las severas criticas a la iglesia expresadas en el Speculum uite humane por Rodrigo Sanchez de arevalo, encaminadas quizas a una reforma interna de la institucion, fueron interpretadas, sin duda contra la voluntad del autor, como precedentes del luteranismo en Europa.

las severas criticas a la iglesia expresadas en el Speculum uite humane por Rodrigo Sanchez de arevalo, encaminadas quizas a una reforma interna de la institucion, fueron interpretadas, sin duda contra la voluntad del autor, como precedentes del luteranismo en Europa.

La doctrina aristotélica de la elección desempeña un papel clave en su concepción de la virtud ética y de la praxis moral. El objeto de este artículo es analizar el planteamiento aristotélico y cómo es interpretado por Aspasio en el siglo II d.c. El hecho de que el Comentario aspasiano sea el primero conservado, nos permite rastrear su evolución, los problemas a los que responde y las consecuencias de este proceso. Siendo su interpretación fiel a la concepción aristotélica, incorpora elementos (...) de la visión estoica de la teoría de la acción, que tiene como consecuencia una modificación de la doctrina de la voluntariedad de los actos. (shrink)

O nosso artigo visa o estudo hagiográfico de Santa Quitéria, uma jovem mártir do século II, cuja vida se encontra envolvida em aspectos lendários, ainda pouco estudados. Filha de um nobre pagão, terá nascido na região de Braga, juntamente com mais oito irmãs gémeas. Os primeiros milagres datam do século VIII, altura em que começou a ser venerada como mártir, destino que partilhou com suas irmãs. O martírio é referido, pela primeira vez, no século XII, estando relatado nos Flos Sanctorum (...) de Alonso de Villegas e de Diogo do Rosário e inscrito no Martirológio Romano (22 de Maio). O culto de Santa Quitéria, promovido, particularmente, pelos jesuítas, encontra-se bem alicerçado na devoção popular que a invoca como advogada contra a raiva. A arquidiocese de Braga celebra a sua memória no dia 8 de Junho. Felgueiras não só lhe erigiu um santuário no local onde, supostamente, foi sepultada, como tem Santa Quitéria como padroeira.A iconografia desta nobre donzela romana faz alusão a certos episódios da sua vida e revela o instrumento material do martírio, aspectos que nos propomos analisar bem como fazer referência ao culto e às dificuldades causadas pelas diversas lendas sobre a sua vida. (shrink)

This photo-essay, entitled 'Our Stories: Cartography of a Conflict', is born from the fieldwork carried out in the scope of the research 'Past, Present and Future in the Voice of Women and Girls Affected by the Conflict in Cabo Delgado: A Feminist Analysis', as a way of naming and disseminating the diversity of voices of displaced women, and broadening the visibility of their stories, which have very often been reduced to statistics. The aim of this article is to share their (...) perceptions and demands, their stories and journeys in search of security and possible horizons for their re-existence. This photo-essay shows that women displaced and affected by the conflict need to be named, singularised in their aspirations, needs and struggles. Their life stories are the reason for this work. It is their pain and resilience, their desires, their invisible and visible powers, their strategies for rebuilding their lives, families and communities that we want to make known. Their voices need to be heard, read, understood and placed at the centre of all governmental and civil society interventions for reconstruction, humanitarian response and peacebuilding in Cabo Delgado. Each woman participating in this photo-essay has chosen to share her story and her face, and has decided how to be photographed and represented, with the desire that somehow their trajectories become sources of direct knowledge to guide the paths to Peace in the province. They want to be known and recognised in their dignity, in their determination and perseverance, as well as in their deepest needs. The story of each woman shared in this article is a local and national reference to build a nonviolent future in Mozambique. (shrink)

The article aimed to determine the relationship between neuroscience and emotional states in university faculty members from Latin America during the post-pandemic stage of COVID-19. It highlights the importance of understanding emotions from a neuroscientific perspective to develop strategies that enhance emotional management and resilience in the educational context. The descriptive-correlational research included a sample of 318 faculty members from various Latin American countries. The results revealed severe levels of stress (88.4%) and anxiety (92.1%), as well as inadequate (40.9%) or (...) moderate (46.9%) levels of resilience among the faculty members. A strong positive correlation was found between neuroscience and emotional states (rho=0.860), as well as a good positive correlation between neuroscience and resilience (rho=0.739). The study concludes that the knowledge and application of neuroscience principles could contribute to lower levels of stress and anxiety and increase resilience in university faculty members, emphasizing the importance of integrating these disciplines into the understanding and management of emotions in the educational field. (shrink)

Introduction: This study explores how learning experiences at public universities impact the development of critical thinking in early education students in 2023. Objective: To determine the influence of learning experiences on the critical thinking of early education students, identifying effective didactic strategies for its promotion. Methodology: Utilizing a quantitative approach, data were collected from 247 early education students across various public universities in Peru through structured surveys. These surveys were designed to measure students' perceptions of their learning experiences and their (...) impact on critical thinking, including items related to communicative, reflective, and problem-solving competencies. The instruments' validation was ensured through reliability and validity analysis, and data were statistically analyzed using SPSS V.25 software to examine the relationships between variables. Results: The findings indicated a positive and significant correlation between carefully designed learning experiences and the enhancement of students' critical thinking. This link underscores the critical value of adopting didactic strategies focused on fostering critical thinking, showing that when students are immersed in learning environments that challenge their abilities and promote reflection, their capacity to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information significantly improves. Conclusions: The findings highlight the necessity for universities to continuously implement and adapt their pedagogical methods to foster meaningful and critical learning. This research contributes to understanding how educational experiences can be designed to enhance critical thinking, providing a foundation for future curricular and pedagogical developments in higher education. (shrink)

The connections of Medicine and Religion are thoroughly documented in the primitive societies, and it comes as no surprise to see them together. Here we describe the true story of a Portuguese physician of the late 19th century whose image today is venerated in such a way as to compare him to a saint and to bestow upon him miraculous powers of healing. We propose that modern day physicians can learn from the example of this man that the role of (...) doctor encompasses not only scientific and technical mastery but, most of all, piety, humanity and compassion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article proposes to discuss the aesthetic and poetic praxis in the performance art Corda de Nó(s),1 based on theatrical and visual narratives directed towards intellectual emancipation and the expansion of the sensibility from the teaching experience within a municipal public school unit, in the city of Palmas (TO). This study focuses on a qualitative methodology of oral and exploratory narrative as well as the researchers’ field notebooks, prepared during the activities referred to in this text, in conjunction with (...) bibliographic studies, on the concepts of preparation, development and conclusion of the lesson plan of Arts discipline, based on universal education, as proposed by Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

Objective. To determine the effectiveness of the "I take care of myself" program for self-care in schoolchildren. Methods. Quasi-experimental study with a single pre-post test group, with the participation of 120 sixth grade students of the primary level of the Educational Institution of San Pedro - Huánuco, Peru 2022, in which the "I take care of myself" Program was applied. The data collection instrument was the self-care practices scale. In the hypothesis test, the Wilcoxon statistical test was used. Results. It (...) was found that the average score obtained in self-care before the application of the "I take care of myself" program was 3.7, and after this it was 4.0, finding significant differences in the pretest and posttest with p≤0.000. Likewise, there were significant differences in the dimensions of self-care such as practices related to universal self-care requirements, practices related to development self-care requirements, and practices related to self-care requirements in case of health deviation, all with p≤0.05. Conclusions. There are significant differences in self-care after applying the "I take care of myself" program in schoolchildren of the Educational Institution of San Pedro - Huánuco. (shrink)

The challenge of developing a business ethics in China in response to today's increasing demands of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is examined within the context of recent business scandals, food scare, labor issues, and environmental degradations the country is now experiencing. Two surveys on CSR are reported. This paper reports the recent CSR development in China and oudines the profile of a prospective business ethics for China. The formal constraints and substantive components of this business ethics are proposed against the (...) background of China's cultural and ideological heritage. (shrink)

This study investigates the processes involved in the shaping of a society's economic ethos. The discussion of ethics and economics has a very long history across multiple disciplines. The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, likewise had a keen interest in this topic. However, with the development of economic science, scholarly assessment has shifted toward positive analysis while normative analysis has been left mainly to philosophers. By utilizing the newly developed morality of profit-making scale, the authors sought to understand how (...) respondents' economic ethical worldview shifts over time. Specifically, we theorized that the news media's copious negative coverage of the gasoline price crisis of 2006 would significandy impact individuals' MPM worldview. The results show that respondents' explicit attitudes toward MPM were significantly impacted. However, respondents' more deeply held, implicit economic ethical worldview was only slightly impacted. The authors argue that only patient, long-term explanation and argumentation can permanently affect a society's economic ethos. Implications and future research directions for business researchers are oudined. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Noël Carroll THE PARADOX OFJUNK FICTION Perhaps on your way to some academic conference, if you had no papers to grade, you stopped in die airport gift shop for something to read on the plane. You saw racks of novels authored by die likes of Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Tom Clancy, and so on. (...) These are the kinds of novels that, when you lend them to friends, you don't care, unless you live in Bowling Green, Ohio, whether you ever get them back. They are mass, popular fictions. In another era, they would have been called pulp fictions. Following Thomas Roberts,1 I will call diem junk fictions, under which rubric I will also include things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies. There are a number of interesting philosophical questions diat we may ask aboutjunk fiction. We could, for example, attempt to characterize its essential features. However, for the present, I will assume that the preceding examples are enough to provide you with a rough-andready notion of what I am calling junk fiction, and I will attempt to explore anotiier feature of the phenomenon, viz., what I call the paradox ofjunk fiction. Thejunk fictions that I have in mind are all narratives. Indeed, dieir story dimension is die most important thing about diem. Stephen King, for instance, makes diis point by saying that he is primarily a story teller rather than a writer. Junk fictions aspire to be page-turners—the blurb on the cover of Stillwatch by Mary Higgins Clark says that it is "designed to be read at breatiitaking speed"—and what motivates turning die page so quickly is our interest in what happens next. We do not dawdle Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 225-241 226Philosophy and Literature over Clark's diction as we might over Updike's nor do we savor die complexity of her sentence structure, as we do widi Virginia Woolfs. Radier, we read for story. Moreover, junk fictions are die sort of narratives that commentators are wont to call formulaic. That is, junk fictions generally belong to well-entrenched genres, which diemselves are typified by tiieir possession of an extremely limited repertoire of story-types. For example, as John Cawelti has pointed out, one such recurring Western narrative is diat of the recendy pacifist gunfighter, like Shane, who is forced by circumstances to take up his pistols again, widi altogedier devastating effect.2 Junk fictions tell diese generic stories again and again with minor variations. Sometimes diese variations may be quite clever and unexpected. Agatiia Christie was the master of this; she was able to use the conventions of the mystery genre in order to "hide" her murderers. In TheMurderofRogerAckroyd, she "secrets" the murderer in the personage of the narrator; in Ten Little Indians, die murderer is a "dead man"; while in Murder on the Orient Express, all the suspects did it. In each of these cases, Christie's brilliance hinges upon her playing (and preying) upon conventional expectations. Neverdieless, even diese surprising variations require a well-established background of narrative forms. That is, in order to appreciate diese variations, die reader must in some sense know die standard story already. And with junk fiction, it is generally fair to say that in some sense, the reader—or, at least, the reader who has read around in die genre before—knows in rough oudine how die story is likely to go. Readers and/or viewers of Jurassic Park surmised, once die dinosaur enclosures were described, diat in fairly short order die dinosaurs would trample them down and go on the rampage—after all we had already seen or read The Lost World, King Kong, and their progeny. So, junk fictions are formulaic. They rehearse certain narrative formats again and again. And, furthermore, in some very general sense, the audience already knows die story in question. But this knowledge on die part of die audience provokes a question, specifically, why if the reader, viewer or listener already... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard J. Bernstein THE RAGE AGAINST REASON Recently, a number of phflosophers including Alasdair Maclntyre, Richard Rorty, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-François Lyotard have reminded us about die centred (and problematic) role of narratives for philosophic inquiry. I say "reminded us" because narrative discourse has always been important for philosophy. Typically, every significant philosopher situates his or her own work by telling a story about what happened before he or (...) she came along— a story that has its own heroes and villains. This is the way in which philosophers are always creating and recreating dieir own traditions and canons. And die stories that they tell are systematically interwoven with what they take to be their distinctive contributions. Consider Aristotle's narrative in die first book of me Mdaphysics about the insights and blindnesses of his predecessors in grasping the multidimensional character of our scientific knowledge of causes. Or — to leap to the contemporary scene — think of the story that logical positivists told us about the confusions and linguistic blunders of most of their predecessors — with a few bright moments of anticipation of their own radical program for reforming phdosophy. Or again, there is the powerfully seductive story diat Husserl tells where the entire history of philosophy is viewed as a teleological anticipation of die new rigorous Wissenschaft of transcendental phenomenology. There is a common rhetorical pattern in these narratives. They tell stories ofanticipations, setbacks, and trials, but they culminate with the progressive realization of truth and reason, which is normally identified with what die philosopher/ storyteller now sees clearly — a "truth" which his or her predecessors saw only through a glass darkly. There is also die genre of philosophic narratives which has become so fashionable in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has dramatically reversed diis pattern. They tell of relentless decline, degeneration, catas186 Richard J. Bernstein187 trophe, and forgetfulness. A "classic" instance of this is Nietzsche's geneological unmasking of the "history" of reason, truth, and morality which culminates in the dominance and spread of a pernicious all-encompassing nihilism. But we also find variations of this pattern in Maclntyre's saga of the decline and degeneration of moral phdosophy and moral life since me Enlightenment. And — as we shall see — diis is die way in which Heidegger reads (in his "strong reading") the destiny of Western philosophy and metaphysics which is interwoven with the history of the forgetfulness and concealment of Being. It is not my intention to develop a typology of narrative patterns in philosophy, although I am convinced that such a typology would be extremely üluminating. Rather I want to set a context for what I will attempt to do in this article. For I want to oudine a narrative — or more accurately and modestly — a narrative sketch. Even diough I will be schematic, my tale is a complex one for several reasons. First, because it is a narrative about narratives, specifically narratives which themselves relate stories about the development of reason, or what thinkers such as Weber and Habermas call "rationalization" processes,1 Secondly, because it is a narrative that isolates different story lines, a plot and a counterplot that stand in an uneasy and unresolved tension with each odier. Thirdly, because it is not one of those narratives where all the loose threads are neady tied together at die end — or to switch metaphors, there is no grand Aufhebung because it is essentially an unfinished story. In the spirit of this prologue let me introduce die four main characters ofmyfirst story line, and tell you what I hope to achieve. The names of the main characters are Condorcet, Weber, Adorno, and Heidegger. My aim is to confront some deeply troubling contemporary questions, for I want to understand why today there are so many "voices" screeching about Reason. Why is there a rage against Reason? What precisely is being attacked, criticized, and damned? Why is it diat when "Reason" or "Rationality" are mentioned, they evoke images of domination, oppression, repression, patriarchy, sterility, violence, totality, totalitarianism, and even terror? These questions are especially poignant and perplexing when we realize that not so long ago, die call to "Reason" elicited associations with autonomy, freedom, justice, equality... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes’s Demon and the Madness of Don QuixoteSteven NadlerDescartes’s “malicious demon” (genius malignus, le mauvais génie)—the evil deceiver of the Meditations on First Philosophy whose hypothetical existence threatens to undermine radically Descartes’s confidence in his cognitive f aculties—is an artful philosophical and literary device. There is considerable debate over the significance of this powerful and malevolent being within Descartes’s argumentative strategy. Some insist that its role is a substantive (...) one, with Descartes in troducing the deceiver in order to deepen yet further the skeptical doubts of the First Meditation, doubts from which he hopes, by the grace of a benevolent God, eventually to rescue himself. 1 Others claim that its role is merely a rhetorical one, with the demon meant simply to reinforce already philosophically well-established skeptical doubts that, in the face of everyday habit, are difficult to sustain. 2 Either way, there is no underestimating the force of the hypothesis as an epistemological tool for subverting our faith in our reasoning and sensory powers. [End Page 41]It is useful to place the “evil genius” in the context of seventeenth-century intellectual culture 3 not just for our understanding of what may have been the historical origins of this most extreme and “metaphysical” 4 of all skeptical doubts but also for broadening our appreciation of its significance beyond epistemology alone. When we grasp the various practical (moral, legal, and social) problems and the literary and artistic possibilities raised by the demon hypoth esis, we can see why such an improbably hyper-skeptical thesis is nonetheless deserving of general interest. To take just one example, Richard Popkin, in his seminal work on the history of skepticism in early modern thought, describes the knotty problems that are generated in the legal context of a trial when the issue of the demonic is raised (as in the case of someone on trial for witchcraft). 5In the service of this contextualizing project I compare Descartes’s meditator (with his self-assumed skeptical pose) with a near-contemporary literary character of particular fame and importance. What is especially striking—and instructive—in this comp arison are the parallels and resonances between the kind of general, systematic, philosophically-generated hyperbolic doubt that Descartes introduces by way of his deceptor potentissimus et malignus and the initially more particular (but perhaps eq ually systematic) distrust of the faculties that is suggested by Don Quixote’s own “rationalization” of his illusions. 6 In fact precisely the same philosophical problem is raised both in the first major work of modern philosophy and in the first modern novel: in the face of the possibility of ongoing deception by some powerful and malicious being, how can we possibly trus t our sensory and rational faculties to provide us with true and reliable knowledge? Descartes’s philosophical work can even provide us with a key to understanding part of the nature of Don Quixote’s madness, to systematizing it in its epistemological dim ensions. Reciprocally, it may be that Cervantes’s hero gives us a concrete picture of what it would be like to try to live in the radically deceptive world of the skepticism of the First Meditation. [End Page 42]Did Cervantes’s novel have a direct influence on Descartes’s philosophical reflections? The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1604; the second part, written after several pirated editions of Part I had been circulating for a number of year s, appeared in 1614, the year before Cervantes’s death. The novel was immediately and enormously popular and was quickly translated into a number of other languages. The first French translation of Part I (by César Oudin) was published in 1614. In 1618, François de Rosset translated Part II, and these two translations were published together in one volume in 1639, 1646, and 1665. 7 We can be confident that Descartes knew about Cervantes’s works; and while we cannot say with certainty that he read Don Quixote, given his education, social status, interest in novels of chivalry, and the intellectual circles in which he traveled, it would be surprising if he did not. He... (shrink)

The fourth volume in the series "Jean-Franðcois Lyotard: Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists" contains 48 texts written by Lyotard between the early seventies and 1998, the year of his death. Nine of these texts are previously unpublished papers on general aesthetics and the theory of art. The remaining 39 essays deal with 27 specific artists: Luciano Berio, Richard Lindner, René Guiffrey, Gianfranco Baruchello, Henri Maccheroni, Riwan Tromeur, Albert Ayme, Manuel Casimiro, Ruth Francken, Barnett Newman, Jean-Luc Parant, François Lapouge, (...) Sam Francis, André Dubreuil, Joseph Kosuth, Sarah Flohr, Lino Centi, Gigliola Fazzini, Bracha Lichtenberger Ettinger, Henri Martin, Michel Bouvet, Corinne Filippi, Stig Brogger, François Rouan, Pierre Skira Pastels, and Béatrice Casadesus. Many of these texts are notes or contributions to catalogues; some were published in now inaccessible journals. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende dar a conhecer as condições de criação e de produção de um conjunto de textos de vanguarda que viriam a constituir-se como marco para a poesia portuguesa do século XX: a Poesia 61, impressos e editados numa pequena cidade de província, Faro.Como são aí editados estes e outros folhetos de autores como António Ramos Rosa, E. M. Melo e Castro, Maria Teresa Horta, Casimiro de Brito, Luiza Neto Jorge ou Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, entre outros? Para (...) responder a essa questão, interrogam-se contextos, autores e obras, mas também editores, tipógrafos e tipografias. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gerald Prince WORLDS WITH STYLE Whether it is taken to be a laudable characteristic of verbal artifacts (as in, "This essay is really well written"), a distinctive feature of an individual manner of speaking or writing (as in, "Jane definitely has a style of her own"), an ornamental supplement to that which is expressed (style as elocutio), or an appropriate way of using language in different contexts (there is (...) — or was — a style for tragedy, another one for comedy, and still another one for pastoral; there is a style for speaking at business meetings and other styles better suited to everyday conversations, political rallies, or Ph.D. exams), whether it is taken to be any of these four things (or many other things as well), the style of an utterance is traditionally viewed as a secondary phenomenon different from and added to some primary base. It is the mode of expressing a given matter, the way of "saying" some thing, the how of a what. The same is true when the notion style is used in connection with nonverbal artifacts — we talk about musical styles and about pictorial ones — but also in connection with any number of activities or states of affairs: walking down the street, dancing the tango, being pleasant, or playing ping-pong. Ping-pong players use rackets, a net, and a ball, in accordance with certain rules, when they engage in a casual game; but they are thought to be doing somediing more than merely playing: they are performing an activity (the what) in a particular way. They do it stylishly, idiosyncratically, with a lot of showboating, or in a manner appropriate to the informal context.1 It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that, when it comes to verbal (and nonverbal) representations, style is often thought to be irrelevant to the signified (what is represented) as opposed to the signifier (what represents). Graham Hough writes, for example: "In discussing whatever it is we mean by style we assume mat the primary choice, the choice of subject-matter in the large sense, has already been made.... We can talk about the secondary choice, the stylistic one, in various ways.... But whatever point of view we adopt, it will be the verbal ordonnance that we discuss, not the oudines of die mym, the facts of the case, the ideological or biographical substructure."2 Yet, as I have more than suggested, any what has (or can have) a corresponding how. Besides, both 59 60Philosophy and Literature in formal criticism and informal exchanges, we frequently seem to refer to the how of a signified. When we say, for instance, that a given short story is Kafkaesque, we do not, I think, have its verbal style in mind; and when we claim that a novelistic episode or character comes right out of Alice in Wonderland, we are not talking about linguistic matters. Of course, the fact mat we seem to refer to the how of signifieds (or that we do refer to the how of signifiers) does not necessarily mean mat mere are such things (or that we can describe them). But I suspect that there are (and that we can). I would like to discuss in what follows some of the ways in which we might be able to talk of the style of represented "worlds" more or less meaningfully and systematically and some of the problems attending such talk. For the sake of convenience and because of personal affinities, I will restrict myself to verbal narratives. I will not make a distinction between literary and non-literary ones, since such a distinction is formally and even pragmatically quite problematic. IfI concentrate on fictional narratives, it is, again, because of personal affinities and not because I mink that, when it comes to style, (ontological or other) differences between fiction and nonfiction make very much of a difference. As I will argue, style is in the eye ofthe beholder and, from that point of view, whether or not something is compossible with one's knowledge of the "real world" does not necessarily make it function as fictional or nonfictional; indeed, I am constandy surprised by the real world and I could easily recount... (shrink)

Reseña de Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 2014, Humorismo, edición de Pedro Aullón de Haro, Madrid: Casimiro. ISBN 978-84-15715-45-0, 93 pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OSCAR WILDE AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM by Guy Willoughby Towards the beginning ofthe hugely entertaining and provocative manifesto called "The Critic as Artist" (1890),1 Oscar Wilde causes the well-named discipulus Ernest to inquire of the suave magister, Gilbert: "But what are the two supreme and highest arts?" The prompt answer takes us to the heart ofWilde's aesthetic priorities: "Life and Literature," says Gilbert: "Life and the perfect expression of life" (p. (...) 1016). The aim of this discussion is, first, to consider the terms of Oscar Wilde's aesthetics; second, to relate them to tendencies in contemporary theory. I will be arguing, in sum, that the ideas entertained in his essays, and demonstrated in his fictions, have suggestive implications for our practices today—particularly in die light of a gathering rapprochement across the range of cultural study. The abiding theme ofOscar Wilde's writings is his insistence throughout not merely on art's primacy, but on the vital importance ofaesthetic criteria to life itself. In de Profundü (1897), that extraordinary attempt at self-definition, the author claims that it is only by conceiving of one's existence as an art-statement, as a dynamic convergence of forces extending in time and place, that trial, humiliation, and reversal—the shocks the flesh is heir to—can be imaginatively subsumed into a composite whole. He summed up the argument of the apologia thus to André Gide: "My life is like a work of art; an artist never starts the 316 Guy Willoughby317 same thing twice... or if he does, it's that he hasn't succeeded. My life before prison was as successful as possible. Now it's something that's over."2 Accordingly, he ascribes in de Profundis the greatest value to the frank acceptance of all one's deeds and susceptibilities, no matter how vicious or unlovely: "to reject one's experiences is to arrest one's development," he writes. "Whatever is realised is right" (p. 916). It is noteworthy, furthermore, that Wilde oudines this same argument under varying conditions throughout his work as essayist, story-teller, and playwright. In his wry but delicately tuned fairy tales, the most successful heroes and heroines are those who—like the litde Nightingale, the young King, or the Star-Child—manage to transform their lives into images of complex, artistic unity, suggestive of the radical power of the imagination. As the author ofde Profundis was to remark: "every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy" (p. 928). Likewise, the elegant rhetorical strategies of Wilde's two critical dialogues announce art's power to starde and provoke its spectators into new attitudes, and—in particular—to suggest a transference ofaesthetic criteria to life itself. Artistic appreciation develops "that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical achievement," which may then be profitably applied to one's disparate experience: "it is form that creates not merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty" ("The Critic as Artist," p. 1052). It is only by cultivating a flexible, formalist oudook that a cramping and static Weltanschauung may be avoided; ethical distinctions too must be recast, if a successful life-as-artwork is to be sustained. Thus, writes Wilde, "Ethics, like natural selection, makes existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, makes life lovely and wonderful, fills it with new forms, and gives it progress, variety and change" (p. 1058). Moreover, the critical or aesthetic impulse—and the point of Wilde's essay is that the terms are interchangeable—has overall a vital cosmopolitan function; it will heal all human divisions, "by insisting on the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms" (p. 1057). If we transfer aesthetic criteria from art to life, therefore, we will discover a new raison d'être in a skeptical age; we will understand that our apprehension of symmetry in art offers a motive for restoring a novel order to our own lives, singly and together. So it will be that "form [will... (shrink)

Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures, it reads like the “sequel” to The Fiscal Crisis of the State, elaborating the expanding of his 1973 critique of modem macroeconomic management as a spoils system of special interests. At odier turns, it comes across as a “prequel” to the earlier work, oudining a tortuous logic for the underproduction and accumulation crises that set off the “fiscal crises” he described over a decade earlier. Although not all that new, (...) the plot of the sequel is occasionally interesting. The prequel side of the narrative, however, is very questionable and as old as the hills because, once again, the ancient apparatus of theories of surplus value is trundled out and fired up to “explain” the roots of the current crisis. (shrink)