Looks at the philosophy behind some of the biggest names in pop culture, including movies, video games, music groups, and more.

This author sets out to prove that the whole of western philosophy, from the cosmologists of Ancient Greece to the existentialists of the 20th century may be found in the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

In this splendidly preposterous volume, John Tyerman Williams sets out to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the whole of Western philosophy - from the ancient Greeks to the existentialists of this century - may be found in the works of A. A. Milne. Williams shows how Pooh - referred to here as "the Great Bear" - explains and illuminates the most profound ideas of the great thinkers, from Aristotle and Plato to Sartre and Camus.

SpanFor generations the elements of humor, poignancy, fantasy, and unfettered morality found within acclaimed children's author Roald Dahl's most famous tales have captivated both children and adults. Editor Jacob M. Held has collected the insights of today's leading philosophers into the significances, messages, and greater truths at which Dahl's rhythmic writing winks, revealing a whole new way to appreciate the creation of a man and mind to which readers of all ages are still drawn. /span...

"Essays explore philosophical themes in the Wizard of Oz saga, comprising the books by L. Frank Baum, the 1939 film, the novel Wicked, and related films and ...

This collection of essays examines the wisdom of Dr. Seuss and the philosophical insights that his classic children's books hold for adults. Whether exploring morality, compassion, or conflict resolution, Dr. Seuss's works are a guide to living well, and being the best person you can be.

Anyone who loves Dr. Seuss or is interested in philosophy will find this book to be intriguing and enlightening.

Malaysia is often hailed as a development success story. However, one criticism of this success story is the over-emphasis on the ideology of economic and capitalist growth by the state in its setting, determining and directing of development. This paper looks into some of the most interesting and critical reflections on development. Representing prominent voices in Malaysian literature in English, K. S. Maniam, Chuah Guat Eng and Yang-May Ooi delve into Malaysia’s development success story through Between Lives (2003), (...) Days of Change (2010) and The Flame Tree (1998), respectively. Through textual analysis, I examine how these writers treat the state’s prevailing ideology of development. Through their creative responses to the rapid development that has occurred in Malaysia, Maniam, Chuah and Ooi offer individual expression and powerful critiques of development, not merely reflecting on the ideology of economic and capitalist growth but also illustrating different perspectives on development based on notions of social justice, democracy and cultural sustainability. That is not to say that they reject development. On the contrary, they acknowledge that development is part and parcel of social, economic and political processes. However, through their treatment of development, they bring to light other equally important issues, thus emphasizing the flaws in adopting a development model that is essentially based on economic and capitalist growth. (shrink)

Representations of nonhuman wild animals in children's stories and toys underwent dramatic transformation over the years 1830-1915. During the earlier part of that period, wild animals were presented to children as being savage and dangerous, and that it was necessary for them to be killed or brutally constrained. In the 1890s, an animalcentric discourse emerged in Nature writing, along with an animal-human symbiosis in scientific child study that highlighted childhood innocence, resulting in a valuing of wild animals based upon (...) their similarity to humans. This article will describe the aesthetic devices of children's stories and play materials in relation to the dominant, emerging, and residual ideas about the wild communicated by adults to children through these means. (shrink)

This children's history of England by Maria Callcott was written as though she were telling a series of stories to a young boy known as 'Little Arthur'. Having travelled widely during her first marriage, publishing accounts under the name Maria Graham, she had become an invalid by 1831 owing to a burst blood vessel. Nevertheless, she continued her literary activity and became best known for this highly popular work. The first edition, published by John Murray in two volumes (...) in 1835, is reissued here in a single volume. In the course of the century after its appearance, the book went through seventy editions and sold some 80,000 copies. Its success stemmed partly from its romantic and patriotic depiction of the protagonists of English history. Also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection are Callcott's travel journals describing her time in India, Brazil and Chile. (shrink)

Scholars often turn to Livy’s famous digression on Aulus Cossus and the spolia opima (4.17–20) to shed light on his larger political inclinations. These readings generally regard Livy as either an Augustan (or at least a patriotic Roman) or an apolitical skeptic. Yet neither view, I argue, fully explains the Cossus affair. What is needed is an interpretation that recognizes the political nature of the Cossus digression and its skepticism toward Augustus. Attending to Livy’s rhetorical strategy in the digression allows (...) us to see it as an instance of oblique criticism of Augustus and his control over Roman life. The explanatory power of this reading extends to episodes from the life of Romulus as well. I argue Livy uses these stories to make a theoretical argument about the nature of despotism, namely, that it seeks to control narratives of the past just as much as it aims for political domination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity by Suparno BanerjeeBarnita BagchiSuparno Banerjee. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. xiii + 256 pp. E-book, ISBN 9781786836670.Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and (...) students in higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interplay between the familiar and the strange, and its emphasis on the novum that is created in SF, has been enriched with further attention to context, including postcolonial contexts. Whose familiarity in cognition are we speaking about, and what happens when contexts are not necessarily hegemonic Anglo-American or Western ones? Indeed, even in Western contexts, science is not a given, but an element that always has political, historical, and ideological overtones. The novum, too, as with the term utopia, is moored in the contexts of the text.Banerjee’s book is one among several excellent monographs on Indian SF that have been published in the 2020s: Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020) come to mind. Khan adopts a refreshing fan’s guide to Indian SF register in his monograph, discussing mythology, materiality, ideology, and technology, and he coins the abbreviation TransMIT to capture his approach. Mukherjee’s book examines how Indian SF syncs with or questions the technological and scientific paradigms of India under Nehru and the Non-Aligned Movement; arguing that Indian SF needs to be seen as semiperipheral, the book also applies concepts from energy humanities [End Page 586] to Indian SF in an arresting way. Suparno Banerjee’s monograph is a solidly grounded work in its clearly explained choice of corpus, and a methodology that elicits particularly generative insights in a number of areas, including the epistemological status of science in Indian SF, the importance of SF written in bhasha or non-English Indian languages, the interplay between past and future in Indian SF, analysis of how Indian SF imaginatively represents the Other, and attention to Indian women writers of SF.Banerjee offers a lucid and useful chronology of Indian SF in four historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95, and 1995–2019. The period from 1835 to 1905 offers the first specimens of Indian SF, primarily in the form of future histories that question colonialism, in the utopian mode, and adventure tales and stories with scientific and technological elements. The establishment of a British education system, starting in the 1820s, gave an impetus to the birth of Indian SF. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” was published in 1905, a year that heralds the second period lasting until Indian independence. In this period, SF starts appearing not just in the English, Bengali, and Hindi languages, as in the first period, but also in a number of other Indian languages, such as Assamese, Marathi, and Tamil. Children’s and youth magazines develop from the 1920s, spaces where science writing and SF both appear. Nationalist, anticolonial stances emerge, challenging western hegemony, in the 1940s. In the early post-Independence period, the nationalistic elements become even stronger, and SF interacts quite strongly with older forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairytales, and ghost stories. This third period, Banerjee argues, is the golden age of bhasha SF. From the 1990s English-language SF again becomes very prominent in India and its diaspora, though SF in bhashas continues to flourish.Banerjee examines fiction not just from post-Independence India, but also from colonial British India, and diasporic Indian writing. SF written primarily in Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi is examined and, when possible, the book also brings into its ambit of analysis SF written in the languages Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Reflexivity about the corpus of... (shrink)

This article examines E.H. Gombrich’s critical appraisal of Arnold Hauser’s book, The Social History of Art. Hauser’s Social History of Art was published in 1951, a year after Gombrich’s bestseller, The Story of Art. Although written in Britain for an English-speaking public, both books had their origins in the intellectual history of Central Europe: Gombrich was an Austrian art historian and Hauser was Hungarian. Gombrich’s critique, published in The Art Bulletin in 1953, attacked Hauser’s dialectical materialism (...) and his sociological interpretation of art history. Borrowing arguments from Karl Popper’s critique of historicism, Gombrich described Hauser’s work as collectivist and deterministic, tendencies at odds with his own conception of art history. However, in his readiness to label Hauser a proponent of historical materialism, Gombrich failed to recognize Hauser’s own criticism of deterministic theories of art, especially formalism. This article investigates Gombrich’s reasons for rejecting Hauser’s sociology of art. It argues Gombrich used Hauser as an ideological counterpoint to his own version of art history, avowedly liberal and individualist in outlook. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a version. Despite the fact that the Hegelian philosophy (...) of history has often been derided, something very similar currently functions as the official ideology of the world community: the idea of history as the story of freedom. This book does not retell the world-historical story of freedom. Rather, it uncovers it, beginning with the current age of human rights and working backward through the great role-model civilizations of history. Its conclusion is that a forward retelling of the story of freedom as the story of human rights can be justified by dewesternizing the story. The book contains critical responses from specialized scholars and re-presentative of selected world cultures. The volume includes illustrations, and a guest Afterword by Donald Phillip Verene. It is a companion-volume to the author's Hegel's Logic: Between History and Dialectic (North-western University Press, 1996). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Scottish PhilosophyManfred KuehnAlexander Broadie. A History of Scottish Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 392. Cloth, $140.00.Alexander Broadie is well known to those who have an interest in Scottish Philosophy. His 1990 book, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy: A New Perspective on the Enlightenment (Barnes & Noble), attempted to show that there were two great periods in the history (...) of Scottish culture, the "circle of John Mair" around 1500 and the so-called "Scottish Enlightenment" of the last half of the eighteenth century. Broadie argued that one could "trace a line of philosophical influence from Mair's circle to the philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment."The present book has a much wider scope. It is an attempt to tell the entire story of Scottish philosophy from its beginnings to the 1960s. The book has twelve chapters, including a short Introduction (1–6) and an even shorter Conclusion (365–69). The first philosopher discussed is John Duns Scotus. The next five chapters are called "The Fifteenth Century," "The Circle of John Mair," "Humanism and After," and "Scotland Moves into the Age of Enlightenment," which deals with Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, and Francis Hutcheson. Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9, which constitute the bulk of the book, deal with David Hume, Adam Smith, and The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are treated relatively briefly under the titles "The Nineteenth Century: Ferrier to Seth" and "Realism and Idealism: Some Twentieth-century Narratives." The book has a fairly extensive bibliography and a very useful index.The summaries of the different philosophical positions are lucid, balanced, and fair. They provide very useful introductions to the thought of the philosophers discussed in the book. Someone interested in the background of Hume and Reid and looking for a first orientation could do a lot worse than consulting this book.I do have a problem with the way Broadie places the accents in his history. The two chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries take up only about one sixth of the book, yet they are among the most interesting—at least for me. They would have deserved a more detailed treatment. The discussion of the Middle Ages and Humanism is rather long. The same holds for the eighteenth century. The discussion of Hume in particular, whose philosophy has received much attention of late, could have been significantly shortened. Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart's successor, who is not as well known, but was a brilliant philosophical mind, would have deserved a section of his own—or so I believe. Since he did discuss Mair and his circle extensively in his earlier publication, this part of the book could also have been abbreviated. Whether Duns Scotus belongs in a "history of Scottish philosophy" I do not know. In any case, it appears that the concerns of his earlier book on The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy exercise an undue influence on the new book.I would have liked to hear a little more about what makes a certain philosopher a Scottish philosopher and what makes Scottish philosophy Scottish. It may well be impossible to write a national history of philosophy in the strictest sense of the word. Philosophy, perhaps still more than Literature and Literary Criticism, knows no national boundaries. As Lewis White Beck once pointed out, any national history of philosophy encounters the problem of figures whose importance transcends the limits of the philosophical discussion in any one nation or language: "No history of English or German philosophy can be understood [End Page 124] without Descartes," Locke or Hume, for that matter. A national history of philosophy may therefore "appear at best episodic, at worst arbitrary. Why not write a history of philosophy mentioning only men whose names begin with the letter 'p'?"Broadie believes that these philosophers "responded to each other partly because they were close by and partly because they were so interested in each other's thinking" (5). This context justifies us or "makes it appropriate to speak of Scottish philosophy, parallel to the way in which writers speak of German philosophy" (6). This point goes both too far and not... (shrink)

Examines the theme of haunting in recent U.S. and postcolonial literature as a response to the dynamics of transnational literary circulation.

For hundreds of years English people have claimed that fair play is at the core of their national identity. Jonathan Duke-Evans looks at the history of fair play in Britain from earliest times to the present, asking whether it is in fact a British, or alternatively an English, characteristic at all - and if so, whether fair play still matters today? In An English Tradition?, Jonathan Duke-Evans explores the origins of the idea of fair play, tracing (...) it back to the classical world and the Dark Ages, and finding its genesis deep within England's social structure. Charting its early development through both the tales of chivalry and the stories of popular legend, the book shows how fair play manifested itself in literature, the law, the Christian religion, and the family. It examines the way in which fair play was conceived during the ages of slavery and empire, and it proposes a new account of the birth of modern sport in the encounter between age-old popular games and the Victorian cult of amateurism. Taking in the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh manifestations of fair play, Duke-Evans offers contrasts and comparisons from cultures all around the world, and suggests new perspectives on the relevance of fair play in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement‐clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief‐based action. We also (...) measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false‐belief tasks. English‐ and German‐speaking young 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds as well as English‐ and German‐speaking adult controls heard complement‐clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., “He thinks thatshe's not feeling well”) turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question (“Why does he not play with her?”), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say “He thinks…” When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause (“She's not feeling well”). Furthermore, children with better short‐term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false‐belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by athatcomplementizer only had a small effect on the German adults’ responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short‐term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false‐belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, (...) and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

This essay addresses the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland. Rather than narrate a familiar story of events--migration, settlement, the creation of viable Anglophone cultures amid hardship and danger--it pursues a less familiar track by examining the terms upon which English adventurers and their contemporaries understood the world they inhabited, the process of transatlantic expansion upon which they were engaged, and, in particular, the justifications they espoused for their appropriations of space from its existing (...) inhabitants. My examination concentrates in particular on the conjoined discourses, literary and legal, in which the meanings of those terms are most clearly displayed. Through analysis of Shakespeare's early play Titus Andronicus, I demonstrate the salience of Tudor political economy--principally of sovereign power and invasion, of land and inhabitation, and of the city and barbarism--to the discourse of early-modern English colonizing. I show how the same complex of ideas animated the founding legal texts of English "settlement," revealed in the jurisdictional structures created and spaces occupied by the projectors of colonies. Finally, through reference to another foundational text, not of colonizing but of modern American legal history, I show the cardinal importance to contemporary America's historical self-construction of a refusal to acknowledge America's historical origins in a political economy of "colonization" and its violence, and its preference for a narrative of "energy" and "freedom" and their occlusion of violence. (shrink)

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the (...) fate of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 443-455 [Access article in PDF] Romanticism's Gray Matter Nancy Easterlin British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, by Alan Richardson; xx & 243 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, $55.00. THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN science and the humanities is an old story, one whose basic themes were inspired by a new understanding of the utility of science that emerged from the Enlightenment. If faith in (...) the efficacy of human reason to renew human society was no longer quite so robust after Robespierre's Reign of Terror, science itself did not suffer but instead assumed the central place in intellectual inquiry. Half a century later, the opposition between humanistic inquiry and science not only carried over into the conception of literary studies in its embryonic phase as an academic discipline; the rise of science provided, ironically, a primary impetus for the institutionalization of English studies, since the study of language and literature was envisioned as an arena of spiritual values and social polish. But according to Gerald Graff, the picture is even more complicated than this: the oppositions between literature and science are largely matched by those within English/literary studies from the very beginning. If English was envisioned as a repository of value and cultivation on the one hand, it was driven, under the influence of science, to professionalize and develop a research industry on the other—which itself fostered a divide between criticism and academic research, areas that have only recently come together. 1 [End Page 443]Since conflicted attitudes toward science were thus at the heart of literary studies from the very beginning, it is hardly surprising that debates about the relevance of science to literary theory and criticism are vital today. These debates are the healthy result of the twentieth century's attempts to apply scientific research and models to literature, for early efforts at scientific criticism help locate both the potential benefits and possible drawbacks of interdisciplinary approaches. Yet some humanistic research paradigms have remained largely immune to the influence of science, maintaining the two-cultures tradition by virtue of the body of knowledge they adopt—and therefore by what they implicitly exclude—to frame our understanding of written works. Chief among these are literary history and the history of ideas, which have drawn principally on the fellow humanities of philosophy and history, and only superficially or sporadically on the history and philosophy of science. (Interestingly, despite differences in theory, method, and values, recent projects like the new historicism are in this respect generally continuous with traditional literary historical practice.) In British Romanticism and the Science of Mind, Alan Richardson expands the parameters of the history-of-ideas approach within literary criticism, rendering it more fully congenial to developments within scientific thought. With great diplomacy, Richardson points to the limited conception of context that has informed historical accounts of British literary romanticism, and proceeds to demonstrate what a knowledge of romantic-era brain science can bring to our understanding of the ideas and works of a selection of romantic-era writers. The result is a book that, in providing a detailed account of the major theories of brain-mind and in constructing the plausible grounds of influence on several major literary figures, largely succeeds in the difficult task of appealing to an interdisciplinary audience.As Richardson notes in his preface and first chapter, the overlap between literary and scientific representations of mind has been generally neglected in romantic scholarship. Work on the romantic mind has, for the most part, drawn selectively on Hartleyan associationism, psychoanalysis, and the German idealist tradition within epistemology, even though the historical period of British literary romanticism (roughly 1789-1832) corresponds with an unprecedented development of theories of the brain and nervous system, many of which were vigorously discussed—in no small part for their ideologically inflammatory implications—in the major literary periodicals of the day. To [End Page 444] remedy the neglect of contemporaneous science, Richardson supplies a discussion of the major brain scientists in his first chapter, following this with four chapters on major figures and works of literary romanticism (Coleridge... (shrink)

Best Book of June 2015 (The Christian Science Monitor) Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical (...) rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. The result is an extraordinary account of the ideas, affections and vexations that drove the group's most significant members. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style. (shrink)

Nikolai Lossky is key to the history of the Husserl-Rezeption in Russia. He was the first to publish a review of the Russian translation of Husserl’s first volume of the Logische Untersuchungen that appeared in 1909. He also published a presentation and criticism of Husserl’s transcendental idealism in 1939. An English translation of both of Lossky’s publications is offered in this volume for the first time. The present paper, which is intended as an introduction to these documents, (...) situates Lossky within the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Husserl in Russia and explains why he is central to it. It also explains what Lossky principally found in Husserl: he saw in the latter’s critique of psychologism support for his own ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Lossky characterizes his ontology as an ideal-realism. According to ideal-realism, both the realm of ideal beings and the realm of real beings are mind-independent. Per his epistemology, which he calls “intuitivism,” real beings are intuited by sensual intuition and ideal beings by intellectual intuition. The realm of ideal beings includes the subrealm of values, which is intuited by axiological intuition. This thoroughly realist conception contrasted sharply with the subjectivist tendencies of the time. So, when Lossky took cognizance of Husserl’s critique of psychologism, he thereupon found an ally in his battle against the various subjectivisms. But, when Husserl took the transcendental idealist turn, Lossky was at the forefront of the backlash against the new direction Husserl wanted to give to phenomenology. (shrink)

Written in 1938 when the Western world had succumbed to the notion that history is a creature of blind force. A reviewer at the time noted the importance of Croce's belief that "the central trend in the evolution of man is the unfolding of new potentialities, and that the task of the historian is to discover and emphasise this trend: the story of liberty". As Croce himself writes, "Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines (...) of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them." The first edition in English of HISTORY AS THE STORY OF LIBERTY appeared in London in 1941. The new Liberty Fund edition includes modest improvements to the translation by Folke Leander and arranged by Claes Ryn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Good HopeCarla Liesching Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 111]Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, she considers the intersections of representation, knowledge, and power, with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography. Carla's ongoing project, Good Hope, was published by MACK in (...) 2021, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, and the Arles 2022 Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. An excerpt from Good Hope is also featured in On Whiteness, by SPBH Editions. Carla was a 2021 winner of the Open Walls Arles competition presented by The British Journal of Photography and exhibited work during Rencontres d'Arles Festival in 2021 and 2022. She is a 2021 Light Work Grant recipient and the 2022 recipient of the Silver Eye Fellowship, culminating in a photo-sculptural installation at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh. Carla was recently named a Foam Talent, with exhibitions at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt, along with a solo exhibition of Good Hope through PhMuseum in Bologna. Carla lives between South Africa and Ithaca. In Ithaca, she works as Visiting Critic in Cornell University's Art Architecture and Planning Department; as Lecturer in the Art, Art History and Architecture Department at Ithaca College; as faculty at the International Center of Photography; and as coordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. As part of her socially engaged practice, Carla is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy, and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution'As soon as you are in a proper stage of defence you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest ground in which everything planted or sown will thrive.' Click for larger view View full resolution—Instructions from the Dutch East India Company inscribed on a yellowing sheet of parchment, 1651.1[End Page 113] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 114]iYes, there are facts and figures to account for, timelines to trace, but have I told you of today's newspapers? Headlines like: 'Land Justice', 'Expropriation without Compensation', 'Revolution or Reform?' Have I told you of the monuments removed in the 'riots'? Or the groundsmen in green overalls scrubbing graffiti, repairing broken fountains, collecting debris? Black men White bosses still call 'boys'? Have I told you of the doves cooing gently, perched atop the sleeping bodies of migrant families on the lawns? Have I told you of the White children from the Cape of Good Hope Seminary dressed in their afternoon 'civilian clothes'? Or of the more racially integrated group from Mseki High in their grey-and-turquoise uniforms surrounding me on the main steps leading to the garden? The cacophony of lunch-time chatter, chip packets crinkling, the flap-flap of wings as seagulls scavenge for tasty morsels? Have I told you of the signs pointing to the Scientific Pleasure Garden? Or of the gift store filled with locally sourced flower oils, handmade candles, Delft-blue china tea-sets and postcards depicting the early colony? And what of Cecil John Rhodes cast in greening bronze, flanked by a Madagascar Cycad and a Queen Palm, announcing: Your Hinterland is There? Have I told you of the small rock in the corner of the vegetable garden with a label hidden beneath weeds? The arrival of the Dutch to establish a refreshment station, providing fresh produce for the ships plying the spice route, marked the end of a free and independent existence for the native Gorinhaiqua Khoikhoi. And what of the large label at the stone-walled entrance? A story of how a garden in 1654 brought together continents and affected the course of history. A story of how plants in the form of pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon changed the world economy. Have I told you the garden is the cause of it all? [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sick with PassionAlfred LouchOpera: Desire, Disease, Death, by Linda and Michael Hutcheon; xvi & 294 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, $40.00.IDriving east from the Auvergne you may chance upon La Chaise-Dieu, a charming village where a very acceptable cafe confronts the fortress-like Abbatiale de St Robert across the village square. The church itself is an imposing monument to the ephemeral glory of the Avignon Pope Clement VI, (...) but its most extraordinary feature is a fresco in the aisle to the left of the choir. Called the Danse Macabre, it depicts death as a sequence of skeletons, each of which beckons, pleads with, consoles, or compels its many victims—young and old, rich and poor, exalted or mean—toward their inevitable end. At times the skeleton’s posture is sinister and threatening, at others, as with children, it seems to turn away, as if to shield them from its fearful aspect. The skeletons seem to catch the movement of a single dancer as they select one partner after another, taking the life of each in a graceful though ghastly movement.The fresco depicts the Black Death—art inspired by disease and contagion. But even if you were as innocent of history as the typical American tourists you would confront in the fresco the undeniable image of death, and the caprice of its visitation, a thought contrasting strangely with the enduring granite of the church. Your experience may be enriched by history and lead you to moralize on the contrast [End Page 155] between the pomp and grandeur of the papal builder and the fresco’s depiction of the vanity of human wishes. But it would be a jarring note if some know-it-all in the company of viewers were to lecture for all to hear on the transmission and symptoms of pasteurella pestis. That is another story, and an interesting one, but not here and now.And so it is, if not so abrasively, with a recent book by Linda and Michael Hutcheon on desire, disease, and death in opera. They hope to shed new light, by combining literary analysis and the medical theory of disease and contagion, on the themes and purposes of opera, or certain operas anyway. Somehow the passages on mycobacterium tuberculosis, treponema pallidum, and vibrio cholerae, together with graphic descriptions of the symptoms caused by these micro-organisms, and an accompanying photograph of syphilitic gummæ seem intrusive, just as talk about the etiology and the pathology of the plague strikes a discordant note as we look upon the Danse Macabre in wonder and fear. The Hutcheons, a husband and wife team who practice, respectively, medicine and literary criticism, tell the reader they are opera lovers. I hope their affection is not prompted only by infection.But why shouldn’t medicine and its history be relevant to literary, artistic, or musical creation? Think here of a question Wittgenstein asks in Zettel (paragraph 610): “Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concept of causality then it is high time it was upset.” He did not mean to say that it would not be surprising if someone talked and acted and looked like a person but turned out to have an empty skull. But he did mean surely that talk about human projects and emotions is complete as it stands; what is going on in the neurons and what busy microbes are doing are other stories. Literature is about human projects, the skill or clumsiness with which they are pursued, the responses to success and failure, achievement and frustration. Opera, which, ever since someone had the idea of putting story to song, raided literary invention for its subject matter, is the same. Heroes and villains may of course be expected to be vulnerable to the various vicissitudes of life. Diseases may lay them low, as well as passing trains. But disease enters their stories to delay or frustrate or put period to their projects, not as new characters on the stage. If you read about the death of Ivan Illych and come away dissatisfied because Tolstoy failed to identify the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:248 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY be taken from a philosophical point of view. Since it is not certain whether the author of the Prolegomena was or was not a Christian (p. xlix), "god" should not be capitalized, and the translation of T&~ia 5~l~ttovo'f~l~taTa as "God's creation" at IV. 15. 6 is actually misleading. Moreover, for no apparent reason, 0~oX07tz6gis translated as "metaphysical" in the first four chapters, but as (...) "theological" thereafter. Inaccuracies are very few indeed. "Ungrateful" is peculiar for o~5~5t• at I. 2. 25, and so is "adapted state" for ~to~tTe[a~ ~no~ae0g at I. 5.35; X. 26. 38, 40, and 44; at II. 10. 11, there is no need to translate o~Te&0t~6)g bu~yovxctL as "they do not aim at accurate expression," and on p. 32, line 1, "as yet" is not in the Greek of the Prolegomena, although it should have been, if the Anonymous had quoted correctly from Plato, Phaedrus 229 E. But this is trifling criticism of a work which leaves nothing to be desired in any other respect, and which displays the same high qualities of scholarship which we have come to expect of the author on the basis of his earlier achievements. MARTIN OSTWALI) Swarthmore College The Fountain of Life (Fons Vitae). By Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron). Specially abridged edition, translated from the Latin by Harry E. Wedeck, with an Introduction by Theodore E. James. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962. Unpaged introduction, 133 pp. $4.75.) The romance of the nineteenth-century discovery, by Salomon Munk, that "Avicebron's" Fons Vitae, a major source of neoplatonic thought in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was actually the work of the eleventhcentury Hispano-Jewish poet, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and has often been retold. It is, indeed, a remarkable story. Perhaps its most noteworthy feature is that it reveals how closely alike Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers were; by implication, then, it indicates that theological considerations were of less importance in medieval philosophy than is suggested by most historical accounts. Although the story of The Fountain of Lqe has now become an oft-told tale, the work itself has never been available in English dress. The present edition remedies this situation in part. It presents Tract III of the original text, a section dealing with the existence of simple spiritual substances. Harry Wedeck's translation is lucid and readable. Theodore E. James's introduction is useful for the beginning student but too elementary to be of much use to a more advanced reader. It is good that there is now this much to recommend to our students; we may hope that the day will come when BOOK REVIEWS 249 larger sections of the work will be translated-preferably not from the Latin, but from the Arabic original. JOSEPHL. B~u Columbia University Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. By St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. by John P. Rowan. (Chicago, Illinois: Henry Regnery Company, 1961. Pp. xxiii + 955.2 vols., boxed, $25.00.) Generally speaking, the two Summae of St. Thomas, long available in English translation, contain all that is most personal and most profound in his philosophical thought. Nonetheless, it is quite impossible to get a fully adequate conception of St. Thomas' place in the history of western thought from a consideration of his theological writings alone. Hence, by translating St. Thomas' Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle into English, Professor J. P. Rowan has provided the non-Latin reading student of the history of philosophy an invaluable service. For it is in his r61e as Aristotelian commentator that we see St. Thomas creating for the Schoolmen a version of Aristotle which served to render the Stagirite's thought into terms which became fundamental to the philosophical defense of Christianity. Further, by keeping in mind the fully-developed notions of St. Thomas on the existence of God and the nature of being as these are given us to understand in the Summae, the reader becomes better enabled, by a critical reading of Thomas' Commentary, to grasp the sense in which the Saint's theological writings are said by his enthusiasts to represent a "completing" and "perfecting" of... (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, (...) prophet-saviour-apostles,” in which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

Despite the prodigious inventiveness of the Middle Ages, the era is often characterized as deeply suspicious of novelty. But if poets and philosophers urged caution about the new, Patricia Clare Ingham contends, their apprehension was less the result of a blind devotion to tradition than a response to radical expansions of possibility in diverse realms of art and science. Discovery and invention provoked moral questions in the Middle Ages, serving as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and opening (...) thorny questions of creativity and desire. The Medieval New concentrates on the preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Examining a range of evidence, from the writings of Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer to the letters of Christopher Columbus, and attending to histories of children's toys, the man-made marvels of romance, the utopian aims of alchemists, and the definitional precision of the scholastics, Ingham analyzes the ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. With its broad reconsideration of what the "newfangled" meant in the Middle Ages, The Medieval New offers an alternative to histories that continue to associate the medieval era with conservation rather than with novelty, its benefits and liabilities. Calling into question present-day assumptions about newness, Ingham's study demonstrates the continued relevance of humanistic inquiry in the so-called traditional disciplines of contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze's assertion that 'Sartre knew how to invent the New' suggests a vital aspect of the French philosopher, one that departs from the image that has often been presented of him. Criticism of the Soviet Union post 1956, together with the increasing prominence of anti-colonial struggles and a series of experiences that would find their condensation in 1968, pushed Sartre to a continuous rearticulation of his political ideas, on the basis of an intense confrontation with Marx. In Basso's (...) lucid study, here newly translated into English, the expression 'singular universal' seeks to capture the revolutionary potential of individual and collective subjects, illuminating the close but also unstable relationship between history and politics. (shrink)

I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the (...) apologist for imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered. Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3. (shrink)

This study looks at the lives of the most famous "wild children" of eighteenth-century Europe, showing how they open a window onto European ideas about the potential and perfectibility of mankind. Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angelique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized. A variety of educational experiments (...) failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results. (shrink)

Advances in reproductive medicine have opened up new scenarios, changing our experience and our understanding of what it means to be a parent. Literature and cinema have quickly turned their attention to new forms of reproduction, and often do what doctors in centres for assisted reproduction advise against: they reveal secrets, re-unite the various different protagonists, who make the new life possible, and explore the dramatic and sometimes tragic entanglement of birth stories. Significantly, literary and filmic stories also give voice (...) to those whose voice is seldom heard: the children. In my contribution, after providing a brief summary of the history of assisted reproductive technologies, I discuss some contemporary novels and films, in English and Italian, that deal with these new scenarios. Examples include The Kids Are All Right (2010) by American director Lisa Cholodenko, Google Baby (2009) by Israeli director Zippi Brand Frank, Venuto al mondo [Brought into the world] (2012) by Italian director Sergio Castellitto, Carissimi [Dearest] by Italian writer Letizia Muratori, Non mi vendere, mamma! [Do not sell me, mom!] (2016) by Italian writer Barbara Alberti, and Katherine Carlyle (2015) by British novelist Rupert Thomson. I argue that each birth has a story and that we cannot struggle free from the stories that make us any more than we can ignore the fact that we were brought into the world. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study in English of Voltaire's contes philosophiques--the philosophical tales for which he is best remembered and which include his masterpiece Candide. Pearson situates each story in its historical and intellectual context and offers new readings in light of modern critical thinking. He rejects the traditional view that Voltaire's contes were the private expression of his philosophical perplexity, and argues that it is narrative that is Voltaire's essential mode of thought. His book is a witty, (...) lucid, and scholarly guide to the "fables of reason" through which Voltaire's skepticism undermined the contemporary religious and philosophical explanations of human experience. (shrink)

James Mill's History of British India’ (1817) played a major role in re-shaping the English policy and attitudes in India throughout the nineteenth century. This article questions the widely held view that the ‘HBI’ heralded the utilitarian justification of colonisation found for instance in John Stuart Mill's writings. It suggests that James Mill's role as a proponent of ‘utilitarian imperialism’ has been overstated, and argues that much of Mill's criticism of Indian society arose from the continuing influence (...) of his religious education as well as from his links with a network of Presbyterian and Evangelical thinkers. It is only after his death that the colonialist views put forward in the History of British India were re-interpreted in light of his later attachment to utilitarianism. ☆ I am most grateful to Gareth Stedman Jones for his guidance in the early stages of my research into this topic. I would also like to thank Justin Jacobs and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. (shrink)

If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in principle impossible that we might choose to set going an initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of (...) the predispositions for or against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety, evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form, threatens to remain merely gestural and generic. “History” promises thus to function as legitimating any reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived, whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist reconstructions. David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 and Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. (shrink)

This paper investigates critically the approaches to picturebooks as used in the history of philosophy for children movement. Our concern with picturebooks rests mainly on Morteza Khosronejad's broader criticism that children's literature has been treated instrumentally by early founders of P4C, the consequence of which is abolishing the independent voice of this literature. As such it demands that we scrutinize the position of children's literature in the history of this educational program, as well as other (...) genres and forms, including picturebooks as a highly valued artistic-literary form to educationalists. In our inquiry, we probe, therefore, the transition of approaches to picturebooks concomitantly with the investigation of the transition of approaches to children's literature. This research evinces that some later scholars and practitioners of P4C have departed significantly not only from Lipman's approach to children's literature and picturebooks, but also from his conceptualization of childhood and philosophy for children. Meanwhile, it demonstrates that in spite of P4C scholars' taking effective steps to address children's literature in general and picturebooks in particular, there are some steps for them to take in order to fully recognize this literature as an independent branch of knowledge and picturebooks as artistic-literary unique works. While revealing the limitations and paradoxes that P4C scholars continue to deal with, in this article, we see Khosronejad's earlier idea as a suggestion to overcome the instrumentalization of children's literature and picturebooks in P4C. Fundamental dialogue with children's literature theorists particularly those of picturebooks will open new horizons to the realization of our suggestion. (shrink)

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is recognized as a masterpiece among the historical literature of medieval England and Europe. Completed in 731, it comprises in a single flowing narrative a coherent history of the conversion of the English peoples to Christianity, and the story of the island kingdoms and churches from the 590s to the early eighth century, prefaced by a sketch of the earlier history of Britain. In 1969 the Clarendon Press published (...) the new edition in Oxford Medieval Texts, edited by Bertram Colgrave and Sir Roger Mynors. Mynors's masterly text and textual introduction replaced much of Charles Plummer's great edition of 1896; but the historical notes did not attempt to match in scale and detail Plummer's second volume of commentary. To fill this gap the late Professor J. M. Wallace-Hadrill devoted the last years of his life to a new commentary, one of the finest and most mature fruits of his scholarship - more succinct than Plummer, tauter, more relevant, above all drawing together and adding to the findings of a galaxy of modern scholars. Prepared for the press by Thomas Charles-Edwards, helped by Patrick Wormald and others, this book completes the new Bede, and is prefaced by a paper characteristic of Professor Wallace-Hadrill on `Bede and Plummer'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 143-149 David Hume and Public Debt: Crying Wolf? JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN and GREG COOLIDGE David Hume's views on public credit have not only received prominent attention in the literature on his political thought, but have even been the subject of attention in The Wall Street Journal.1 Most of the attention has centered on Hume's essay "Of Public Credit" of 1752, (...) and treats it only as an expression of ideas, without relating it to the historical facts. This note lays out Hume's views on this matter throughout his lifetime, and juxtaposes them with figures for the actual public debt, carrying the story down to the twentieth century. Public debt as we know it only goes back about 300 years. The British government in the 1690s was the first modern government to establish enough genuine credit that private citizens would loan it money without having to be compelled.2 At the turn of the century, in the year 1700, the British public debt amounted to 14.2 million pounds sterling.3 As early as 1741, Hume was already worrying about the public debt in the essay "Of Liberty and Despotism" (later changed to "Of Civil Liberty"). In the last paragraph of that essay, he wrote of the "degeneracy" brought about by public debt, suggested that debt-service "taxes may, in time, become altogether intolerable, and all the property of the state be brought into the hands of" the government. If it is not curbed, we may come to "curse our very liberty," he wrote.4 That year, the national debt totaled 48.8 million pounds (45.2 million in 1701 pounds5). John Christian Laursen and Greg Coolidge are at the Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 USA. Laursen e-mail: [email protected]. 144 John Christian Laursen and Greg Coolidge Hume's essay of 1752, "Of Public Credit, " was devoted entirely to criticism of the public debt (Essays, 349-365). His thoughts on public credit at this time can be summed up in this ominous warning: It must, indeed, be one of these two events; either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation. (Essays, 360-361) Hume acknowledged that the use of public credit could benefit the economy in some ways: more men with large stocks and incomes, may naturally be supposed to continue in trade, where there are public debts; and this, it must be owned, is of some advantage to commerce, by diminishing its profits, promoting circulation, and encouraging industry. (Essays, 354) But the many disadvantages would outweigh such advantages (Essays, 354355 ): 1) "It is certain, that national debts cause a mighty confluence of people and riches to the capital," making the head too large for the body. 2) Public stocks "banish gold and silver from the most considerable commerce of the state." 3) The taxes levied to pay the interest oppress the poorer people. 4) "As foreigners possess a great share of our national funds, they render the public, in a manner, tributary to them, and may in time occasion the transport of our people and our industry." 5) Public credit encourages an idle and useless rentier class. All of this pales, however, in comparison to the political consequences. From the point of view of the body politic, public credit was a threat to the security of the state. It would die a natural or a violent death. In wartime, or some national emergency, the funds necessary for the functioning of the economy would be diverted to other purposes. The economy, now dependent on credit, would crumble. The whole fabric, already tottering, falls to the ground, and buries thousands in its ruins. And this, I think, may be called the natural death of public credit. (Essays, 363) Hume Studies David Hume and Public Debt: Crying Wolf? 145 Another scenario would occur if the government became too indebted to intervene in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Our children, weary of the struggle, and fettered with encumbrances, may sit down secure, and see their neighbors oppressed and conquered ; till, at last, they themselves... (shrink)

These texts were created as part of a federally funded project (R305A200364) funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), targeted towards the use of low-tech immersive learning for social studies instruction in Ohio's fourth and fifth grade classrooms. Texts and materials created as part of the Digital Civic Learning curriculum are free for use for educational purposes.

From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides (...) a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the "subjective universal" condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the "Japanese vellum" luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino. (shrink)

Satire was core to the work of Thomas Hobbes although his critics also used it as a weapon to ridicule him. Condren uses Hobbes as an example to demonstrate that an examination of the persona is needed to advance our understanding of a writer's philosophy.