In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Realism & Anti-Realism: John Dewey and the NeopragmatistsAndrew W. HowatDavid L. Hildebrand Beyond Realism & Anti-Realism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003. xii + 241 pp.In this book David Hildebrand provides a spirited defence of the philosophy of John Dewey, a defence he claims is faithful to his actual views and contrary to those of the "neopragmatists," specifically Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. (...) Hildebrand rejects the neopragmatist assumption that Dewey's oeuvre can support one or other side of the realism/anti-realism debate, at least without obscuring some of Dewey's vital insights. In particular, he thinks Rorty and Putnam miss the centrality and significance of Dewey's "Practical Starting Point" for philosophy and his understanding of key concepts such as "knowledge," "experience" and "inquiry." He argues that when taken together these insights show that Dewey transcends traditional debates about realism, and that this was the essence of his pragmatism.The first two chapters set out Dewey's views in the context of his contemporaries (especially the New and Critical Realists). They emphasise the radical nature of Dewey's position; that it aimed to supplant the well-established philosophical dualisms and debates of the day. Chapters Three and Four recount and criticise how Rorty and Putnam employ Dewey's insights to support near-opposite ends of the realism/anti-realism debate. The final chapter summarises and recapitulates the central themes and arguments of the book.Hildebrand describes his motivating worries as "pedagogical" and "political." If contemporary pragmatists serve as authorities on the subject, [End Page 296] this threatens to occlude the significance of classical texts for new students. This would be unfortunate, as those original texts are beautiful pieces of philosophy. Moreover, there is the danger that contemporary 'authorities' on pragmatism are mistaken, or have their own distorting agenda. It is thus vital that students and professionals continue to study original texts, gaining a grasp on this subtle and rewarding era of philosophy first-hand.Hildebrand's argument is immediately plausible, given that misinterpretations and caricatures of classical pragmatism are sadly common and familiar. It is also novel however, as it asserts pragmatism's foremost contemporary representatives are also guilty of misinterpretation. Hildebrand courts controversy, concluding his introduction by saying the neopragmatists "misuse central epistemological and metaphysical views of classical pragmatism for their own ends, all the while sustaining dualisms that the classical pragmatists fought to dissolve." This book may polarise opinion about Hildebrand's success, if so contemporary debate about pragmatism should be enriched.Readers may enjoy the novel account of New and Critical Realism in Chapter One, movements of which I knew nothing before reading the book. Hildebrand uses these movements to locate Dewey historically and dialectically amid the popular realism & idealism of his time. He demonstrates Dewey's views clearly diverged from those of his contemporaries, despite some of their best efforts to assimilate them for their realist or idealist cause. His main argument concerns Dewey's view that New Realists were responsible for hypostatising the faculties of knowledge and perception and conflating their products, resulting in paradoxical psychophysical dualism. They claimed that knowledge "can be simply had, in an instant," while Dewey insisted that "knowledge is an achievement, the eventual, alembicated product of inquiry," and that contrary to the way New Realists made it sound "Knowledge is never received like manna from heaven." Dewey's work on the reflex arc illustrated that perception is similarly an active or participatory process, though its products are distinct from those of knowledge. Hildebrand argues Dewey was trying to show how such mistakes created two crippling problems for New Realism: the problem of illusion and relapse into the very idealism the movement was designed to refute.Chapter Two concerns aspects of Dewey's views which realists (New and Critical) considered at odds with their own, implying too close an affinity with idealism. Like its predecessor this chapter would benefit from more (or better) examples to help elucidate Dewey's sometimes oblique prose. The dialectic is often highly abstract, focusing on such notions as the given (versus Dewey's preferred "taken"), Dewey's unusual understanding of temporal epistemology (knowledge of past... (shrink)

I examine Henry More’s engagement with Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, in his Enchiridion Ethicum. More quotes from Marcus’ Meditations throughout the Enchiridion, leading one commentator to note that More ‘mined the Meditations’ when writing his book. Yet More’s general attitude towards Stoicism is more often than not critical, especially when it comes to the passions. I shall argue that while More was clearly an avid reader of the Meditations, he read Marcus not as a (...) Stoic but as a ‘non-denominational’ ancient moralist who confirms a range of doctrines that More finds elsewhere in ancient philosophy. In this sense More continues the Neoplatonic practice of downplaying doctrinal differences between ancient philosophers in order to construct a single ancient philosophical tradition. This is quite different from the approach of his contemporary and fellow Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, who was keen to highlight doctrinal differences between ancient philosophers. (shrink)

An avid reader of Nietzsche, the German radical feminist Helene Stöcker referred in 1893 to the Verfrühung of the modern woman, her prematurity. She used references to Mill, Bebel, Darwin, Galton, and Nietzsche among others to develop a concept of women's untimely modernity. This paper considers how a number of concepts of time, transformation, biological futurity, and putative agency over nature became, for Stöcker, the basis for a feminist claim to autonomy, agency, and reproductive rights. The paper goes (...) on to ask how some of these concepts and their context could also have provided the implicit resources to resist their conversion by Stöcker. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nietzsche was an avid reader of Emerson's essays, and their influence is discernible from his earliest philosophical writings through to his final philosophical works. Nietzsche's copies of Emerson's books are covered with traces of his reading, from underlinings, exclamation marks, question marks, and dog-eared pages to numerous annotations and philosophical comments written in the margins. I use some of these to analyze the influence Emerson exerted on Nietzsche's conception of history and historiography. The two authors can be (...) considered “twin souls” in that they both praised the strengthening effects of past greatness and, at the same time, opposed psychological subjugation or fanaticism. Nevertheless, they were not twin minds: Nietzsche rejected Emerson's metaphysical concept of an Oversoul and turned it into the ideal of a Dionysian soul, which aims at reliving the history of humanity in order to increase its power. (shrink)

1900 was a remarkable year for science. Several ground-breaking events took place, in physics, biology and psychology. Planck introduced the quantum concept, the work of Mendel was rediscovered, and Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams . These events heralded the emergence of completely new areas of inquiry, all of which greatly affected the intellectual landscape of the 20 th century, namely quantum physics, genetics and psychoanalysis. What do these developments have in common? Can we discern a family likeness, a (...) basic affinity between them, so that we can use the one to deepen our understanding of the other? One common denominator is that they open up realms of inquiry that are significantly different from the world of everyday experience, namely the realm of elementary particles, of genes and genomes, and of the unconscious. But to what extent can we meaningfully argue, for instance, that the genome is the biological unconscious, and the unconscious the psychic genome? To address these questions, I will build on the work of two key intellectual figures who have explored the affinities of these developments in depth, namely Erwin Schrödinger (a quantum physicist and avid reader of Schopenhauer who initiated molecular biology) and Jacques Lacan (who reframed the specificity of psychoanalysis with the help of 20 th century science: the era of structural linguistics, but also of quantum physics, molecular biology, bioinformatics and DNA). (shrink)

This is a tale of two thinkers across time and space who have been read together but in conventional ways as representing the meeting of the East and the West. I propose instead a different relationship between them, that of hidden relays and realizations, in which one who comes later receives and actualizes a potential in the writings of the one earlier but in implicit ways to avoid the political and theological pitfalls of his times. To draw out this line (...) of transmission requires me to offer a different reading of a famous poem by the one who comes later than that usually proffered. The tale starts with the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal visiting the Mosque of Cordoba during a sojourn at Spain in 1933 and writing a lyrical poem (ghazal) of the same name to mark the event. The poem, widely considered a great work, has been well plumbed for its formal qualities and for the themes with which Iqbal has long been associated, such as a new appreciation of the Muslims’ past and harkening to Muslims of the future. If we take into consideration that Iqbal was an avid reader of philosophy and poetry, with an attraction to German thought, then his engagement with the writings of the eighteenth-century thinker Goethe provides a way to rethink the Muslim present within the poem. It becomes a space of possibility for Muslims, historical ruins, and poetical verse, which is neither about bemoaning a lost caliphate nor anticipating Muslim becoming but about Muslim participation in nature as natural beings. (shrink)

The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and (...) institutions principally responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848). (shrink)

Wilson R. Bachelor was a Tennessee native who moved with his family to Franklin County, Arkansas, in 1870. A country doctor and natural philosopher, Bachelor was impelled to chronicle his life from 1870 to 1902, documenting the family's move to Arkansas, their settling a farm in Franklin County, and Bachelor's medical practice. Bachelor was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests in literature, science, nature, politics, and religion, and he became a self-professed freethinker in the 1870s. He was driven (...) by a concept he called "fiat flux," an awareness of the "rapid flight of time" that motivated him to treat the people around him and the world itself as precious and fleeting. (shrink)

Rajan Gurukkal is a leading social scientist and is currently the Sundararajan Visiting Professor at Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science. He has been the former Vice Chancellor, M. G. University, Kottayam, Kerala. An avid reader, critical theorist and a prolific writer, he has authored several monographs, research articles and has been actively engaged with several projects in association with UGC, the Ford Foundation to name a few. His research interests explore the historiographic dimensions and dialectical (...) processes involving the state and society. He can be reached at rgurukkal@gmail.com. (shrink)

English summary: Johann Gottfried Herder played a central role in the emergence of aesthetics and art history in the eighteenth century. His was not only an avid reader and critic of important contemporaries, but also made essential contributions to the possibilities of art and art theory. This volume is illuminated by contemporary art discussion and the many facets of debate around Herder and the emergence of aesthetics and art history, from his early writings in the 1760s and 70s, (...) to this later works. French description: Johann Gottfried Herder spielt eine zentrale Rolle fur die Entstehung der Asthetik und der Kunstgeschichte, die beide zu den grundlegenden geistesgeschichtlichen Neuerungen des 18. Jahrhunderts gehoren. Er war nicht nur ein aufmerksamer Leser und Kritiker der wichtigsten Autoren, die sich mit dieser Materie befassten, wie etwa Winckelmann, Lessing oder Baumgarten, sondern hat selbst grundlegende und umfassende Beitrage geschrieben, die immer wieder aufs Neue die Moglichkeiten und Grenzen der Kunst, der Kunstwahrnehmung und der Kunsttheorie ausloten. Der hier vorgelegte Band leuchtet vor dem Hintergrund der zeitgenossischen Kunstdiskussionen die vielen Facetten der Auseinandersetzung Herders mit der entstehenden Asthetik und Kunstgeschichte aus, beginnend mit seinen Schriften, Kritische Walder' und, Plastik' aus den 1760er und 1770er Jahren bis hin zu seinen spateren Werken. (shrink)

The final volume (XXVI) of Princeton's Kierkegaard's Writings series, the Cumulative Index provides wide-ranging navigation to the preceding twenty-five volumes in the series. Composed of over 90,000 entries, the Cumulative Index offers access to Kierkegaard's complex authorship and the extraordinary range of subjects he addressed in his writing. Covering the series' historical introductions, primary works, supplementary material (journal entries), and footnotes, the Cumulative Index provides a comprehensive entryway to the series' more than 11,000 pages of text. Readers are able to (...) survey via extended entries Kierkegaard's dual authorship(pseudonymous and signed), his frequent biblical references and allusions, his references to Christianity, God, and love, and his frequent use of analogies. A cumulative collation of the extensive supplementary material (over 4,000 journal entries) is also included, giving researchers and avid readers the opportunity to correlate and examine items from the current series, Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers , and the original Danish Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. (shrink)

The final volume of Princeton's Kierkegaard's Writings series, the Cumulative Index provides wide-ranging navigation to the preceding twenty-five volumes. Composed of over 90,000 entries, the Cumulative Index offers access to Kierkegaard's complex authorship and the extraordinary range of subjects he addressed in his writing. Covering the series' historical introductions, primary works, supplementary material, and footnotes, the Cumulative Index provides a comprehensive entryway to more than 11,000 pages of text. Readers are able to survey via extended entries Kierkegaard's dual authorship, pseudonymous (...) and signed; his numerous biblical allusions; his references to Christianity, God, and love; and his frequent use of analogies. A cumulative collation of the extensive supplementary material is also included, giving researchers and avid readers the opportunity to cross-reference Kierkegaard's Writings with his journals and papers published elsewhere in both English and Danish. (shrink)

Two recent French poets, Henri Meschonnic and Jacques Roubaud, have found in Wittgenstein's philosophy an alternative to post-structuralist poetics. Meschonnic's poetry and his theoretical writings show a sustained critical engagement with Wittgenstein, whom he reads in conjunction with Emile Benveniste. The writers inform his theory of poetic rhythm and his practice of biblical translation. Roubaud's use of Wittgenstein, by contrast, here examined in the collection Quelque chose noir, is linked partly with the poet's grief following the death of his wife (...) Alix Cléo Roubaud, a photographer and an avid reader of Wittgenstein. In Roubaud, Wittgenstein opens up the space for a meditation on disappearance and absence. Roubaud reformulates passages from Wittgenstein's On Certainty in poems evoking Alix's memory. (shrink)

Enter The Expanse to explore questions of the meaning of human life, the concept of justice, and the nature of humanity, featuring a foreword from author James S.A. Corey The Expanse and Philosophy investigates the philosophical universe of the critically acclaimed television show and Hugo Award-winning series of novels. Original essays by a diverse international panel of experts illuminate how essential philosophical concepts relate to the meticulously crafted world of The Expanse, engaging with topics such as transhumanism, belief, culture, environmental (...) ethics, identity, colonialism, diaspora, racism, reality, and rhetoric. Conceiving a near-future solar system colonized by humanity, The Expanse provokes a multitude of moral, ethical, and philosophical queries: Are Martians, Outer Planets inhabitants, and Earthers different races? Is Marco Inaros a terrorist? Can people who look and sound different, like Earthers and Belters, ever peacefully co-exist? Should science be subject to moral rules? Who is sovereign in space? What is the relationship between human progress and aggression? The Expanse and Philosophy helps you answer these questions—and many more. Covers the first six novels in The Expanse series and five seasons of the television adaptation Addresses the philosophical issues that emerge from socio-economics and geopolitics of Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance Offers fresh perspectives on the themes, characters, and storylines of The Expanse Explores the connections between The Expanse and thinkers such as Aristotle, Kant, Locke, Hannah Arendt, Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Nietzsche Part of the popular Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, The Expanse and Philosophy is a must-have companion for avid readers of James S.A. Corey’s novels and devotees of the television series alike. (shrink)

​The motivation for this volume is simple. For a variety of reasons, clinical psychologists have long shown considerable interest in the philosophy of science. When logical positivism gained currency in the 1930s, psychologists were among the most avid readers of what these philosophers had to say about science. Part of the critique of Skinner’s radical behaviorism and thus behavior therapy was that it relied on, and thus was logically dependent on, the truth of logical positivism—a claim decisively refuted both (...) historically and logically by L.D. Smith (1986) in his important Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance. ​. (shrink)

This short essay connects President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822 - 1893) with the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882). It shows that President Hayes was an avid reader of Emerson and that he thought in Emersonian terms when he considered political questions. In private letters Hayes was wont to describe himself with the unusual term 'nihilist.' His use of this appellation has to be understood in the context of the times. What he meant was that he (...) had been called a 'nihilist' by devotees of the principle of 'laissez-faire' for his preference for policies which saw the state in a 'proactive' role in terms of economic regulation and so on. Hayes was proud to be a 'nihilist' understood in this sense because he believed state activity for the sake of social improvement is in fact the legacy of the Declaration of Independence and the Sermon on the Mount. Hayes' religious views were very 'liberal' but he was a long way from what the term 'nihilist' subsequently came to mean in later generations. (shrink)

Everyday aestheticians have had relatively little to say about literature. Inspired by Peter Kivy’s philosophy of literature as laid out in his books The Performance of Reading and Once-Told Tales, I examine reading literature as a part of everyday life. I argue that not only do Kivy’s views help explain the value that avid readers place on their daily silent engagement with a book, but that his philosophy of literature also shows how literary works can have an aesthetic presence (...) in our everyday lives even during periods in-between reading a book. In light of the paper, literary reading turns out to be an artistic routine that fills avid readers’ everyday lives in a very literal sense. (shrink)

It was no accident that the first neuroscience community, the Neurosciences Research Program (NRP), took shape in the 1960s at MIT, the birthplace of cybernetics. Francis O. Schmitt, known as the founding father of the NRP, was a famous biologist and an avid reader of cybernetics. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional context that Schmitt was situated in, this article unveils the way that the brain was conceptualized as a distinct object, requiring the launch of a new research (...) community in the US. In doing so, this article moves beyond the dominant narratives on the triumph of molecularization of the brain at the beginning of neuroscience. Instead, it argues that what brought researchers together in the name of neuroscience was not just a molecule but an aspiration to develop biological theories of the brain/mind, which resonated with biologists in a postwar context and was materialized through support for basic research. The article highlights the tension over the computerization and molecularization of the brain, which shaped the interdisciplinary gathering of neuroscientists in the context of growing interest in basic research. Thereby, this article reveals the rise of theoretical concerns in brain science that reflect the distinct desires and concerns of biologists in the US at an intellectual and institutional level. By revisiting the launch of the NRP with a focus on Schmitt, the article sheds light on the historical contingencies in launching the new community as neuroscience in the US and their meaning for the locality and transiency of (inter)disciplinarity in brain science. (shrink)

Stephen Cox writes of the complexities that guided this well-known columnist, literary critic, best-selling novelist, avid reader, and intellectual, Mary Isabel Bowler Patterson, better known as Isabel Paterson or “I.M.P.” This edited collection includes a well-chosen selection of her essays, reviews, and letters. Combining both formal and colloquial prose, Paterson’s writings incorporated quips about such people as Sinclair Lewis and Henry David Thoreau, as well as candid discussions of William F. Buckley, Jr., Buffalo Bill, and Cecil Rhodes. The (...) more than one hundred names mentioned in the collection included such diverse figures as Virginia Woolf, John Pierpont Morgan, H.G. Wells, Henry Hazlitt, and Jasper Elliot Crane. (shrink)

Thomas Fleming is an erudite political philosopher with a flair for language. Almost every page of his book on human nature includes colorful distillations of legal, ethical, and biological concepts drawn from a lifetime of study. Fleming also pokes fun at pompous naïfs: for example, when he observes that historians "like Philipe Aries and Lawrence Stone are forever discovering that some aspect of family life--conjugal intimacy or affection for children--was invented during the sixteenth or seventeenth century." From such playful phrases (...) and from learned references an argument takes shape in favor of the existence of a normative social morality based on the constancy of human nature. An enthusiastic classicist, an avid reader of the social and natural sciences, and a devout Lutheran, Fleming believes that Athens and Jerusalem have much in common, starting with a view of the social good. He looks for overlaps between the social practices of the Western and non-Western worlds and between classical and biblical morality. (shrink)

In this work, Daniel Cassany offers us some suggestive reflections on different aspects of reading, beginning his presentation with a quote from the writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: "The less you read, the more damage what you read does", and closing the work in its epilogue with an eloquent quote by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in honor of a verifiable fact by every avid reader: “You never finish learning to read”. Its list of sections seems ordered (...) by criteria of progressive complexity; and, in each of the twenty sections of this work, it gives us a thought from the mouth of others, perhaps in coherence with the construction of intentions that it describes, –as alluded to later– within section “8. Intentions ”. The starting point of the work responds to a logical justification of the word "laboratory" in the line of the experimental meaning related to scientific research, after transcribing a reference to its entry or voice in the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy. “I imagine it as a large, white room, with lots of light and full of private furniture: refrigerators with biological samples, drawers for storing delicate instruments, sophisticated microscopes for observing tissues, tables full of test tubes, and scientists and fellows in white coats and silicone gloves, working quietly, sitting on stools. And that is exactly this book, except in two details: that it is not about chemistry or medicine and that there is no room. ” With this almost plastic metaphor, Daniel Cassany has created an atmosphere as a communicative situation that easily mimics the reading fact seen as a sum of small microscopic details that are there, waiting to be discovered when the skills and sensitivity of the reader let you get there. (shrink)

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that--in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports...is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher Aaron James vigorously disagrees, and in Surfing with Sartre he intends to expound the thinking surfer's view of (...) the matter, in the process elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms "leisure capitalism." In developing his unique surfer-philosophical worldview, he draws from his own experience of surfing and from surf culture and lingo, and includes many relevant details from the lives of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, with whose thought he engages. In the process, he'll speak to readers in search of personal and social meaning in our current anxious moment, by way of doing real, authentic philosophy. (shrink)

Who would have thought it? Poker has become a mass-audience spectator sport. Names like Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson, Phil ‘Unabomber’ Laak, and Dave ‘The Devilfish’ Ulliott may not be familiar to all readers of the TLS, but on any normal night you can see these top poker professionals on the nether reaches of the satellite channels, as they bluff and bully their way to pots worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like their counterparts in tennis and golf, they tour the world, (...) playing in lucrative tournaments which are avidly followed on television by millions of amateur enthusiasts whose own poker experience is mostly limited to small-stakes games played with faceless strangers on internet poker sites. (shrink)

James Cameron’s critically acclaimed movie Avatar was nominated for nine Academy Awards and received countless accolades for its breath-taking visuals and use of 3D technology. But beyond its cinematic splendour, can Avatar also offer us insights into business ethics, empathy, disability, and the relationship between mind and body? Can getting to know the Na’vi, an alien species, enlarge our vision and help us to “see” both our world and ourselves in new ways? Avatar and Philosophy is a revealing journey through (...) the world of Pandora and the huge range of philosophical themes raised by James Cameron’s groundbreaking film Explores philosophical issues such as religion, morality, aesthetics, empathy, identity, the relationship of mind and body, environmental and business ethics, technology, and just war theory Examines a wide range of topics from the blockbuster movie, including attitudes toward nature, our responsibilities to nonhuman species, colonialism, disability, and communitarian ethics Written by an esteemed group of philosophers who are avid fans of Avatar themselves Explains philosophical concepts in an enjoyable and accessible manner that will appeal to all levels of readers With a new trilogy of sequels now announced, this is the ideal entry point for understanding the world of Pandora for fans and newcomers alike. (shrink)

Early Modern European travelers sought to gather and disseminate knowledge through narratives written for avid publishers and public. Yet not all travelers used the same tools to inform their readers. Despite a shared interest in conveying new knowledge based on eyewitness authority, Grand Tour accounts differed in an important respect from travelogues about Asia: they were less likely to include maps until the late eighteenth century. This paper examines why, using travel accounts published between 1600 and 1800 about Italy (...) and France (Europe) and India and Japan (Asia). It argues that maps of different types--coastlines, city plans, country topographies--appeared more frequently in accounts of Asian trips in part because of Europeans' more limited geographical knowledge about Asian destinations. More important, however, was the purpose of travel, the type of information gathered, and the intended audience of accounts. Seventeenth-century authors of Grand Tour experiences focused on single topics, ignored what seemed to be the familiar countryside they passed through, and showed little interest in geography. Their counterparts visiting Asia took an opposite tack, covering a wide range of subjects, including space, and cartographic representation was an important element within the account. Only in the eighteenth century, when the strange locale had become familiar and the familiar European destination became strange with new types of travel through it, were maps an important part of narrative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Sextus Empiricus: Against the Grammarians (Adversus Mathematicos I)George A. KennedyD[avid] L. Blank, trans. Sextus Empiricus: Against the Grammarians (Adversus Mathematicos I). With an introduction and commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. lvi + 436 pp. Cloth, $105. (Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers).Sextus was a Greek physician whose "empirical" medical studies seem to have led him to an enthusiastic commitment to what he calls "Pyrrhonian" skepticism, though it perhaps has (...) rather little debt to Pyrrho, who lived in the fourth century B.C. When and where Sextus himself lived and worked is unknown: certainly during the time of the Roman Empire, probably in the second, possibly in the third century, maybe in Alexandria, or Rome, or elsewhere. His extensive writings are a major source for the skeptical tradition in ancient philosophy--a kind of anti-foundationalism that has some appeal in our own age--but their importance goes beyond that, since Sextus explicates in detail the dogmas and theories he seeks to counteract. Against the Grammarians, as Blank notes, is second only to the textbook attributed to Dionysius Thrax for information on the teaching of grammar and is important for knowledge of Epicureanism as well.Blank's introduction, translation (the Greek text is not included), and line-by-line commentary (the first ever published) is a work of great learning and, I would think, of great patience. The volume as a whole greatly facilitates understanding of Sextus, his sources, and the traditions to which he subscribed or which he resisted. Blank has adopted "expertise" as a translation for the somewhat troublesome word techne, and "expert" for technites. This seems a reasonable rendering of Sextus' usage. What he attacks is not grammar (or, in subsequent books, rhetoric and the other arts) as practiced in ordinary life, but the claims to expert, scientific knowledge on the part of doctrinaire teachers of the arts, as well as some physicians and philosophers.This leads us, however, to a general problem in Sextus' writings. At the beginning of Against the Grammarians (chapters 5-7) (and elsewhere) he claims to have discovered difficult problems in the claims of specialists in philosophy and the arts which lead him to suspension of judgment. He will attempt "without any spirit of competitiveness to select and put the effective arguments against the liberal studies." Implicitly, an equal amount might be said in their defense. In what follows, however, he repeatedly claims to have "demolished" dogmas, leading to what has been called "negative dogmatism," the dogmatic denial of dogma. Blank devotes a section of his introduction to this problem, concluding that Sextus' intent throughout is in fact "equipollence." That is probably what Sextus himself would claim. Assuming it is, Sextus must, however, be charged with the fault of expressing himself poorly, for he repeatedly exults at his conclusive refutations of the claims of others.Throughout the work Blank strives, often with considerable success, to provide a sympathetic explanation and logical justification for Sextus' arguments, [End Page 166] many of which may initially strike a reader as blatant sophistries. Sextus was no fool, but he had blind spots and obsessions--infinite regress being one--and he often fails to take into account lines of argument obvious to a modern reader. Blank's objectivity does not extend to blanket approval of all of Sextus' arguments; indeed, he criticizes and even rejects the validity of arguments on a number of occasions. His treatment can be described as generally even-handed, but giving his author the benefit of the doubt more often than I would be inclined to do.Blank's extended introduction considers what is known about Sextus' life and works; the history of attacks on the arts, which go back to the fifth century b.c.; evidence for empiricist attacks on grammar; Against the Grammarians in relation to the other writings of Sextus; and negative dogmatism; then a few concluding remarks on the translation. Both here and in the commentary he convincingly demonstrates that Sextus' primary source is a lost Epicurean treatise--something like the writings of Zeno of Sidon, the teacher of Philodemus, though Blank stops short of claiming Zeno as the source. This Epicurean work contained a detailed attack... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comic RomanceBenjamin La FargeIOn the surface, it would seem that nothing could be more different from comedy than romance. Comedy deflates, romance inflates. Comedy is realistic, romance fantastical. Comedy reduces, romance elevates. Comedy is democratic, romance heroic. Yet there are underlying similarities. Both involve a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses. In both, appearances are typically mistaken for reality, and both end happily. Above all, both are governed by (...) a structure of illogical logic that generates laughter in one and fantasy in the other.The generic differences between comedy and romance are crucial to a proper understanding of their functions. Comedy celebrates the renewal of life, the relation of man to woman and of man to man, in a spirit of tolerant acceptance, while romance celebrates a narcissistic dream of the self. If the former is best enjoyed in a crowded theater, the latter is usually enjoyed in solitude. Romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. Since wishful thinking is generally understood as childish, romance is often regarded as a poor cousin among literary genres, haughtily dismissed by highbrows who associate it with the infantile pleasures of their childhood reading and with lowbrow fiction in general. This is precisely why so many sophisticated readers are reluctant to grant science fiction and other forms of fantasy any enduring literary value. In their view the pleasures of such works can not be taken seriously.Yet those childhood pleasures have a lasting appeal that lingers in the mind of every adult. There must be few grown readers who do not harbor a special fondness for the first heroes and heroines they encountered in their favorite childhood stories. Many of those heroes possess [End Page 18] some magical power; and when they place that power in the service of justice, especially the justice of revenge, their appeal is irresistible. I have seen grown men, armed and dressed for battle, avidly reading Superman comics. What stirred them, as it stirred many educated men and women in their childhood, was the spectacle of an omnipotent hero fighting to overcome the wrongs of this world.Even if our sentimental memory of these heroic figures is nothing more than nostalgia for irrecoverable pleasures, their initial impact may be seen as having a formative influence on a child's expectations, as many commentators have thought. In either case, they are all descended from a venerable tradition of literary figures. Superman himself is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, who comes from a long line of English heroes going back to Robin Hood and Merlin, each of whom is involved in righting some injustice. Ultimately, all of them are descended from Odysseus, who reclaimed his rightful kingdom, after an absence of twenty years, by murdering his wife's suitors.Romance, like comedy, is a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses, and these impulses are embodied in the characters that inhabit this dream fiction.1 Like comic characters, the characters of romance evoke in us the same responses of wish and fear, and like comedy itself romance builds toward a catharsis of those two emotions. To achieve that catharsis, romance requires our "willing suspension of disbelief" (as Coleridge put it so memorably), which we have no difficulty in granting, provided only that the story is skillfully told. What we want from romance is the fulfillment of the wishes it arouses; what we get from their fulfillment is the pleasure of story-for-the-sake-of-story. It is this pleasure, in fact, that constitutes the basic, generic purpose of romance.The difference between the two genres, however, can be seen in the kinds of wish and fear they evoke in us, for unlike comedy the feelings of wish and fear evoked by romance are uncomplicated by ambivalence. We may wish to experience the destructive impulse vicariously through the protagonist, but only in order to see him triumph in the end. We are so entirely sympathetic to his enterprise that we cannot possibly wish for his destruction. If he is destroyed, as in the case of Tristan, the hero of the eponymous medieval romance, we are forced to recognize that the love potion he drank with Isolde was his... (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment by Karen GreenAlan CoffeeKaren Green. Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment. London: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 276. Hardback, $160.00.Though she was once one of the most recognizable and celebrated public intellectuals in Britain and was read avidly in both revolutionary America and France, after her death in 1791, Catharine Macaulay's work fell into almost total obscurity for around two hundred years. This began to change in the (...) 1990s, since which time interest in Macaulay from historians, philosophers, and feminist scholars has gathered pace. In the last decade and a half, no one has likely done more to advance this scholarship than Karen Green, who has published numerous journal articles and book chapters probing deeply into Macaulay's thought and intellectual context, and who helpfully edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), which had not previously been easily available to readers. As one would expect, Green's Catharine Macaulay's Republican Enlightenment builds on this depth of research. For a relatively slim volume, this is the most complete and detailed intellectual biography of Macaulay that I know of, an impressive feat given Macaulay's voluminous output.The aims of the book are twofold: first, to provide a narrative biography following Macaulay's life and the development of her works as they unfolded across her life, and second, to offer an overview and exposition of her ideas in their social and political context (4). These aims are important to bear in mind, since they establish what the book [End Page 158] is able to do and what it stops short of giving us. The volume is organized chronologically, divided into seven main chapters, each representing a short period in Macaulay's life, with an introduction and concluding chapter that considers her legacy, bringing the total chapters to nine. In each of the substantive chapters, Green mixes a biographical account of Macaulay's life with an often detailed analysis of one or more of her main works written during that period, as well as an assessment of how these works both engaged with, and were received within, some of the political and intellectual debates at the time. This is expertly done, with Green drawing on her intimate acquaintance with Macaulay's correspondence with many of the key figures of the period. The book, therefore, would make an excellent companion to anyone reading through the Correspondence as well as for those studying any of Macaulay's historical volumes, treatises, and tracts.An especially strong aspect of Green's book is the way she weaves an ongoing dialogue between Macaulay and several influential figures from her intellectual world across the chapters. One of these is David Hume, who, like Macaulay, had written an ideologically situated—even if both authors claimed impartiality—multivolume History of England. Though Hume's series was completed before Macaulay's had begun, hers can be seen as a philosophical and political rival to his. While the two would only correspond directly once on the subject, Green compares the impact that their respective philosophies have on their resulting political positions. In the 1760s, Green argues, Hume's naturalism, empiricism, and skepticism gave rise to a social conservative politics, whereas Macaulay's theological rationalism provided the basis for her optimistic and radical politics (50). By the 1790s, however, when Macaulay was writing her Letters on Education, Green detects some elements of a Humean philosophy of mind coming to influence Macaulay, albeit likely through David Hartley, particularly concerning the importance of sympathy on our moral psychology, even if there remain important differences between them (180–82). Green also analyzes Macaulay's engagement with Thomas Hobbes in her Loose Remarks and her two formal Observations on writings by Edmund Burke. Of particular value to historians of republicanism is Green's tracing and examination of Macaulay's ongoing intellectual relationship with key political figures, such as John Wilkes in Britain; Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, John and Abigail Adams, James Otis, Mercy Otis Warren, and George Washington in America; Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot and Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville in France, among many others. Though Macaulay's reputation as an influential political writer... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 143 sensual reason is supposed to develop the powers of observation and reasoning to the highest degree but not the spiritual intuition into the essence of things. Steiner proposed a theory of reincarnation; he also created a special kind of Christology which is based on the assumption that there were two Jesus-boys, one of whom incarnated the spirit of Zarathustra. As for Christ he descended into the (...) second Jesus from extraterrestrial spheres where he pre-existed. This is the "mystery of Golgatha," a decisive event in the history of mankind. Steiner has also a special concept of Karma as world spirit. His beliefs are strongly influenced by the German "Naturphilosophie" of the Romantic epoch and by Fichte whom he admires. The main theme of his life-work is the struggle against "materialism," against the concept of "homo oeconomieus," although Steiner was connected in the beginning with the leaders of the Austrian social democracy, such as his friends, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, and Viktor Adler. There is also the influence of German mystics, such as Jakob Boehme, on his thinking. This collection of lectures shows also that in the crucial period of German nationalism-during World War I--Steiner was not a chauvinist. He criticized, for instance, in these lectures the chauvinistic aberrations of Thomas Mann. He predicts (p. 100), in the course of the mechanization of human thinking, the construction of machines which would replace thinking itself. Instead of thinking, there would be mere "switching" (man schiebt). He predicts furthermore (p. 98) that this radical mechanization of man will come from America. The greater part of mankind will be influenced by America from the West.... It will not take too much time: around the year 2000 there will be issued in America not a formal but still a sort of prohibition of thinking; there will be a law that will have the purpose of repressing all individual thinking. On one side there is already the beginning of this development in purely materialistic medicine where the soul is not permitted to act but man is dealt with on the basis of external experiments as a pure machine. MAx RINSER New York City The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. By Alan Donagan. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press~ 1962. Pp. xi + 332. $6.00.) The influence of Collingwood has been evident in many disciplines, and, judging from the number of books, articles, and dissertations being prepared with him and his interests in mind, it is a safe guess that he will remain an ubiquitous influence for some time. Yet because Collingwood 's interests were so wide and his attraction so general, few, if any, of his readers and critics have attempted to "place" him. This is not to say that the critical works prepared by T. M. Knox (the "Editor's Preface" to The Idea of History, 1946) and E. W. F. Tomlin (R. G. Collingwood, 195~) were unconcerned with such an issue. Indeed, their respective studies appear to have it in mind; nevertheless, it was not the impetus for the specific work, and as a result their researches tend to be prolegomena. With the publication of Donagan's book, however, there is presented a study which must be considered a landmark, if not a turning point, in the tradition of Collingwood criticism: for Donagan not only "places" Collingwood, he also attempts to justify his conclusion. And for the critic it is the subtlety of Donagan's arguments, ~lbeit their venturesome quality, which leads one to suggest that this book will make its "contributions " both to the tradition in particular and to the avid interest in general. In the Preface, Donagan acknowledges the fact that in order to "place" Collingwood his readers must be persuaded "to abandon the injurious preconception with which Collingwood's later books are often read" (p. vii). Although he does not designate what these "preconceptions " are, it may be surmised that they have something to do with the traditional tendency among the critics to read too lightly The New Leviathan (1942). Donagan believes that Colling~ wood's "later" masterpieces, "The Idea of History (1936-39?), The Principles of Art (1938), and the first three parts of The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor ColeridgeWilliam E. CainCritical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Leonard Orr; vi & 194 pp. New York: Twayne, 1994, $42.00.“Coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, August 12, 1834, to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result.” There is now a huge Coleridge industry in the academy, engaged in producing editions of his writings (...) and examinations of his literary career. Yet Carlyle’s judgment continues to carry weight with many nonspecialist readers, who know Coleridge only as Wordsworth’s estimable friend and as the author of a handful of superb lyrics and radiant critical speculations in the Biographia Literaria (1817). These texts are indeed rich and suggestive: readers wish that there were more like them and that Coleridge’s achievement had somehow been greater, more monumental, like Wordsworth’s. Coleridge’s “misfortune,” concluded Carlyle’s friend, John Sterling, in January 1842, “was to appear at a time when there was a man’s work to do—and he did it not.”But the wish that Coleridge had been more than he was is misplaced, in large measure for the reason that it neglects the vast amount of significant work that he did accomplish—not only in poetry and criticism, but in philosophy, political journalism, social theory, and other disciplines and areas of thought. Experts in Romanticism know this work (or, at least, know of it), yet it has not [End Page 151] been excerpted in anthologies, contextualized and explained for students, or brought forward for analysis, beyond the circle of avid Coleridgeans, to extend and complicate the commonplaces about this writer that still enjoy wide circulation.In this respect, Leonard Orr, editor of Critical Essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, perhaps has missed an opportunity. His collection is valuable as far as it goes; it reprints eight excellent essays along with two new ones, and Orr’s own concise, informed Introduction, with footnotes packed with bibliography, provides a lucid overview of Coleridge studies. But the focus is strangely limited, the conception of the writer’s career is dated and conventional, and the selection of essays is too restricted.One is grateful for this collection’s strengths even as one regrets its gaps and omissions. John Beer gives a good account of the Coleridge/Wordsworth relationship; Stuart Peterfreund nicely shows how “Coleridge’s failed political vision of European history” is redeemed “as part of his critical vision of the imagination”; James C. McKusick, Paul Magnuson, Andrew M. Cooper, James Engell, and Anne K. Mellor explore Coleridge’s poetry—though oddly there is no essay devoted primarily to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; and Kathleen M. Wheeler, Lawrence Buell, and Jerome Christensen form a helpful unit of pieces on the Biographia Literaria. But readers will not find here anything more than brief mentions of, for example, Coleridge’s writings for The Watchman and The Friend, his striking interpretations of Shakespeare, Aids to Reflection, letters, notebooks, two Lay Sermons, and On the Constitution of the Church and State.This failure to supply broader, more innovative coverage is puzzling, given that the general aim of the series in which Orr’s book appears (Critical Essays on British Literature, gen. ed. Zack Bowen) is “to develop a new overall perspective on its particular subject.” Even more, Orr himself says in his Introduction that scholarship of the past two decades has prompted us to be “less likely to ignore the prose works beyond the Biographia” and has drawn attention to Coleridge’s marginalia and notebooks. Orr displays a sharp sense of the new Coleridge, yet has designed his book in a way that reflects the old one and that will tend for many readers simply to reinforce Carlyle’s adverse judgment.William E. CainWellesley CollegeCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive insight into the (...) present moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the concept of need is as vital for moral theory as it is for moral life. In II we analyse need and its normativity in public and private moral practice. In III we describe simple cases which exemplify the moral demandingness of needs, and argue that the significance of simple cases for moral theory is obscured by the emphasis in moral philosophy on unusual cases. In IV we argue that moral theories are inadequate if (...) they cannot describe simple needs-meeting cases. We argue that the elimination or reduction of need to other concepts such as value, duty, virtue or care is unsatisfactory, in which case moral theories that make those concepts fundamental will have to be revised. In conclusion, we suggest that if moral theories cannot be revised to accommodate needs, they may have to be replaced with a fully needs-based theory. Correspondence:c1 c.s.reader@durham.ac.ukc2 g. brock @auckland.ac.nz. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers tended to be suspicious of the concept of need. Contributors to this volume build on recent work establishing its philosophical importance. David Wiggins, Gillian Brock and John O'Neill propose remedies for some mistakes made in ignoring or marginalising need, for example in need-free theories of rationality or justice. Christopher Rowe, Soran Reader and Sarah Miller highlight insights that emerge when the concept of need is explored through Plato, Aristotle and Kant - and others that emerge when (...) historical work is seen through the lens of need. Jonathan Lowe and Garrett Thomson consider the role need plays in the philosophies of action and mind. Bill Wringe, David Braybrooke and Sabina Alkire debate how our obligations relating to need are best understood and articulated, and how we can best ensure they are fulfilled, exploring for example how talk of need is related to talk of rights, well-being or capability. (shrink)

Many animals will invent new behaviour patterns, adjust established behaviours to a novel context, or respond to stresses in an appropriate and novel manner. This is the first ever book on the topic of 'animal innovation'. Bringing together leading scientific authorities on animal and human innovation, this book will put the topic of animal innovation on the map, and heighten awareness of this developing field.

In our philosophical tradition and our wider culture, we tend to think of persons as agents. This agential conception is flattering, but in this paper I will argue that it conceals a more complex truth about what persons are. In 1. I set the issues in context. In 2. I critically explore four features commonly presented as fundamental to personhood in versions of the agential conception: action, capability, choice and independence. In 3. I argue that each of these agential features (...) presupposes a non-agential feature: agency presupposes patiency, capability presupposes incapability, choice presupposes necessity and independence presupposes dependency. In 4. I argue that such non-agential features, as well as being implicit within the agential conception, are as apt to be constitutive of personhood as agential features, and in 5. I conclude. (shrink)

Needs and Moral Necessity analyses ethics as a practice, explains why we have three moral theory-types, consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics, and argues for a fourth needs-based theory.

How can we justify partiality to those near to us, such as our own families, friends, neighbours and colleagues, when we could act in much more morally valuable ways by helping others who are merely distant from us? In 1972 Peter Singer used two now-famous examples, Pond and.

The rubber hand illusion is one of the most commonly used paradigms to examine the sense of body ownership. Touches are synchronously applied to the real hand, hidden from view, and a false hand in an anatomically congruent position. During the illusion one may perceive that the feeling of touch arises from the false hand, and that the false hand is one's own. The relationship between referral of touch and body ownership in the illusion is unclear, and some articles average (...) responses to statements addressing these experiences, which may be inappropriate depending on the research question of interest. To address these concerns, we re-analyzed three freely available datasets to better understand the relationship between referral of touch and feeling of ownership in the RHI. We found that most participants who report a feeling of ownership also report referral of touch, and that referral of touch and ownership show a moderately strong positive relationship that was highly replicable. In addition, referral of touch tends to be reported more strongly and more frequently than the feeling of ownership over the hand. The former observations confirm that referral of touch and ownership are related experiences in the RHI. The latter, however, indicate that when pooling the statements one may obtain a higher number of illusion ‘responders’ compared to considering the ownership statements in isolation. These results have implications for the RHI as an experimental paradigm. (shrink)

A threat to women is obscured when we treat “abortion-as-evacuation” as equivalent to “abortion-as-killing.” This holds only if evacuating a fetus kills it. As technology advances, the equivalence will fail. Any feminist account of abortion that relies on the equivalence leaves moral room for women to be required to give up their fetuses to others when it fails. So an account of the justification of abortion-as-killing is needed that does not depend on the equivalence.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Action and Passivity Capability/Incapability and Need Choice, Rationality, Freedom/Constraint Independence and Dependency References Further reading.

Evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) may provide insights and new methods for studies of cognition and cultural evolution. For example, I propose using cultural selection and individual learning to examine constraints on cultural evolution. Modularity, the idea that traits vary independently, can facilitate evolution (increase “evolvability”), because evolution can act on one trait without disrupting another. I explore links between cognitive modularity, evolutionary modularity, and cultural evolvability. (Published Online November 9 2006).

Aristotle’s account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.

One of the most striking contributions of particularism to moral philosophy has been its emphasis on the relative opacity of the moral scene to the tools of rational analysis traditionally used by philosophers. Particularism changes the place of the philosopher in relation to the moral life, pointing up the limits to what philosophy can do here. The modern moral philosopher who takes particularism seriously no longer has the luxury, endemic in our tradition, of imagining that moral philosophy can be done (...) with only passing illustrative reference to experience, or that the truth about the whole of our moral life may be read of a list of a priori moral principles, whose rationality is underwritten by the mechanistic account of what it is to follow a rule that pre-Wittgensteinian philosophers took for granted. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce my work in ethics, inviting others to draw on my approach to address the ethical issues that concern them. I set up the Centre for Ethical Philosophy at Durham University in 2007 to plug a puzzling gap in philosophical work to help us help the world. In 1. I set out ethical philosophy. In 2. I consider some implications, for example, that to do good we must pay much more attention to the beings around us, (...) less to ourselves. In 3. I consider the implications for how we should think about war and peace. In 4. I draw out some implications for good political practice. In 5. I consider objections and conclude. (shrink)