration of all kinds is needed to take apart this juggernaut of complex causes and conditions. I believe the Buddhist tradition has powerful analytical tools and spiritual practices which may be helpful in this undertaking. These may aid or inspire similar efforts explored through the Christian heritage. A survey of the landscape and the literature shows it is shockingly clear: the challenge here is enormous. It will require all the spiritual insight, dedication, and sheer stamina we can bring to it. This work cannot be done alone; we need each other's help to keep going through the many obstacles.To date, Buddhist initiatives in this conversation have been modest. Several popular books have brought Buddhist perspectives to bear on consumption issues, most notably E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1975) and Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild (1990). Both works popularize practices of simplicity and restraint, flavored by the exotic Western fascination with Eastern thought. Several Buddhist teachers in the U.S. have taken up particular sub-themes addressing over-consumption. Philip Kapleau has sounded an ethical call for vegetarianism based on the first precept, "no killing" (1982). Robert Aitken has taken a stand for reducing wants and needs to simplify... (shrink)

The work ‘Thinking and Feeling’ edited by Robert C. Solomon may be considered as a landmark in the history of the philosophy of the emotions. The work also has assembled together some of the best minds in the Anglo American Traditions. The central focus in this work is to mediate between the physiological arousal theories of emotions and the cognitive appraisal theories of emotions. My article is an attempt to mediate from my Asian background and in specific terms using (...) the Buddhist perspectives on emotion studies, to find answers, a subject on which I have worked over several decades. The Buddha has discouraged people in attempting to find ultimate answers to the body- mind relationships, but use pragmatic and practical perspectives for a two way interactionism. Thus, in the Buddhist analysis the mental and the cognitive, as well as bodily and the physiological are recognised, thus giving room for a holistic understanding of emotions concepts. In fact, Buddhism expects the body, feelings, perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations as facets of emotion concepts. The second point is the domination of the metaphor of reasons as the charioteer in managing unruly emotions in the West. But Buddhism introduces the factor of ‘mindfulness’ as an important ally in the management of emotions. My personal work in therapy and counselling has helped me to explore new dimensions for managing emotions through mindfulness practice. (shrink)

Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, the Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Rector of American Jewish University in Los Angeles, is one of today's leading Jewish ethicists. Writing extensively on the intersection of law, morality, science, religion, and medicine, Dorff offers an authoritative and non-Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law. As a leader in the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, he has shaped the religious practices of Conservative Jews. In serving on national advisory committees (...) and task forces, he has helped to articulate a distinctive Jewish voice on contested bioethical and biomedical issues. An analytic philosopher by training, Dorff has endorsed pluralism, arguing that Jewishness best flourishes in the context of American pluralism, and he has worked closely with non-Jews to advance religious pluralism in America. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Style: A Queer Cosmology by S. Taylor BlackJoe Edward HatfieldStyle: A Queer Cosmology. By Taylor Black. New York: New York University Press, 2023. 304 pp. Hardcover $99.00, paper $35.00. ISBN- 10: 147982500X.Style is a perennial concern within rhetorical studies. As one of Aristotle's five canons, style has inspired a great deal of rhetorical theory over the past two millennia and counting. Hence, it would be reasonable to presume (...) that there is not much, if anything, else original to contribute to the well-trodden domain of the stylistic. However, Taylor Black's Style: A Queer Cosmology challenges this assumption by offering a fresh take on its titular concept. The book's grounding in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies allows its author to speak to multiple audiences at once, including those invested in queer theory, race and ethnicity, popular culture, new materialism, and literary criticism. To this inventory, I would add anyone interested in the art of rhetoric, particularly those committed to incorporating new, diverse perspectives into the field's existing analytical tool chest. Tonally whimsical but nonetheless boldly argued, Style dramatically reframes a timeworn concept in the rhetorical lexicon that many of us have likely—and mistakenly—come to take for granted.Readers of this journal will be immediately seduced by Black's provocative rethinking of style as elemental. Here, the term "elemental" directs attention toward style as "the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun" (5). As Black infers throughout the book's introduction, style is the expression of difference available to all human and nonhuman beings. More than aesthetic ornamentation, or the mere ability to make oneself appear outwardly beautiful, style is a mysterious yet universal condition of possibility underlying the cultivation [End Page 226] of a personality. Style names the intertwined processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery that produce individuation as its outcome. And though everyone "has" a style, Black asserts, "not everyone is a stylist" (15). Black posits the figure of the stylist to denote a minoritarian subject who transmutes the experience of oppression into a purposeful performance of self. Upon realizing their exclusion from a majoritarian social order organized by deeply embedded attachments to a hierarchy of difference that discriminates on bases of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other intersecting codes of identification, stylists turn their failure to conform into an opportunity for opening possibilities for alternative futures.In other words, from the limitations that accompany experiences of structural oppression, style authorizes potential. Referencing Zora Neale Hurston's 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Black suggests stylists tend to dwell in cosmology, a form of storytelling or narrative fabulation about the universe's origins and one's place in its ongoing unfolding. "Stylists," Black poetically avers, are "naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be" (20). Black highlights style's fundamental elementality as emerging from cosmic renderings of marginalized experience and the pursuit of a future otherwise. To further illustrate this elemental notion of the stylistic, Black assembles an eclectic corpus of texts by those he calls "subterranean American stylists" (5), namely Quentin Crisp, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, whose lives and work he examines over seven chapters divided into three main parts. Each chapter supplies unique insights on the elementals of style, as well as its subject matter, thus allowing Black to support the thesis constructed in the introduction without ever seeming overly redundant.The first part of Style, "The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style," consists of a preface and two chapters oriented around the specific ways stylizations of queer selfhood may function as a survival strategy and, relatedly, a means for exploring elemental mysteries of personality and being. In the initial chapter, Black analyzes texts authored by openly gay memoirist and cultural commentor Quentin Crisp, who became famous for his humorous and often brash... (shrink)

In an age in which the lack of independent public intellectuals has often been sorely lamented, the historian Tony Judt played a rare and valuable role, bringing together history and current events, Europe and America, what was and what is with what should be. In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last fifteen years of Judt's life, the years in (...) which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11; and issues of social inclusion and social justice in an age of increasing inequality. Judt was at once most at home and in a state of what he called internal exile from his native England, from Europe, and from America, and he finally settled in New York--between them all. He was a historian of the twentieth century acutely aware of the dangers of ethnic exceptionalism, and if he was shaped by anything, it was the Jewish past and his own secularism. His essays on Israel ignited a firestorm debate for their forthright criticisms of Israeli government polices relating to the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Those crucial pieces are published here in book form for the first time, including an essay, never previously published, called 'What Is to Be Done?' These pieces are suffused with a deep compassion for the Israeli dilemma, a compassion that instilled in Judt a sense of responsibility to speak out and try to find a better path, away from what he saw as a road to ruin. When the Facts Change also contains Judt's homages to the culture heroes who were some of his greatest inspirations: Amos Elon, Francois Furet, Leszek Kolakowski, and perhaps above all Albert Camus, who never accepted the complacent view that the problem of evil couldn't lie within us as well as outside us. Included here too is a magnificent two-part essay on the social and political importance of railway travel to our modern conception of a good society; as well as the urgent text of 'What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy,' the final public speech of his life, delivered from a wheelchair after he had been stricken with a terrible illness; and a tender and wise dialogue with his then-teenage son, Daniel, about the different outlooks and burdens of their two generations. To read When the Facts Change is to miss Tony Judt's voice terribly, but to cherish it for what it was, and still is: a wise, human, deeply informed view on our most pressing concerns, delivered in good faith. (shrink)

This second volume of ReConFort, published open access, addresses the decisive role of constitutional normativity, and focuses on discourses concerning the legal role of constitutional norms. Taken together with ReConFort I (National Sovereignty), it calls for an innovative reassessment of constitutional history drawing on key categories to convey the legal nature of the constitution itself (national sovereignty, precedence, justiciability of power, judiciary as constituted power). In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, constitutional normativity began to complete the legal fixation (...) of the entire political order. This juridification in one constitutional text resulted in a conceptual differentiation from ordinary law, which extends to alterability and justiciability. The early expressions of this 'new order of the ages' suggest an unprecedented and irremediable break with European legal tradition, be it with British colonial governance or the French ancien régime. In fact, while the shift to constitutions as a hierarchically 'higher' form of positive law was a revolutionary change, it also drew upon old liberties. The American constitutional discourse, which was itself heavily influenced by British common law, in turn served as an inspiration for a variety of constitutional experiments - from the French Revolution to Napoleon's downfall, in the halls of the Frankfurt Assembly, on the road to a unified Italy, and in the later theoretical discourse of twentieth-century Austria. If the constitution states the legal rules for the law-making process, then its Kelsian primacy is mandatory. Also included in this volume are the French originals and English translations of two vital documents. The first - Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès' Du Jury Constitutionnaire (1795) - highlights an early attempt to reconcile the democratic values of the French Revolution with the pragmatic need to legally protect the Revolution. The second - the 1812 draft of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland - presents the 'constitutional propaganda' of the Russian Tsar Alexander I to bargain for the support of the Lithuanian and Polish nobility. These documents open new avenues of research into Europe's constitutional history: one replete with diverse contexts and national experiences, but above all an overarching motif of constitutional decisiveness that served to complete the juridification of sovereignty. (www.reconfort.eu). (shrink)

The biogeographic contributions of Léon Croizat (1894–1982) and the conflictive relationships with his intellectual descendants and critics are analysed. Croizat’s panbiogeography assumed that vicariance is the most important biogeographic process and that dispersal does not contribute to biogeographic patterns. Dispersalist biogeographers criticized or avoided mentioning panbiogeography, especially in the context of the “hardening” of the Modern Synthesis. Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History associated panbiogeography with Hennig’s phylogenetic systematics, creating cladistic biogeography. On the other hand, a group (...) of New Zealand biologists formalized Croizat’s original concepts and soon began arguing with cladistic biogeographers over the relative merits of their approaches. In Latin America, panbiogeography and cladistic biogeography were incorporated as parts of an integrative approach. A recent development, molecular panbiogeography, is based on the use of molecular phylogenetic data. The current practice shows that some authors insist on considering panbiogeography as the only appropriate approach and vicariance as the only relevant process, whereas others accept Croizat’s dictum “Earth and life evolve together” as a useful guide to understanding broad, general patterns, but recognize that dispersal also contributes substantially to biotic assembly. The framework of integrative pluralism allows to explain the complexities of the biogeographic processes involved in biotic assembly without the need of unification on a large scale. This historical analysis intersects with the existing historiography of the Modern Synthesis and may provide some insights on the dynamics of integrative pluralism, which may be especially relevant in the current development of the Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

The fifteen “Messenger Leaves” poems Whitman assembled as part of the third (1860) edition of Leaves of Grass exhibit a tension between the prophetic and the sacramental that would become more significant as the United States entered the decade of the Civil War. Comprised of poems that provide warnings and admonitions (the prophetic) and poems that offer consolation and healing (the sacramental), in “Messenger Leaves” Whitman uses biblical models and texts to appeal to the religious sensibilities of the American (...) people. Although “Messenger Leaves” as a cluster was dissembled in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, its religious themes draw attention to Whitman’s envisioning of the third edition as the “new Bible.”. (shrink)

This volume addresses the way ethics is taught in American Business Schools. The Editors has assembled a collection of timely essays offering practical experienced-based insights in business education. The authors of these essays address a diversity of topics yet are unanimous in calling for change (even if they occasionally disagree on the best means of accomplishing it). For business faculties seeking to meet this growing and multifaceted challenge within their discipline, this book offers a wealth of useful insights and (...) practical solutions. (shrink)