In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Epistemology to EthicsPaul D. NumrichThe evolution of the essays gathered here began as I pondered a popular article about contemporary science-religion dialogue some years ago. I was reminded that Christian notions provide the motivation, presuppositions, and conclusions for much of this dialogue and wondered, "How might things differ if Buddhism joined the conversation?" I later learned that others wondered likewise and that the John Templeton Foundation was willing (...) to fund a project to explore the contours of a Buddhism-Christianity-science dialogue.As important as all this was, the project took an early epistemological turn, to borrow a phrase from Mark T. Unno's chapter in the eventual edited volume, The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science.1 The project's advisors recommended that we not devolve into simplistic litanies of how the latest scientific theories confirm ancient religious wisdom or how religions might accommodate the latest scientific discoveries. They also counseled that we should avoid narrowly construed theoretical or doctrinal discussions. Instead, we should focus on "knowability" in science and religion. And we should challenge the hubris that claims to know everything—or everything that really matters—whether that hubris presumes to speak for science or for religion.The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science addresses the really big philosophical question "What can we know about reality?" and inquires into profound epistemological issues that cut across the worldviews of Buddhism, Christianity, and science: How do they explore the boundaries between the known and the unknown? What do they define as unknowable? How do they participate in the human quest for knowledge about reality? The volume goes beyond the usual fare in contemporary science-religion dialogue to explore how science and religion engage each other's attempts to understand reality.In the opening chapter, I ruminate on human knowledge generally. The other chapters move largely from Buddhism to Christianity to science, although several incorporate insights from more than one of these worldviews. Project advisor Roger Blomquist of Argonne National Laboratory suggested the important distinction between a boundary (which is movable) and a limit (which is fixed, i.e., the ultimate boundary). The frontiers of knowledge are often pushed back in both science and religion, yet these shifting boundaries exist within a larger fixed limit of human knowability. What Buddhists, Christians, and scientists do in the face of moveable boundaries within a fixed limit of knowability provides the intrigue of the volume. The contributors were not required to honor the distinction between moveable boundaries and a fixed limit. At times these terms are used interchangeably, at other times the distinction is implicitly called into question, thus adding to the volume's intrigue.The physicist-philosopher Niels Bohr (1885-1962) pondered the inherent inadequacy of conceptualization and language in apprehending and explaining reality. His assistant relates a discussion between Bohr and unnamed others: "He [Bohr] was forcefully stressing the primacy of language: 'Ultimately, we human beings depend on our words. We are hanging in language.' When it was objected that reality is more fundamental than language and lies beneath language, Bohr answered: 'We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down.'"2Religions understand the human condition of being suspended in languages that cannot contain perceived realities. Hence their frequent use of metaphor, symbolism, via negativa statements, and the notion of "mystery." Here is a fruitful opening for dialogue between science and religion, offering an opportunity for mutual pondering of the limit of pondering. The volume presents Buddhism, Christianity, and science as case studies in the human endeavor to understand a reality tantalizingly beyond our ability to understand fully. It examines the epistemological conundrums at the boundaries and limit of human [End Page 161] knowledge, where at some point both conceptualization and language inevitably fail us.The essays gathered here were given in early versions at the 2009 annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. Paul O. Ingram and Dennis Hirota gave presentations based on their chapters in The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, to which Sandra Costen Kunz and Amos Yong, respectively, gave responses. These four presentations... (shrink)

Observing that standard accounts of constitutional law - both the "conservative" and "liberal" varieties - have lost their power to illuminate, The Constitution and the Pride of Reason explores how constitutional law hangs together (and how it falls apart) by investigating the perennial claim that the Constitution and its interpretation somehow embody a commitment to governance by "reason". What does this claim mean, and is it valid? In confronting these queries, Smith offers revealing and iconoclastic assessments of constitutionalists ranging from (...) Madison and Jefferson to Dworkin and Bork. Also detailed in these pages is a provocative overview of the whole constitutional project, from its noble aspirations to its tragic failures. (shrink)

Insights from First Amendment considerations and from developmental psychology are utilized in suggesting that whatever value codes of ethics may hold for the mass media, they represent serious difficulties in inculcating substantial ethical values in individual journalists and in the profession as a whole. Evidence from developmental psychology suggests that codes are probably of some limited value to the neophyte working in the media. Codes also help assure non?journalists that the industry really is concerned about ethics. However, codes probably should (...) be relegated to a framed wall hanging for any journalists who have advanced beyond their internships. Confusion reigns because codes are often founded on moralistic rather than moral?philosophical bases, and there is a blurring between general precepts and specific practices covered in codes. As individual professionals mature intellectually and ethically, they should transcend socially?approved conventions codified by ?regulators,?; and begin to become social catalysts in their own rights, according to this essay. (shrink)

As persons we are irreducibly unique and essentially relational. In many contexts individual uniqueness has been accentuated at the expense of communal relationality. Our age has been marked by the loss of deep and meaningful relations to one another, and still more dramatically to the earth and its living creatures. The cosmological dimension of human personhood, that is, has been largely obscured. This chapter argues that our age has been marked increasingly by anesthetizing, alienating, and anonymizing tendencies. It proposes three (...) commensurate responses: aestheticization, or embodied philosophical knowing that remains faithful to the earth; anacarnation, or willful return to the wonders of embodied life, purged of romantic sentimentality; and attestation, or speaking up on behalf of the haecceitas or thisness of living creatures systematically instrumentalized for profit and pleasure. Together these responses help us to regain touch with animality by embracing the earth that hosts us, thus becoming more gracious guests, and to become more fully human by becoming better hosts to the multitude of earth's creatures, whose lives hang in the balance. (shrink)

Please imagine a long fuse hanging down from the ceiling. It is a carefully woven tube of fabric that holds a core of gunpowder. We note that it is beautifully made, with brightly colored threads intertwined with the coarser bare cotton. It a masterpiece of the modern weaver's art.

I am tasked with addressing philosophical hazards in the neuroscientific study of religion. As a philosopher concerned with the well-being of neuroscientists studying religion, I am inclined to begin with the philosophical hazards of philosophy. I am well aware of the extraordinary difficulties of both tasks, for the hazards are many and it is easy to miss the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest. Instead of focusing on one issue in great detail, I shall hang (...) a number of warning signs around a forest of issues that identify various philosophical hazards which deserve particular caution when it comes to neuroscience and religion. Since I am aiming for breadth over depth, my brief remarks on each issue shall be synoptic, non-exhaustive, contentious and suggestive for additional consideration and reflection. To redress such deficits, I have provided references for further reading. (shrink)

Professor Flew's vigorous and interesting paper, “The Justification of Punishment,” in PHILOSOPHY for October 1954 discusses my article on Punishment in Mind for April 1939. It merits some rejoinder. Flew's paper ranges far beyond the particular issue of punishment, and much of what is most interesting in it has this wider relevance. I, too, therefore shall use punishment as a peg on which to hang some discussion of the wider problems of ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 224-238 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks A Hanging Judge Denis Dutton "CORNERING THE MARKET ON CHUTZPAH," blared the headline on one review, and in tone it wasn't alone. It's not often that a book by a public intellectual has received as much media attention—mostly vilification and scorn—as Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press, $29.95). Three reasons for this (...) stand out. First, there's the sheer audacity of including a list of the top hundred public intellectuals, drawn from a larger list of 546 names. This invites endless dispute over how the list was generated, who is on it, who is left off, where each one stands, and why. Second, there is the fact that Posner has managed in the book to offend half of the public intellectuals you'd expect to be called on to review it—almost as though he made a list of potential reviewers and worked in a swipe at each. Finally, he has tapped into the deep antipathy humanist intellectuals have to seeing a beloved topic treated quantitatively, with statistics and applications of social and economic theory, replete with graphs and algebraic formulae. And after all, what topic is more beloved by the intellectuals than they themselves? That Posner would actually treat such important people as a demographic type, sorting them in terms of race, age, field, politics, sex—why, he even asks why so many are Jews. It's outrageous... and delicious.Definitions first. The idea of an intellectual, Posner says, should not be identified merely with having highbrow, cultivated tastes, being especially creative, or having high intelligence. All of these things are possible without being an intellectual, which Posner thinks ought to denote the application of the mind to "political matters in the broadest sense of that word, a sense that includes cultural matters when they are [End Page 224] viewed under the aspect of ideology, ethics, or politics (which may all be the same thing)." There is therefore a vague redundancy in the term "public intellectual," since the placing of ideas in a larger public context, acting as social critic, is what the intellectual most essentially does. In our age of vast communication media, it is also done con-spicuously in public, through op-eds, public radio interviews, and on TV clips with the regulation public-intellectual bookcase as a backdrop. This concern with larger moral issues means that for Posner paradigm individuals would therefore include the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, and most powerfully in Posner's mind, George Orwell: people who write about literature, art, science, and so forth from a broadly political or ideological perspective. For example, when Allan Bloom writes about rock and roll, he is not doing so as a music critic but as a philosopher who sees it as a symptom and source of social degradation. That's echte public intellectual work (and rather bad work in this particular case, Posner believes). That it is done for a broader public is also a crux for Posner, who leaves omits John Rawls from his list, because as influential as Rawls is as a philosopher, he does not address a larger public in the way that Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum do.The decline referred to in Posner's title is a decline in the actual worth of public intellectuals' work, not in their media celebrity, which has grown roughly inversely to the value of what they do. This invidious situation has followed, in Posner's view, the proliferation of academics in the ranks of public intellectuals. From the nineteenth century, with such names as Thoreau, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Tocqueville, to well into the twentieth, with the likes of Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, H. G. Wells, and Dwight Macdonald, the great tradition of public intellectuals had its life outside of universities. Although there remain nonacademic public intellectuals today—Susan Sontag, Roger Kimball, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal—they are a severely diminished species. Universities, which have expanded... (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning attributed to the national group as an entry point into how boundaries between the in-group and the out-group are formed. To do so, it focuses on the representation of the past of the group, taken as a symbolic resource able to produce a raison d’être for national groups, and does so within a dialogical framework. Using the transcripts of the French parliamentary debates on immigration from 2006, it proposes a qualitative analysis of collective narratives of (...) the past along three axes: 1) what meaning do they give to the nation, 2) how is such a meaning produced, and 3) how do the stories told by different groups reply or relate to one another. By identifying the main narratives found in the data and how they relate to each other – within and between groups – it proposes to see collective memory as itself the product of symbolisation processes and, therefore, as a cultural tool especially powerful to produce meaning about the present. This paper also argues that collective memory is a situated construction negotiated with – or contested by – others, made possible by the presence of common historical benchmarks to which different meanings may however be attributed. Finally, it proposes to understand “immigration talk” as potentially the product of the identity questions faced by the national group, rather than the other way around. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 40-52 [Access article in PDF] Hugo's le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné The End as Contamination Allan Stoekl How does one end a story? What does it mean to end a story? What is the relationship between the end of a story and that which precedes it? These, in many ways, are among the central concerns of nineteenth-century fiction, for this period saw extensive experimentation not only (...) in the areas of narration, point of view, and style, but in the realm of what is often called narrative "closure."This term, one we are all familiar with from television news accounts—everyone wants closure nowadays, whatever that is—is already contested in much of nineteenth-century fiction. The happy certainties of, say, a Sherlock Holmes story are hardly corroborated by the dismal fates of Emma Bovary or Thérèse Raquin. Indeed, one of the goals of much "realism" of the period can be seen as a desire to formulate another type of ending, one that provides not happy consolation—closure in the contemporary sense of the term—but simply an ending as cessation, a hanging-fire that offers only the silence, and emptiness, of the tomb. And even the emptiness of the character: after all, when Charles Bovary is opened up in order to determine the cause of his death, the doctors "find nothing": he was as empty as the ending of his wife's story. Indeed the discovery of that emptiness is the end (such as it is). Charles's emptiness has opened the story, it closes it, and in between there are only episodes that make obvious the end to come: disillusionment in the power of stories, the death-in-life of a life that tries to ape adventures. The end, the end of stories in general, comes to occupy and reconfigure (in its own nonimage) the entire story.As Montaigne put it, there is only a bout rather than a but: an end as mere cessation rather than as goal or conclusion.1 This endlessness of the end—as simple extinction—suffuses all that comes before it: it is not so much that events lead up to an end, but rather that the end casts back on the events that precede it its own void, its fundamental unknowability.Sartre, of course, was eager to continue this Flaubertian critique (as he continued so much else started by Flaubert); in La nausée (Nausea) his hero, Roquentin, refuses any belief in the reality of "adventures"—his own or anyone else's—because they are essentially false: they are stories, with beginnings and endings selected to provide an illuminating or pleasurable experience. They are no more "real" than are the objects [End Page 40] around us, which are fabricated and chosen with a subjective, and selfish, end in view. In lived adventures, as in stories in novels or films, it is the end that gives sense to what comes before it: the economy of narrative, so to speak, requires that everything that figures in a story be of use in contributing to a satisfying and totalizing end (a but). In his diary, Roquentin writes:And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. "I was out walking, I had left the town without realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles." This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. [...] And the story goes on in reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves up in a lighthearted way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant: "It was night, the street... (shrink)

I start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is (...) in my title. Secondly, I ask some further questions. Is there any systematic connection between the bits that Aristotle reports? Do they hang together? Ought we to see here some relic of an Aristotelian understanding of what made Heraclitus tick? If we juxtapose these themes and Aristotle's comments on them, I suggest, we can generate some suggestive motifs, in particular a rather curious fascination with smoking, and the pleasures of inhaling. Finally, I suggest that smells (and the way the world would be if smells were the only differences to be discerned) are important in understanding what Heraclitus was doing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In the Belly of the Whale:Some Thoughts on Preserving the Integrity of the New Bioethics CommissionF. Daniel Davis (bio)10 July 2010. Washington, D.C. President Obama's Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has just concluded its inaugural meeting, designed as a primer—the first of three that it plans to hold—on synthetic biology. As a topic for deliberation by a national bioethics commission, "synbio" is ideal. A cloud of (...) equipoise hangs over the practical implications of recent developments in this, the latest phase in the evolution of biotechnology—a seemingly genuine uncertainty about the need for additional mechanisms of oversight to mitigate potential risks to biosafety or biosecurity. Despite these concerns, its advocates and practitioners enthusiastically champion the prospect of eventual, perhaps significant benefits to be gained with progress in "synbio," including, for example, enhanced processes for the mass production of vaccines and biofuels. And yet like the advent of recombinant DNA technologies in the mid-1970s, synthetic biology has generated not only hope for benefits and concern for risks, but also questions variously described as "deep," "profound," "fundamental," and "philosophical": Is the capacity to synthesize novel, living entities yet another technological invitation to hubris on the part of humankind? Will that capacity alter the relationship between humankind and nature? How should we think about the moral status of living entities created de novo in the laboratory? Should we even care? How will wide-scale applications of synthetic biology tip the scales of social justice? And finally, the democratization of synthetic biology, the growth of DIY-BIO (do-it-yourself-biology) communities beyond the usual scientific arenas of academia and industry, has infused old questions about scientific freedom and responsibility with new complexities—all in the midst of an American public that is reportedly unaware and uneducated about this new chapter in the often triumphant, unsettling history of biotechnology.Thus, the topic of synthetic biology presents the new commission with several possibilities. It could very well make a substantial contribution to public policies responsive to both the current capabilities and the possible trajectories of [End Page 291] these emergent biotechnologies. The very fact that the President explicitly asked the Commission to take up the topic and report back to him (in six months) means that that potential is especially promising. It could, as well, delve into the "deeper" philosophical questions that "synbio" raises with the aim of bringing both depth and breadth to the tasks of critically analyzing and reflecting upon what currently is known and what, with regard to the future, can only be glimpsed of this amalgam of the life sciences, engineering, and other disciplines. The Commission could also set its sights on diminishing the apparent deficit in public understanding of these biotechnologies. And finally, with this topic as well as any others it takes up, the Commission, along with the administration that established it, could make an effort to reinvigorate public bioethics in the United States. At the very least, in the sobering light of experience with the President's Council on Bioethics, certain actions or behaviors could be avoided in the interests of preserving the integrity—the moral and political legitimacy—of the new commission. Although each of these possibilities warrants further explanation, my focus here is the final one.The Belly of the WhaleIn several decades, some future historian of public bioethics in the U.S. will be able to look back on the bioethics commissions established to date and offer an insightful, comprehensive—maybe even magisterial—account of their beginnings and endings, their deliberations and the political forces that shaped them, and perhaps most important, their ultimate value as public bodies. Lacking the strategic perch of historical distance, and fresh from the trenches, I can only offer a few somewhat informed but partial observations and arguments about public bioethics in the context of contemporary American politics, acknowledging at the outset that my thoughts are open to, and needful of, critical amendment or supplement by others.In the U.S., bioethics commissions are political creatures, established through the authority of the Congress or the President for the purpose of providing counsel to the legislative and/or executive... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:347 THE ROLE OF PART XII IN HUME'S DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION Anyone appreciative of Hume's greatness as a philosopher will want to suppose that the Dialogues both form a coherent whole and express Hume's own views on natural religion or religion based on reason (as opposed to religion based on revelation). In the last connection, given what we know of Hume's epistemology, life, and correspondence, one would be (...) inclined to suppose that he would reject out of hand the claims of revealed religion and contend that if there existed an acceptable religion it would have to be some form of natural religion. But insofar as natural religion claimed to establish scientifically the existence and nature of God one would envisage Hume dissenting. Now as long as we restrict our gaze to Parts I-XI of the Dialogues we seem to be able, easily enough, to satisfy all these suppositions. In Part IV, under the name of 'mysticism, ' revealed religion is summarily and facetiously dismissed as 2 indistinguishable from atheism. Demea's apparently permanent departure from the discussion at the conclusion of Part XI as much as says, symbolically, that revealed religion is not a serious contender for one's belief. Its a priori arguments -- the argument from sufficient reason and the ontological argument -- are almost as shortly attacked and dismissed (D 188-192). Also quite in keeping with Hume's philosophical view on knowledge of matters of fact is, on the other hand, the lengthy and detailed examination he bestows on the empiricist argument from design. That Philo, ostensibly his spokesman, is however able to uncover all kinds of logical short-comings in its claims to scientifically 348 establish the existence and nature of God does not surprise us; it coheres perfectly with our preconceived picture of Hume the skeptic, and his system as restricting science to numbers and quantities or, in the term's looser sense, to human nature and its more immediate surroundings. In short, Parts I-XI seem to be all of one Humean whole. But at first and even second glance Part XII notoriously seems to tear our hopes to find coherence and a plausible representation of Hume to tatters. There are, for one thing, those mocking sentences that seem to paint Hume in the colors of a devout, believing Christian, 'avid' for revelation. Thus, at the end of Part XII, apparently expressing Hume's deepest convictions, Philo says that "a person, seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity" and immediately afterwards, "To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian" (D 227, 228). For another thing, in Part XII Hume seems to be completely reversing his refutations in Parts I-XI of the argument from design's claims to establish the existence and nature of God. Thus, where in Part II he had Philo reject the use of causal reasoning in the establishment of a Mind as the first cause of the universe on the relevantly Humean grounds that, to do so, "it were requisite, that we had experience of the origin of worlds" (D 150), in Part XII he has Philo, apparently speaking for himself (Hume), argue that "as there are also considerable differences, we have reason to suppose a proportional difference in the causes; and in particular ought to attribute a much higher degree of power and energy to the supreme cause than any we have ever observed in mankind. 349 Here then the existence of a DEITY is plainly ascertained by reason" (D 217). Indeed, all forms of the argument of design, purely analogical as well as causal, seem resurrected in Part XII, although they were one and all hanged and buried in Parts I-XI. Moreover, it seems that in Part XII Hume via Philo is saying that science itself leads us "to acknowledge a first intelligent Author" (D 214-215). Before proceeding to deal with certain other incoherencies with which Part XII seems to confront us let us address ourselves to the two that I have so far... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deaf InterpreterPaul HostovskyHer tiny hands, flitting, darting, happily signing as we wait for the audiologist to call her name, are a joy to behold. And it makes me want to take her by the hand and just walk right out of there, me holding her left hand, the Deaf interpreter holding her right hand, the three of us skipping through the waiting room and out the door of the (...) audiology department, away from [End Page 148] her parents who don't know how to sign—who want to "cure" her of being Deaf—away from the hospital and all the doctors with their pathological views of Deaf people.But we can't do that. We must wait here in the waiting room until her name is called. And then we'll go inside for the meeting to discuss the elective cochlear implant surgery that she has not elected to have—her parents are electing it, because, understandably, they want her to be able to hear. And yet she's Deaf. But they didn't sign up for having a Deaf child. In fact, they were probably devastated when the audiologist told them: Your child is profoundly deaf.Lower case d deaf: people who have a hearing loss. Upper case D Deaf: people who have a hearing loss and for whom sign language—and its attendant culture—represents their primary experience and allegiance; people who mostly attend Deaf schools, mostly marry other Deaf people, mostly hang out with Deaf friends and Deaf family, attend Deaf events and Deaf sporting competitions and Deaf theater and Deaf parties and barbeques and Deaf conferences and conventions, and are active in Deaf civic organizations and Deaf politics.Ninety percent of Deaf people are born to parents who hear, who, for the most part, don't know any Deaf people, don't know how to sign, and want nothing more than for their child to be "normal," to be hearing, like them. So when the audiologist tells them about the option of an invasive surgery whereby they can implant an electrode in the cochlea of the inner ear and give the child a possibility of greater access to sound, the parents jump at the chance, the hope, of somehow making their Deaf child hearing.But what about the other ten percent, the Deaf children who are born to Deaf parents? Well, that's an entirely different story: When the audiologist tells a Deaf couple that their child is profoundly deaf, those parents will often celebrate the news, smile a big knowing Deaf smile and give each other a big Deaf hug and high-five, and maybe even give the benighted audiologist a hug and a high-five too, for being the bearer of great tidings. Because healthy Deaf babies are good, the more, the better.As for the ninety percent of Deaf children who are born to hearing parents, growing up to be a happy, healthy, linguistically, and culturally Deaf adult is not something they are able to learn from their parents. It's something that takes place horizontally instead of vertically (i.e., from other Deaf people). It's not unlike the experience of gay children, trans children, or transracially adopted children (e.g., children of color with white adoptive parents) who often don't learn to embrace their identities until they reach adulthood and meet others who are like them. But if there were a way to implant gay children to make them straight, or to implant trans children to make them cis, or to implant children of color to make them white, there would rightly be a public outcry condemning the practice as unethical and immoral. And yet the vast majority of Deaf infants and Deaf children worldwide are being implanted in the name of medicine, in an attempt to make them hearing, an attempt to eradicate Deaf people for their own good because some people don't value the way they are different. And the silence is deafening.While the Deaf interpreter and I are chatting with the little Deaf girl in the waiting room and she is animatedly telling us about her favorite things, her parents are checking their... (shrink)

back in about 1984 or 1985, when I'd been in graduate school for a couple of years at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I started hanging around with three chemists who shared a house. They were colleagues of my roommate, a chemistry grad student. One of them, no kidding, was named Lloyd A. Bumm, who would always introduce himself by saying, "My name is the best joke I know." Lloyd was a quirky, curious guy who often explored unusual places around (...) the City, unlike the typical chemistry grad student. For instance, he frequently would head into Chicago on Sunday mornings to go to this crazy street market he knew about. He invited me to go with him one weekend; he was looking for a power supply, whatever... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t spell (...) it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

Although maybe not the most fashionable area of study today, French science has a secure place in the classical canon of the history of science. Like the Scientific Revolution and Italian science at the beginning of the seventeenth century, French science, particularly eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century French science, remains a safe, albeit conservative, bet in terms of history-of-science teaching and research. The classic trope of the passage of the flame of European science from Italy to Britain and France in the (...) seventeenth and then eighteenth centuries is well established in overviews of the field. Specializing in research in this area is not, therefore, unreasonable as a career choice if you are aiming for a history-of-science position in Europe or even in the US. The Académie des sciences, with its state-sponsored model of collective research, provides a striking counterpoint to the amateur, more individualistic functioning of London's Royal Society – a foretaste of modernity in the institutionalization of science. Clearly naive, such a representation of French science serves as a good initial framework on which to hang half a century of critical historical research. If proof of the continued interest for eighteenth-century French science is needed, we can cite the Web-based project around Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie currently in progress under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences. The large number of publications in the history of French science make it unreasonable to pick out one or two for special attention here. But what about history of science in France and the academic community that practises this discipline today? Here, I offer a very personal view and analysis of this community, trying to underline contrasts with the history of science in the UK and the US. (shrink)

This chapter continues the institutional design process started in the previous, turning to four different types of modification in the system of constitutional review. I consider, in turn, the establishment of self-review panels in the legislative and executive branches of national governments (A), various mechanisms for inter-branch debate and decisional dispersal concerning constitutional elaboration (B), easing constitutional amendability requirements in overly obdurate systems (C), and finally establishing civic constitutional fora as replacements of traditional amendment procedures (D). In each case the (...) proposals are motivated by the problems of judicial review I identified in the previous chapter, and their design is oriented to the fullest realization of the six assessment values I specified there. I assume throughout that some form of judicial review is extant in the political system, and for the most part I assume the concentrated system with specialized constitutional courts that I argued for there. Where something important hangs on the difference between a concentrated and diffuse system of constitutional courts for the design of these other mechanisms for constitutional elaboration, I take that up in the discussion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Nurse BetterJaime HenselWhen things were quiet again I asked him what training he’d had to become the director of hospital security. “I worked for 20 years in corrections,” he answered proudly, and I was saddened but not surprised.In September 2010 I started an accelerated graduate entry nurse practitioner program to become a family nurse practitioner. Accelerated programs leave little time for preamble, since the idea is to take (...) a total novice and turn her first into a nurse and then into a nurse practitioner in just three years. While the classroom information was vital, it was our clinical experiences that really initiated us into the profession. In just the second week of school, we were divided into small groups and assigned to clinical preceptors—hands–on teachers who introduced us to our first patients, curbed our mistakes, quelled our fears, and pushed and pulled and cajoled us into being nascent healthcare providers. In showing us how to give bed baths, suction secretions, insert Foley catheters, and hang IV bags, our preceptors really began showing us how to use our hands as healers.In that first semester my patients also proved to be invaluable instructors. Talking to them, administering their medication, washing their bodies made me keenly aware of the delicate balance of vulnerability and power and trust and respect and intimacy that underlies all healthcare relationships. I hope, wherever those patients are now, they know how deeply I appreciate their patience and good humor and their collusion in my education.In December, the first semester and the first clinical rotations ended. Four months into nursing school I had a basic understanding of what it means to be a nurse. Frankly, most days I still felt like an impostor in blue pajamas sporting a stethoscope I didn’t really know how to use and new Dansko clogs that squeaked with every step. But in an accelerated program, fast and furious is the name of the game. We went away for winter break—a much needed breather—and came back to something completely different: psychiatric nursing.In preparation for these new clinicals, we were taught in class that we should not wear dangly jewelry or stethoscopes. That we should never let the patient get between us and the door. That psychiatric (psych) patients could escalate quickly; psych patients could have surprising triggers; psych patients could be very unpredictable. And psych patients could be violent. We were taught about physical and chemical restraints, and about show of force. We were cautioned, as students, to stay out of the way if things got tense on the floor. In stark contrast to medical patients, psych patients were made to sound less like people who had diseases and more like adversaries. I drove to my first day on the floor with trepidation.My new preceptor had spent her entire career in psych. She loved her job, loved the care of psychiatric patients. She set up a rotation because she wanted our entire clinical group to get full exposure to the breadth of psychiatric services offered by this medium–sized community hospital. We would each get to spend shifts on the locked psych floor, observing outpatient group therapy sessions, and in the psych emergency department (ED).I rotated to the psych ED for the first time on a Friday night. The first couple hours of the shift were very slow. I started talking to the mustachioed guard on duty, who looked as bored as I felt. He told me about his kids, I told him about nursing school. He seemed nice.When our conversation flagged, I explored the psych ED. It didn’t take long—just a short hallway with a bathroom, the social workers’ office, and two patient rooms without doors. The majority of the designated psych beds were actually around the corner in the main room of the medical ED—stretchers lined against the wall, without curtains or any [End Page 98] other attempt at privacy. I noticed that from where the guard stood at the corner of the psych hall he had a pretty good view of all the beds. Then again, so did most of the other patients... (shrink)

Although maybe not the most fashionable area of study today, French science has a secure place in the classical canon of the history of science. Like the Scientific Revolution and Italian science at the beginning of the seventeenth century, French science, particularly eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century French science, remains a safe, albeit conservative, bet in terms of history-of-science teaching and research. The classic trope of the passage of the flame of European science from Italy to Britain and France in the (...) seventeenth and then eighteenth centuries is well established in overviews of the field. Specializing in research in this area is not, therefore, unreasonable as a career choice if you are aiming for a history-of-science position in Europe or even in the US. The Académie des sciences, with its state-sponsored model of collective research, provides a striking counterpoint to the amateur, more individualistic functioning of London's Royal Society – a foretaste of modernity in the institutionalization of science. Clearly naive, such a representation of French science serves as a good initial framework on which to hang half a century of critical historical research. If proof of the continued interest for eighteenth-century French science is needed, we can cite the Web-based project around Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie currently in progress under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences. The large number of publications in the history of French science make it unreasonable to pick out one or two for special attention here. But what about history of science in France and the academic community that practises this discipline today? Here, I offer a very personal view and analysis of this community, trying to underline contrasts with the history of science in the UK and the US. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:116 Feminist Studies 41, no. 1. © 2015 by Olumide Popoola Olumide Popoola Fishing for Naija To choose. To find a way in which one can tell everything. Not just the he and she. But much more of it, all. Gestures. Opening and closing. To do both is saying quite loudly: no not now, not here, not you. John opened the door and stepped out of the car. Uncle (...) T was shifting from one of his loafers to the other, white handkerchief in hand, wiping his shiny forehead. He pulled on the other door so Karl could come out too. Karl didn’t. The bungalow door opened. Ó could hear the excitement in John’s voice. It was all relief and shit. Greetings were exchanged. Words passed back and forth. Uncle T laughed. Happy, it seemed. John laughed too. A joke. Apparently. Karl remained in the taxi. “I think you will need some privacy. We will be back in one hour.” John hugged è. Karl finally stood in the cemented driveway. “I believe we have some catching up to do.” Stepping away from the entrance the father entered the room, leaving the door wide open, turned his head, scrutinized è, two deep lines furrowing the forehead, eyes a good stare in them. They were the opposite to Karl’s, no deflection whatsoever, no putting things at bay, first, Note In this excerpt from a novel, the gender neutral Yoruba pronouns “o” and “e” have been used to replaced the English ones. Please note that the correct Yoruba character for the pronoun “e” has a grave accent and a dot underneath. Because that character is not available, it has been represented by the character è instead. Olumide Popoola 117 then processing in small bits, nothing at all, no fucking warmth as far as Karl was concerned, but all getting into you, straight away. “Carla.” The odds we bet on, the strands we hold, the time we spare, and all falls, or betrays that itch, that place we want to find where belonging meets the now, the here, the us. It was musty inside. No one had bothered to open the windows when the electricity cut off in the morning. “Sit down. What do you want? Water, soft drink?” “I’m fine,” Karl replied. The thank you was stuck in è throat. The eyes. Like whoa, all over the top. Demanding. “This is not what I’ve been expecting.” It was funny like that. This is not when I was expecting you, Karl thought. “What do you think of our country so far?” “I love it. Really.” Ó could see è father’s legs, ashy feet in leather sandals with a large flap covering the top of the foot, a small ring for the big toe. They were obviously different. Very different. Uncle T and him. No moisturisation on this front. At all. The father didn’t seem to believe in Uncle T’s shea butter products. At least not for the feet. The seat cushion shifted. The father leaned back, arms crossed over his head, touching the wall, eyes looking straight ahead. Very delaying tactic. For emphasis. For drama. As if rehearsed. But then again he’d had two weeks since Karl’s arrival in Nigeria. Two weeks of leaving everyone in limbo, just so he could now come with effing heavy artillery. “I was expecting a daughter.” And the manner of closing is always more defined, more punctuated than the question opened. It hangs on the hinges, only for effect. body ['badi] n pl bodies the entire physical structure of a human being adjective versatile 118 Olumide Popoola A mosquito was buzzing around, making the silence between their words like a spotlight. You couldn’t not look. Karl followed it with è eyes. “I always knew. As long as I can think. Mum always lets me be myself. As long as I do nothing wrong. Nothing real bad, I mean. Be polite. I want her to be proud of me. When puberty started I just said I wouldn’t pretend to be a girl no more. She understood. She knew. I had never been one.” It was hot, no fan or air-conditioning to separate the time from the... (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. STAGE NOTES AND/AS/OR TRACK CHANGES: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND MAGICAL THINKING ON PRINTING: AN ELECTION AND A PROVOCATION Isaac Linder “Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a ‘source’ text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre…. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings!” — Tan Lin 1 ELECTING A MASCOT: THE BARNACLE GOOSE After pitching the idea for this panel with the editorial help of my continental cohorts I became fascinated with the image of the goose—dead and roasted as it may be—and its relationship to the space of the printing press. For a long while after proposing this gathering I was seriously under the sway of delusions of grandeur, imagining that we might roast a goose (or goosefu) and, preparing a meal as one prepares a text for publication, feast in something approaching a warm and well-nourished revelry. I should note, by way of introduction, that a substantial part of my undergraduate experience involved learning to typeset and work as a devil, as typesetters mischievously call it, in a letterpress studio. This accounts in part for my fascination and helps to explain the fact that, when I began to leaf around in medieval beastiaries in lieu of being able to procure a goose, I was almost immediately struck by a fantastic monster that I hereby elect to be the mascot for our so-called para-academic practice(s) the relatively famed, but no less fabulous for it, barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a creature that first makes its way into 12th century manuscripts with Giraldus Cambrensis in 1186. Phenomenologically speaking the monster is a tree, a tree which, when approached closer is seen to be birthing geese budding from the buds that hang like ripe fruit from its branches. As the story goes these trees were found over water; the fledgling geese, once wrested from their pods would take off in flight or fall to their watery death, where they would be transformed into driftwood. In retrospect we presume the barnacle goose was posited as a consequence of the fact that geese born in more northern regions, migrating to Ireland and western Europe at large, were never seen to give birth. And I should note that this is far from the only other animal posited to be born from trees at around this time, my other favorite being medieval accounts of Moroccan tree-climbing goats. 2 In particular I’ve thrown up the mascot of the barnacle goose and singled it out from the quires of its beatiaries because its thoroughly hybrid origins lead us to name two very real creatures we can find point to in abundance; discrete materialities of the world cobbled together in textual fancy: on the one hand, the modern day barnacle goose , a common species of goose and, on the other, goose barnacles , a particular type of crustacean with incredible feathery tendrils and—I can't help but mention—one of the largest body mass to penis size ratios of all of the animals in the kingdom. Why is this bit of genital trivia relevant? Because they’re all hermaphroditic and in rare cases have been found to reproduce just with themselves—to inseminate themselves and give birth to their kin. So I think it must be stressed, as a symbol for what we’re really here to talk about, it's not a boy’s club thing so much as a very queer thing and, I contend, para - in every perfect sense of the word... Alongside the natural world, a monstrous imaginary concatenation; Alongside the hulls of so many institutional structures, funding sources and resources, Serresian parasites in all manner of mutualist, symbiotic, or properly parasitic positions; migratory and adrift; The tree, center stage in the 21st century adaptation of Waiting for Godot that is unraveling in ateliers across the world, is a barnacle goose birthing a flurry of miscegenous texts beyond medium and genre. PROVOCATION 1: CHAOSMOSIS “Genre is obsolete.” — Ray Brassier 3 And so, here I was getting carried away in daydreams about this generative and genealogical symbol under which to think all of the diverse projects we are all involved in as architects of the dressed word, (well dressed, bespoke, mansy, butch, careless, or roguishly punk attired as those words may be), when it also dawned on me, mid-flight here from Denver, that we are, even in lieu of being able to roast geese together, very much so literalizing what was never just the metaphor of the wayzgoose—a tradition, as you know, celebrated to mark the crepuscular turn into fall—as we are poised here, tomorrow being the first official day of fall on our calendars in the US marking the seasonal change from at which point it will no longer be possible to print without the aid of candlelight. A beautiful thought, that tipped into magical thinking on account of a little quick math I was able to do to come to the conclusion that we can all be delighted to know that as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and still to be set, we will tonight be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but also in part by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second—photons from an aspect of 9 cyg, a stereoscopic binary deep within Cygnus, the swan but not-so-distant-relative of the goose, with a distance of 572 Light years away; photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, have been raining down on us all year, and which had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than McLuhan could justify; the proliferation of so much ambient text; insurrectionary coups on (and re-crystallizations of) genre—perceived amidst so much ambient light—enveloping this campus, just now. So, with that thought, and perhaps a new mascot, Nico Jenkins... NOTES “ Writing as Metadata Container, An Interview with Tan Lin ,” Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, Gordon Tapper, Tan Lin, Jacket 2. January 20, 2012. To explore Lin’s notion of ambient textuality, plagiarism, and parallel, cross­platform publication in the 21st century, also see Lin’s sampled novel, “ The Patio and the Index ,” Triple Canopy 14, October 24, 2011, as well as the Edit event, organized at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, April, 2010 . For a fascinating and fecund exploration of medieval plant­animal hybrids in relation to media ecology, see Whitney Trettien, “ Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682) .” postmedieval 3.1 (2012):97. See also the crowd­review version of the essay. “ Genre Is Obsolete .” Compléments de Multitudes . 28 (2007). (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 63-82 [Access article in PDF] Faith, Philosophy, and the Nominalist Background to Luther's Defense of the Real Presence Thomas Osborne Recent scholarship has brought into question the traditional interpretation of Luther as being hostile towards philosophy. 1 Graham White claims that Luther holds a place in the history of logic as a member of the Nominalist tradition. 2 Bruce D. Marshall (...) argues that Luther and Thomas Aquinas fundamentally agree on the relationship between faith and reason. 3 Both scholars recognize that Luther himself stressed the importance of logic and used late medieval philosophical techniques. Although I agree with this scholarship that Luther's thought must not be understood in isolation from late medieval thought, I will argue that Luther uses philosophical ideas in a way which conflicts with that of the scholastic tradition. The focus here is on Luther's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason in the context of Luther's controversy over the Eucharist with the Swiss sacramentarians, among whom Zwingli and Oecolampadius were the most prominent. 4 Although Luther uses philosophical [End Page 63] distinctions to argue against what he thinks are misinterpretations of the Bible, he does not in any explicit and systematic way use philosophy to arrive at a theological understanding of the Eucharist. Luther differs from his scholastic predecessors in that he uses philosophy not to develop theological conclusions but only to attack errors about the Bible, and so the concern here is with Luther's use of Nominalist doctrines about presence in his attack on the sacra-mentarians' belief that Christ cannot be present both at the right hand of God and in the Eucharist at the same time.In his discussion of the Eucharistic doctrine which is presented in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Luther not only argues against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice but also against transubstantiation. 5 Luther explicitly states that he was influenced on this issue by Peter D'Ailly, a Nominalist follower of William of Ockham. D'Ailly and other Nominalists thought that transubstantiation was not the only possible way that Christ could be present in the Eucharist, since if God wished he could also make Christ present along with the substance of the bread and wine. 6 From a Nominalist [End Page 64] perspective transubstantiation requires two actions of God, namely, the annihilation of the substance of the bread and the placement of Christ's body under the species. Therefore, consubstantiation would be a simpler account of Christ's Eucharistic presence. If Christ's body were present along with the substance of the bread annihilation would not have to occur. But D'Ailly and the Nominalists argue that we know from Church authority that the real presence occurs through transubstantiation. On this issue the Nominalists differ from Thomas Aquinas, who gives philosophically-based arguments against consubstantiation. 7 When Luther attacks Thomas, he attacks not so much the use of philosophy in theology as Thomas's philosophy: "But this opinion of Thomas hangs so completely in the air without support of Scripture or reason that it seems to me he knows neither his philosophy nor his dialectic." 8Since the Nominalist belief in transubstantiation rather than consubstantiation rests on an acceptance of Church authority, the rejection of such authority would seem to lead to a rejection of transubstantiation. If Luther had assented to traditional Nominalist theology with the sole exception of its reliance on Church authority, one would expect him to argue for the necessity of consubstantiation. However, Luther sees himself as rejecting an unnecessarily philosophical theology in a return to a more biblical faith. 9 Luther claims that he argues for a particular understanding of the Eucharistic presence but rather "that every one may feel at liberty to ponder, hold, and believe either one view or the other without endangering his salvation." 10 Although Luther's training in Nominalist theology leads him to think that consubstantiation is possible, he at no point argues that a belief... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Myth Of ReadingAlfred LouchThe Myth of Theory, by William Righter; x 7 224 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1994, $49.95.IThe critics mill about in the welcome break between interminable and terminal conference sessions, eager to see and be seen. William Righter wanders about, listening and telling anyone who stays to listen what he hears, musing all the while on what each of them has done, or tried to do, (...) or failed to do. One hopes for a dénouement—something, perhaps, like the tableau at the end of The Inspector General: critics frozen in typical and typically ludicrous attitudes. Alas, the prospective tone of ironic detachment is not sustained. Righter is too close to his perambulating colleagues; he shares too many of their academic reflexes to keep the requisite distance. If there is a tableau at the end, the reader must imagine it, and place Righter along with the rest, caught in (may we call them?) Gallosaxon attitudes.It seems to be an important conference. Everyone’s milling about. One wonders, do they have anything else to do? Here’s Derrida, de Man, Barthes, Hillis Miller, Booth, Bersani, Lyotard, Poulet, and Todorov. The remarks of one seem to flow seamlessly into the allegedly counter-claims of the next. It’s all amazingly friendly. Of course there’s that rude fellow Eagleton, who says: “Methodologically speaking, literary criticism is a non-subject.... If literary theory is a kind of meta-criticism [End Page 218], a critical reflection on criticism, then it follows that it too is a non-subject” (p. 210). But don’t mind him. For criticism is about literature and literature exists. So these promenading and posturing critics can’t be mere phantasms of brains fevered by much reading, or anyway by references to many books.Curious that the first critic available for a chat is Leavis. A bit of nostalgia that. I suppose most English critics of sufficient vintage recall their Leavis-inflicted wounds the way they might reminisce about the bit of shrapnel they got in the way of on Omaha Beach and bear now with pride. But my, how temperate he appears here! How on earth can he come across so bland? Remember him saying: Snow does not begin to exist as a novelist. Now that was Leavis. You may have disagreed with him, you may have thought him silly, but you certainly understood him, as one comprehends a slap in the face. But here: “... Leavis takes on vividly and personally the total responsibility of consciousness for a wide area of assumptions that obviously trail their implications behind them” (p. 4). This is an extraordinarily spongy way of saying that Leavis knew he was right, and if you didn’t agree with him, a humiliating place in a cheap and tawdry consumer society awaited you.Still, it is a lucky thing that Leavis appears first on the scene. As a critic to help frame more exactly the kinds of questions about literary theory and practice Righter wants to ask, Leavis offers an easily recognizable starting point. He somehow manages to take the high moral ground. You want to ask, how is it that Elijah’s mantle descends on him? Does he compel assent only by the stridency of his words, and not by an ostensibly rational way in which his critical judgments hang together?A pity if this should be so, because the point of Leavisite diatribes, though not their excesses, is close to the hearts of passionate readers. Such readers (ourselves perhaps) read judgmentally. A book bowls us over. Describing the experience we are tempted to draw invidious comparisons to other books, which perhaps move us less, or not at all. We say of minor things that come our way: it’s not Shakespeare (or D. H. Lawrence). If you agree the project comes to an end. If you don’t, you want to know what it is that bowls us over, and why we don’t find those qualities in your favorite author. You want an explanation of a particular kind, not one that adduces new facts, but one that allows us to appreciate how the case at dispute... (shrink)

Capricci are nonsense drawings that delineate an elusive but inevitable sense behind or, better, within the palpable nonsense of the elementary proposition of a drawing; they are capers on a tightrope stretched between the poles of pathos and the ridiculous. We shall succeed in not falling only if we step forward boldly and know not only what we are doing but also what we are up against in the making of a picture as well as in living in the world. (...) For the world, in its yawning impudence of death and the dance of blind eagerness, ambition, and noisy speechlessness, makes us look to art not, or not necessarily, to escape from the world but rather to learn how to take its measure.... There is a painting ["St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching"] joined to the Passion cycle in S. Polo which demonstrates as well as any paradox ever will how Giandomenico joined piety and irony in his religious art without curtailing the glory of either. He arrives, as it were, at a God-fearing irony. We see St. Vincent Ferrer preaching. He speaks so eloquently, so convincingly in praise of the divine truth, that light shines forth from him and angel's wings grow on his shoulders. Fascinated by the miracle but even more so by the saint's words, his audience sits spellbound at his feet; in the foreground, however, sits a youth, a fop perhaps, gorgeously dressed, with a singular smile on his face, his hand musingly poised to his cheek, who looks at us quizzically. He is the link between us and the miracle. "Can you believe it?" says the smile, and perhaps "I did not—and yes—how can you now not believe it, you need but look - as I did - for there it is!" It is, I think, the face of one who knows about the truth of the absurd and its inner logic. Credo quia absurdum: if it were not so, we could prove the existence of God by feeding data into a computer, and there would be many believers, whose faith, in turn, deserved but little credit. Needless to say, perhaps, the face that so speaks to us in laughter joined to wonder is a self-portrait.1 · 1. In S. Polo the painting of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching hangs opposite a matching picture of The Finding of the True Cross. There is a beautiful young woman on the right who looks at us beseechingly and with her right hand points at the cross. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo who looks out of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching cannot help but see this lady and be affected by her earnest gesture. For a reproduction of the painting, see Maruz, G. D. Tiepolo, plate 22. Philipp P. Fehl is a professor in the department of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has edited Franciscus Junius: The Literature of Classical Art. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Turner's Classicism and the Problem of Periodization in the History of Art," appeared in the Autumn 1976 issue; the present essay was delivered in an earlier version at Stanford University in 1976 and is included in his collection of essays, Art and Mortality. His capricci, Birds with Titles, were exhibited in a one-man show at Kenyon College. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the NovelGerald SandyEllen D. Finkelpearl. Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: A Study of Allusion in the Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. xii 1 241 pp. Cloth, $42.50.At first glance the use of the word “allusion” in the subtitle of this book suggests an old-fashioned approach to literary analysis. Finkelpearl has, however, given a lot of (...) thought to her choice of terms. She acknowledges the equivocalness of allusions but prefers to use this word for the process of incorporating material from earlier writers rather than “reference” or “intertextuality.” In spite of her somewhat informal description of the process of allusion (“recalling, modifying, transforming, and playing around with passages”), she has made a conscientious effort to circumvent the “fuzziness and inexactitude” of identifying allusions by making vigorous use of TLL and other traditional philological aids in order to isolate words, phrases, and lexical combinations that are unique to Apuleius and his putative sources. She has also deliberately avoided applying a single theoretical model, because “Apuleius draws on a wide variety of genres from different time periods,... use[s] his sources differently at different times [and]... often maintains an ambiguous stance—between rejection and incorporation, homage and polemic—even within single allusions” (24). This “ambiguous stance” is in fact central to the thesis that Finkelpearl consistently develops in her book: In the Metamorphoses, “allusion provides a medium [End Page 471] for exploration of the fit between the novel and the genres it contains and helps the novel toward a definition of its genre” (27). She emphasizes the ambiguity of her subject from the beginning to the end of her book, stating in chapter 1 that her aim is “to examine the multiplicity of interactions between the Apuleian text and its forebears, with a vigilant consciousness of the novel’s various uncertainties” (31) and concluding that she has focused on the tensions caused by situating “an uncertain genre” within a defined literary tradition.There is no uncertainty about the structure of the book. Each of the eight chapters begins with a survey of relevant scholarship and a declaration of Finkelpearl’s place within, or outside of, the range of summarized views. The sequence of chapters also unfolds logically. After surveying in chapter 1 (“Background and Method”) the various scholarly procedures that have been used to characterize allusions, she progresses from the seemingly most simple (parody) to the most complex practices of allusion. One of the strongest features of the book is that she manages to uncover complex patterns of allusion in passages that other scholars have been content to label parodies. Good examples of this resourcefulness occur in Finkelpearl’s examination of Apuleius’ use of Sallust, one of the canonical Latin archaic models during the second half of the second century. At 1.16.2–3 the “low-life character” Aristomenes makes an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide by hanging himself with a rope attached to his bed. He addresses the bed in the words spoken by Adherbal over the corpse of his brother Hiempsal (BJ 14.22), substituting, however, grabattule for frater. Other scholars have commented on the obvious disparity between the dignified poignancy of the passage in Sallust and the low-life melodrama of the Apuleian revamping of it. Finkelpearl explains that “the choice of reference has relevance beyond its comic effect” (51), for Aristomenes’ words are “motivated by the questions posed... [by Adherbal] about life and death in the face of fratricide and injustice.” As she puts it, “Apuleius never merely defaces or satirizes; examination of his text reveals a complex thematic engagement with his sources.”In chapter 3 (“Reading Isolated Allusions”) Finkelpearl also manages to find overarching resonance in seemingly isolated pastiches. Others, including me, have perhaps been too quick to conclude that Lucius’ prolonged praise of the maidservant Fotis’ hair in book 2 of the novel is an empty piece of the type of rhetorical tour de force that characterizes the Second Sophistic. Finkelpearl argues, however, that hairstyle and other styles of appearance and dress can serve in the Augustan poets as emblems of literary doctrine and that Apuleius... (shrink)

Capricci are nonsense drawings that delineate an elusive but inevitable sense behind or, better, within the palpable nonsense of the elementary proposition of a drawing; they are capers on a tightrope stretched between the poles of pathos and the ridiculous. We shall succeed in not falling only if we step forward boldly and know not only what we are doing but also what we are up against in the making of a picture as well as in living in the world. (...) For the world, in its yawning impudence of death and the dance of blind eagerness, ambition, and noisy speechlessness, makes us look to art not, or not necessarily, to escape from the world but rather to learn how to take its measure. . . . There is a painting ["St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching"] joined to the Passion cycle in S. Polo which demonstrates as well as any paradox ever will how Giandomenico joined piety and irony in his religious art without curtailing the glory of either. He arrives, as it were, at a God-fearing irony. We see St. Vincent Ferrer preaching. He speaks so eloquently, so convincingly in praise of the divine truth, that light shines forth from him and angel's wings grow on his shoulders. Fascinated by the miracle but even more so by the saint's words, his audience sits spellbound at his feet; in the foreground, however, sits a youth, a fop perhaps, gorgeously dressed, with a singular smile on his face, his hand musingly poised to his cheek, who looks at us quizzically. He is the link between us and the miracle. "Can you believe it?" says the smile, and perhaps "I did not—and yes—how can you now not believe it, you need but look - as I did - for there it is!" It is, I think, the face of one who knows about the truth of the absurd and its inner logic. Credo quia absurdum: if it were not so, we could prove the existence of God by feeding data into a computer, and there would be many believers, whose faith, in turn, deserved but little credit. Needless to say, perhaps, the face that so speaks to us in laughter joined to wonder is a self-portrait.1 · 1. In S. Polo the painting of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching hangs opposite a matching picture of The Finding of the True Cross. There is a beautiful young woman on the right who looks at us beseechingly and with her right hand points at the cross. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo who looks out of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching cannot help but see this lady and be affected by her earnest gesture. For a reproduction of the painting, see Maruz, G. D. Tiepolo, plate 22. Philipp P. Fehl is a professor in the department of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has edited Franciscus Junius: The Literature of Classical Art. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Turner's Classicism and the Problem of Periodization in the History of Art," appeared in the Autumn 1976 issue; the present essay was delivered in an earlier version at Stanford University in 1976 and is included in his collection of essays, Art and Mortality. His capricci, Birds with Titles, were exhibited in a one-man show at Kenyon College. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Form and Discontent*Rosmarie Waldrop (bio)1. Composition as ExplanationIn the beginning there is Gertrude Stein, who says in “Composition as Explanation”: “Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same” [520].I could also say, in the beginning is Aristotle: “the fable is simply this, the combination of the incidents” [1460].2. A Look AroundThe forms that have (...) been striking me as “wild” have tended to be Steinian in this sense of stressing the horizontal, the axis of composition. I’m most struck by 3 tendencies: one is literally spatial composition, e.g. Susan Howe’s work; another, an emphasis on discontinuity, leaps on the level of syntax, of logic, of grammar. Breaks that do not immediately fold back into a smooth unity and may occur in mid-sentence:I was on my way from Carthage, it was night. It is not wax I am scorching was dead about her with knots.—Norma Cole, MarsI hide behind a category by misbehaving.—Carla Harryman, Under the BridgeLoop conceived in a line, the spine with its regions, reasons. On another, sweaters hang by the wrist to dry. The list is sweet. You lie. The eye is met by the season.—Ron Silliman, ParadiseYou took my temperature which I had meant to save for a more difficult day.—Rosmarie Waldrop, The Reproduction of ProfilesWent out so I’d take the car and a whole system of banking and money is based on a hierarchy.—Leslie Scalapino, Considering How Exaggerated the Music IsROAST POTATOESRoast Potatoes for.—Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”Or, a subtler example, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s almost unnoticeable shifts from one grammatical structure into another: [End Page 54]Never mind if he calls, the places you get through inwardness take time, and to drift down to the shore of the island, you know by the sand moving, even the coarse sand here It’s hard to say if you can even stand up, there....[13]The third tendency is mathematical. There is a lot of counting. Not stresses, not even syllables—I’m not considering that most unimaginative bunch, the new formalists—but words per line, sentences per paragraph. You all know about Ron Silliman’s love for the Fibonacci number series, or Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, which began with 37 sections of 37 sentences each. When she published a second edition at age 45, she added 8 sentences to each section plus 8 new sections.Jacques Roubaud: “No ideas but in numbers” [291].Then, in a somewhat more remote way, a number of people use ideas of permutation. For example, Jackson Mac Low’s 4 Trains, of which I will quote the first two stanzas:Train rule atom intricate nitrogen. Rule unusual leotard entropy. Atom train ostrich might. Intricate nitrogen train rule intricate casual atom train entropy. Nitrogen intricate train rule ostrich genealogy entropy nitrogen.Rule unusual leotard entropy. Unusual nitrogen unusual social unusual atom leotard. Leotard entropy ostrich train atom rule dies. Entropy nitrogen train rule ostrich pope yearly.[7]As Zukofsky puts it: “[Thus] poetry may be defined as an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approaches in varying degrees the wordless art of music as a kind of mathematical limit” [27].All these examples draw attention to arrangement, composition. They all listen to language. I once wrote:I don’t even have thoughts, I say, I have methods that make language think, take over and me by the hand. Into sense or offense, syntax stretched across rules, relations of force, fluid the dip of the plumb line, the pull of eyes.... No beginnings. All unrepentant middle.[A Form / of Taking / It All 74]And none of these forms are “organic form.” None relies primarily on metaphor, though from the Romantics on poetry has been more or less identified with it.3. Frameworka. HistoricalLet me step back for a moment to the beginnings of the concept of organic form, what it reacted against.When Goethe started to make a splash writing free verse, around 1770, the dominant aesthetic... (shrink)

The fifth poem in Horace's first book of Epistles takes the form of an invitation to Torquatus to attend a dinner which the poet is preparing for that evening, the eveof the Emperor's birthday. The fare will be simple but Horace will see to it that the furnishings, napkins, vessels and plates will be clean and bright and that the company and the seating-plan will be to Torquatus’ taste. Horace will get Butra and Septicius to be there, and Sabinus, too, (...) as long as he is not kept away by a prior dinner engagement or by a girl he'd rather spend the evening with. With Torquatus and Horace, that makes four or five diners, so that there is room for others before the triclinium is full, although there shouldn't be too many; or, as Horace puts it :locus est et pluribus umbris;sed nimis arta premunt olidae conuiuia caprae. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Five Poems DEBORAH WARREN Bugonia hic vero subitum dictu mirabile monstrum aspiciunt, liquefacta boum per viscera toto stridere apes utero et ruptis effervere costis. —Vergil, Georgics IV The covert’s dark, but Aristaeus sees —beyond it, in the oleandered meadow, walking to her wedding with her maids— Eurydice, as sweet as early windfall apples to the gods of the bitter dead. She runs, from shifting shade to sun to (...) shade until, in a shock of sudden sun, she sways, blinded, blundering into an adder’s kiss, and while the bridegroom waits by the bridal bed, she waits to be undressed by worms instead. But Aristaeus pays for the assault. The mead-gods visit on his apiaries wax-moth, mites, foulbrood and chalk-disease until an oracle orders a hekatomb: after nine days the myrtle-nymphs perform a miracle, and out of the carcases crawl fat new sun-furred drones to work the comb, a gift of the mead-gods who, with the poet, praise the teams of bright collaborating bees as little Romans—parvos Quirites. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 And what about Eurydice? The swarm goes humming on, a small Rome in a hive. The story’s not about Eurydice’s second chance, or whether she’ll survive. Eurydice’s a minor character; she’s only one girl, sui generis. Besides, no cattle-trick exists for her. The gods can let the apiaries thrive and armies—even empires—endure; one girl’s more complicated to replace. 44 five poems The Tithonus Club We can begin our visit with the Day Room where, in wheelchairs, some with canes or walkers, members sit: a fraternity so ancient that the confrères mostly ignore each other (club tradition). The dues are paid in decades; no one has an outstanding balance—Sir? Whoa, steady, there! Sit down... yes. Here’s your blanket. The badge of membership—the club regalia? Laminated ceremonial bracelets bear the motto Do Not Resuscitate (legend which, in practice, is seldom honored). Eleven-thirty, gentlemen; lunch is served, and now a little toast while the television mesmerizes the aides: Messieurs, your health! Deborah Warren 45 Aphrodite at the Old-Age Home —for Aphrodite Kalogeris “Honey,” the night nurse said to Aphrodite, “let me fix your bib. Look, Aphrodite! Here’s your juice and crackers, Aphrodite! “She doesn’t speak a blessed word of English,” the night nurse told us, “but she understands as good as if we spoke to her in Greek.” Aphrodite’s ears were as grotesque as the pore-coarse nose that bloomed across her face, but she heard her name: When Aphrodite rose and, beatific, dreamed across the room, traversing a happiness none of us could hear, she spoke a language older than herself but still her own—a dialect of beauty able to translate the fetid air. 46 five poems Climbing Etna We’d see the lava, nights, from the town square, as if the sun—an egg of fire—broke at dusk, threading its incandescent yolk down a mountain hanging in black air. Every night we’d scan the dark horizon looking for those streaks, and every night they took a while to find, however bright: Etna, it seemed, had spent the evening rising off the earth, to hover even higher, as if the mountain meant not to be found. And then, today, we ran the flows to ground, climbing up to the rolling burns of fire— closer, into the shimmering air and hiss that glanced up from the thick and red-flecked river —until our soles were smoking. But the lava sang, inside the mountain: Come, discover the fire’s origin and genesis; more—the heart of the world, in its enceinte of blind white heat. Seeing the lava course wasn’t enough, or watching the rock decant the sun; what brought us up here was the force— the hot loins—of a lightning god as dark as thunder; and, like Eve, like Semele, we wanted to approach. But there’s a spark, a jewel older than geology: stop shy of it—of finding the fire’s source, of closing in on what you shouldn’t see. Deborah Warren 47 Human Sucking strength... (shrink)

Das Natur/geist-verhältnis zeigt sich darin, dass ein Naturgegenstand immer in einem Verhältnis zu einem Subjekt steht und ein Subjekt immer in Relation zu einem Gegenstand. Fichtes Idee war, die Philosophie auf die Struktur des absoluten Wissens aufzubauen. Naturphilosophie ist im absoluten Wissen spezielles Wissen. Das Natur/geist-verhältnis in Form der beiden Vorstellungsarten Sinnlichkeit und Verstand zwingt uns, sie als eigenständige kognitive Vermögen anzusehen. Das menschliche Subjekt ist dialektisch und hat einen Drang zum Unbedingten, zur Weltlosigkeit und die Tendenz zur Weltbindung. Die (...) unauflösbare Dialektik von Natur und Geist steckt strukturell in der Subjektivität; das Verhältnis von Natur und Geist folgt aus dem »Ur-teilen« der Subjektivität. Kant beginnt seine Kritik, indem er die Erkenntnisfähigkeit der Vernunft des menschlichen Geistes selbst kritisiert; sein Ausgangspunkt war die alte Metaphysik der Subjektivität. Die Grundidee in Ansehung des subjektiven Vernunftvermögens bestand in der Einteilung in theoretische - und praktische Philosophie oder kausales und freiheitliches Sein. Wie ist das Verhältnis von Wahrnehmung zur Selbstwahrnehmung zu denken? Klar ist, dass von der Erkenntnis, von dem was ist, kein Weg zu dem führt, was sein soll; dieser Weg ist durch den Hiatus irrationalis versperrt. Die transzendentale Naturlehre Fichtes ist von Kant prinzipiell vorgezeichnet, jedem Sein geht ein Denken der Subjektivität voraus, gewissermaßen ein überfaktisches Wissen. Der transzendentale Realitätsbegriff von Kant und Fichte geht dem Streit zwischen der Empirie und der Ratio aus dem Wege, denn die Transzendentalphilosophie zeichnet sich durch eine raffinierte Ausgeglichenheit in dem Sinne aus, dass sie das Subjekt zum Schöpfer seines eigenen Wissens- und Wahrnehmungsbereichs macht, ohne die Eigenständigkeit einer objektiven Welt zu verleugnen. Der transzendentale Idealismus führt uns zu einem widerspruchslosen Wirklichkeitsverständnis, trotz des natürlichen Hangs zum Dogmatismus. Mit der Setzung der gegebenen Gegenstände in Erscheinungen und Dinge an sich entfällt die Annahme einer objektiven Außenwelt. Einstein konnte sich dieser Auffassung nie anschließen, für ihn gab es die gottgegebene objektive Welt mit ihren majestätischen Naturgesetzen. Es war Fichte, der behauptete, dass die Realität der Außenwelt nicht nur durch Sinnlichkeit begriffen werden kann, sondern primär durch Sittlichkeit; konstitutive sittliche Selbsterkenntnis und nicht regulative theoretische Naturerkenntnis war für Fichte maßgebend. Transzendentalphilosophie ist die Verschmelzung von Sein und Bewusstsein zu Selbstbewusstsein, oder mit anderen Worten: Sein und Erkennen ist immer nur in Relation zur begleitenden Subjektivität zu denken. Naturphilosophie und Subjektphilosophie sind eigentlich komplementär, verweisen aber gerade deshalb auf ein Ganzes. Die Transzendentalphilosophie kommt diesem Ganzen nahe; sie ist eine subjektive Theorie über das Denken und zeigt uns kritisch die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen objektiver Erfahrungserkenntnis. Sie liefert uns eine Ontologie für die von uns gedachte Welt auf Grund unserer beiden Erkenntnisstämme Sinnlichkeit und Verstand. Die transzendentalen Bestimmungen und Strukturen sind, weil sie vor aller Erfahrung liegen, für jede denkbare Physik gültig und kanonisch. Theorien für Alles, Weltformeln oder Fragen nach dem Ursprung von Allem werden automatisch »zermalmt«. Wirklichkeit ist die faktische Vermittlung von Subjekt und Objekt; Wirklichkeit ist demnach gegenstandslos, ist bloß eine Relation und diese ist das Natur/geist-verhältnis. Naturphilosophie ist kritische Erkenntnistheorie in Ansehung der Naturwissenschaften vom Standpunkt der Transzendentalphilosophie und die objektiven Gegenstände sind Objekte unserer Vorstellungen. Die Vernunftdichotomie des theoretischen und moralischen Gebrauchs des Denkens, von Fichte absolut als eine tätige Einheit gedacht, hat ihren rätselhaften Ort in der Subjektivität. Ich will hier die Antinomie unserer theoretischen Vernunfthandlungen, die aus dem Hin und Her von Weltbindung und Weltlosigkeit, von Endlichkeit und Unendlichkeit zu meinem Thema machen Die erkenntnistheoretischen Probleme in der Physik sind philosophischer Natur; durch Veränderungen der Theorien lassen sie sich nicht zum Verschwinden bringen. Oft werden Vorstellungen hypostasiert und zu Erfahrungsgegenständen gemacht, was wir z. B. in der Quantenphysik deutlich sehen. Bei der Charakterisierung eines Quantenobjekts haben wir je nach Versuchsbedingungen eine Wellenvorstellung oder eine Teilchenvorstellung, d. h. zwei verschiedene Wahrnehmungen vorliegen. Die Frage nach einer eindeutigen Realität im Kontext der Quantenphysik ist sinnlos, denn es ist bloß ein Streit subjektiver Gesetze, der durch die Erfahrung, d. h. durch eine Messung entschieden wird. Kants Doktrin in der Kritik weist uns darauf hin, dass das Denken auf die Erfahrung zu verweisen hat, und damit die Welt erzeugt im Sinne der Revolution der Denkart. Die Wissenschaften haben es immer mit gegebenen Gegenständen zu tun, während es Aufgabe der Philosophie ist, das Wissen und dessen Herkunft selbst wissenschaftlich zu untersuchen. Fichte hat trotz der Favorisierung des absoluten Subjekts die Bedeutung der Erfahrung als Widerstand und Anstoß für das Subjekt betont; nach ihm ist das Schweben zwischen Empirie und Ratio oder Kausalität und Freiheit eine wesentliche Bestimmung der Subjektivität. In der Erfahrung ist dieses Schweben durch die produktive und intentionale Einbildungskraft gegeben, diese vermittelt zwischen den Sinnen und Begriffen und produziert Bedeutung. Das Problem besteht nun darin, dass sich das Denken wegen unseres komplementären Wesens verwickelt und sich dabei selbst in einem Streit subjektiver Gesetze verliert, woraus Aporien und Paradoxien entstehen - wie wir sie nicht nur bei der Deutung der Natur haben. Diesen Widerstreit der Subjektivität zu erhellen, muss Aufgabe einer Philosophie der Subjektivität sein. Kant und Fichte haben uns hier einen Weg gewiesen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t spell (...) it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

Fichte’s Doctrine of Science of 1811 offers a sound model for explaining the conditions of semantics in its connection with the idea of freedom. Following Wolfram Hogrebe’s suggestion that the principle of contradiction works as an archaeological semantic postulate, i.e., is the implicit condition for any sentence to be meaningful, we argue that in Fichte’s definition of the phenomenon we find such a semantic postulate at a higher genetic level than the principle of contradiction indicated by Hogrebe. Moreover, the Doctrine (...) of Science of 1811 offers an analysis of the steps through which this phenomenon displays itself – i.e. Vermögen, als, Soll – which can be understood as the conditions for establishing a meaningful sentence. Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre 1811 kann uns einen soliden Modell zur Erklärung der Entstheung von Semantik anbieten. Mein Beitrag fangt mit der Darstellung Wolfram Hogrebes Hypothese an, dass der Satz vom Widerspruch als archäologisches Bedeutungspostulat fungiert, d.h. als implizite Bedingung der Möglichkeit jeglicher bedeutenden Äußerung. Ausgehend dieser Idee Hogrebes, hier schlage ich vor, dass man im Fichtes Begriffe der Erscheinung ein genetisch höheres archäologisches Bedeutungspostulat als der Satz vom Widerspruch finden kann. Daraufhin bietet die Wissenschaftslehre 1811 einen Einsicht in alle Schritte, wodurch die Erscheinung sich entfaltet – Vermögen, Durch, Als, Soll – die wir als die entsprechende Bedingungen für die Herstellung eines bedeutungsvollen Satzes verstehen können. (shrink)

It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. Consider the headlines from COP24, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Poland in December 2018. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres opened the proceedings by calling climate change “the most important issue we face” (PBS 2018). The Secretary-General’s remarks paraphrase the opening line of the U.N.’s climate change web page, which announces that “[c]limate Change is the defining issue of our time and we (...) are at a defining moment” (United Nations n.d.). Such statements about the singular significance of climate change—the most important, the defining issue—are often followed by proclamations about what hangs in the balance, and this was the case at COP24. There, the celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned that “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons,” amounting to, in his words, “disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years” (PBS 2018). (shrink)

My making choices and acting on those choices in a way that might count as my being free would seem to require that those choices are truly my choices. Furthermore, for my choices to be truly mine, it would seem that these choices must reflect my true self. So it seems that choosing and acting freely depends in a robust sense on such choosing and acting being authentic. Yet the concept of authenticity seems problematic. What or where is that true (...) self which would be the basis for authentic choosing, acting and living? Perhaps there is no such true self. This problem is central to the philosophies of both Sartre and Foucault. For the philosophers freedom authenticity or self-hood were central. The paper aims to show that, in spite of Foucault’s criticism, Sartre does not fall back on the idea of a true or deep self that is given to us. Sartre can appeal to the idea of authenticity without holding on such a dubious construct as a given, true self. Therefore the exploration of bad faith, good faith and authenticity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, where the problem is posed but left unresolved, is necessary. Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, where a more concrete problem – the problem of authentically identifying oneself with a group of human beings − actually opens up a way how to overcome the problem of authenticity. (shrink)

The article of Shestopalets D.V. deals with the construction of theological discourse in the publications of the Spirituals Administration of Muslims of Ukraine. Special attention is devoted to the topics that represent the “proper” image of Islam, the problem of orthodoxy, approaches to interpretation of the Quran and legitimization of the religious authority of Muslim scholars.

Evidence accumulation has been the core component in recent development of perceptual and value-based decision-making theories. Most studies have focused on the evaluation of evidence between alternative options. What remains largely unknown is the process that prepares evidence: how may the decision-maker sample different sources of information sequentially, if they can only sample one source at a time? Here we propose a normative framework in prescribing how different sources of information should be sampled proactively to facilitate the decision process: beliefs (...) for different noisy sources are updated in a Bayesian manner and participants can proactively allocate resource for sampling (i.e. saccades) among different sources to maximize the information gain in such process. We show that our framework can account for human participants’ actual choice and saccade behaviors in a two-alternative value-based decision-making task. Moreover, our framework makes novel predictions about the empirical eye movement patterns. (shrink)

Study of concept of Brahman in Upanishads with special reference to the philosophy of Śāṇḍilya.