In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics in Light of ChildhoodDavid Cloutier (bio)Review of Ethics in Light of Childhood John Wall Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010. 204 pp. $34.95.John Wall’s ambitious volume contends that “considerations of childhood should not only have greater importance but fundamentally transform how morality is understood” (1). He rightly suggests that “the story of childhood cannot be told in one-dimensional formulas of either innocence and vulnerability or unruliness and (...) undevelopment” (7), but instead require a new paradigm for ethics: “childism.” He questions three historical views of childhood: the “top-down,” the “bottom-up,” and the developmentalist. Wall splendidly moves beyond these views and demonstrates that considering children should instruct us in the limitations of ordinary approaches to ethics—not only for children’s sake but for adults too.How so? Wall’s constructive section considers ontology, teleology, and de-ontology. In them, relying heavily on twentieth-century continental philosophy, supplemented by some social-scientific literature and numerous anecdotal examples, he develops an overall approach to the moral life. First, he argues for an ontology of “restless and endless play” (36) reflective of the human capacity for creativity possessed by both children and adults. Secondly, the moral life has a teleology of “narrative expansion,” with a constant movement toward a “more richly diverse life story” (60). Finally, moral obligation involves a constant “decentering” of the self in which “the world I create for myself should be disrupted and stretched out as far as possible by genuine human difference” (88). Building on the insights of top-down and bottom-up traditions, and going beyond the “flatly unilinear assumptions” of developmental “stageism” (81) ethics involves a constant circularity, exemplified in the final three chapters on specific issues. For example, families who “create increasingly expansive family worlds” engage in top-down transmission of tradition, developmental formation of relationality, and bottom-up nurturing of otherness (149). These qualities apply not only to children but to parents as well, and thus satisfy Wall’s desire for an ethics that is fully “child-inclusive” and that does not privilege adult agents. He succeeds admirably at demonstrating that the real agency children actually possess and exercise, as well as their vulnerability and passivity, are not simply incomplete versions of what adults possess fully.I would raise two concerns. First, the book works so hard to avoid any kind of linearity that criteria enabling judgment seem lacking—for example, surely some [End Page 195] forms of “disruption” are not to be welcomed (especially by children). The telos of “narrative expansion” so strongly refuses to privilege any perspective that it threatens to empty out what one might gingerly call “adult commitments”—to stable love, production, civic life, and fine arts—all of which require virtue (absent here), and which seem necessary for children to flourish. Aspiring “to go on creating oneself endlessly” (58) can be a fruitful depiction of adult life, or it can be an immature escapism. Without a thicker telos, the distinction is difficult to make.Second, his category of “childism” (3) forces him to artificially avoid any telos of maturation. In parallel with other “isms” (e.g., feminism), he argues that children are “full human beings,” live in “fully meaningful moral worlds,” and are “full participants in... human moral experience” (29). “Full” appears throughout, but the inclusion parallel clashes with maturation in human life. True, children and adults have both agency and vulnerability (39), but children, generally speaking, are more vulnerable and are less capable agents, and thus will have particular needs (and also offer particular gifts to adults). “Childism” sometimes obscures the particularities of childhood, and how we are bodily and culturally directed toward some “maturity.” Yet these concerns should not diminish Wall’s achievement in displaying how childhood can teach adults much about ethics.David CloutierMount St. Mary’s UniversityDavid Cloutier David Cloutier is an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s University. He received his BA from Carleton College and his PhD from Duke University. He is the author of Love, Reason, and God’s Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics (Anselm/St. Mary’s Press, 2008) and editor of Leaving... (shrink)

Pushing past the constraints of postmodernism which cast "reason" and"religion" in opposition, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, seizes the opportunity to question the authority of "the modern" and open the limits of possible experience, including the call to religious experience, as a new millennium approaches. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, engages with Jean-Luc Marion and other religious philosophers to entertain questions about intention, givenness, and possibility which reveal the extent to which deconstruction is structured like religion. New interpretations of (...) Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida emerge from essays and discussions with distinguished philosophers and theologians from the United States and Europe. The result is that God, the Gift, and Postmodernism elaborates a radical phenomenology that stretches the limits of its possibility and explores areas where philosophy and religion have become increasingly and surprisingly convergent. Contributors include: John D. Caputo, John Dominic Crossan, Jacques Derrida, Robert Dodaro, Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Marion, Frangoise Meltzer, Michael J. Scanlon, Mark C. Taylor, David Tracy, Merold Westphal and Edith Wyschogrod. (shrink)

Despite suggestions that the end of metaphysics leaves us with nothing but history, essential questions about the place of history in a post-metaphysical culture have been neglected. In one sense history "weakens" as the scope for "realism" or a teleological master narrative fall away. But it invites overreaction to suggest that history becomes a "process of weakening" insofar as things have come to be as they are not as the resultants of full, meaningful origins, but only through the "dread accident" (...) of the historical process. The world that has resulted from history is the only one we have, and it weighs on us; in that sense history does not weaken but strengthens. Still, the historical process enveloping us is not Hegelian and necessary but weak and contingent, its outcomes subject to further contest. Conversely, although truth is weak, finite, and provisional, it is not merely consensual or relative precisely because it is historical. To grasp the sense it which history both weakens and strengthens enables us to grasp the scope for learning more deeply from our historical experience. A fuller range of historical questions about modernity would enable us better to understand the ongoing dangers and possibilities of modern politics. (shrink)

No writer or public intellectual of our era has been as sensitive to the role of faith in the lives of ordinary Americans as Robert Coles. Though not religious in the conventional sense, Coles is unparalleled in his astute understanding and respect for the relationship between secular life and sacredness, which cuts across his large body of work. Drawing inspiration from figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, Coles’s extensive writings explore the tug of war between faith and (...) doubt. As Coles himself admits, the “back-and-forthness between faith and doubt is the story of my life.” These thirty-one thought-provoking essays are drawn from Coles’s weekly column in the Catholic publication _America_. In them, he turns his inquisitive lens on a range of subjects and issues, from writers and painters to his recent reading and film viewing, contemporary events and lingering controversies, recollections of past and present mentors, events of his own daily life, and ordinary encounters with students, patients, neighbors, and friends. Addressing moral questions openly and honestly with a rare combination of rectitude and authorial modesty, these essays position Coles as a preeminent, durable, and trusted voice in the continuing national conversation over religion, civic life, and moral purpose. (shrink)

_Draws out numerous affinities between the sophists and Socrates in Plato's dialogues._.

Here I discuss findings that suggest a universal mechanism for proteins (and RNA) to recognize and interact with various binding partners by selectively binding to different conformations that pre‐exist in the free protein's conformational ensemble. The tandem RNA recognition motif domains of splicing factor U2AF65 fluctuate in solution between a predominately closed conformation in which the RNA binding site of one of the domains is blocked, and a lowly populated open conformation in which both RNA binding pockets are accessible. RNA (...) binding to U2AF65 may thus occur through the weakly populated open conformation, and the binding interaction stabilizes the open conformation. The conformational diversity observed in U2AF65 might also facilitate binding to diverse RNA sequences as found in the polypyrimidine tracts that help define 3′ splice sites. Similar binding pathways in other systems have important consequences in biological regulation, molecular evolution, and information storage. (shrink)

There are numerous well-documented problems with the DSM’s polythetic-categorical approach to the delineation of mental disorders. However, the DSM-5 introduces an empirically based dimensional model of personality traits. These traits form a hierarchical structure that represents the organization of dispositions to common mental disorders. We connect emotions to this joint hierarchical structure using a modified set point model, which accommodates major theories linking personality and psychopathology—continuum, risk, scar, and pathoplasty—as well as more dynamic multivariate models. We argue that these traits (...) represent typical causal pathways that can be extracted from a complex web of equifinality and multifinality. Ultimately, research on mood disorders provides a stronger account of their underling traits than the variably endorsed symptoms of their polythetic criteria. (shrink)

When The Absurd Hero in American Fiction was first released in 1966, Granville Hicks praised it in a lead article for the Saturday Review as a sensitive and definitive study of a new trend in postwar American literature. In the years that followed, David Galloway’s analysis of the writings of John Updike, William Styron, Saul Bellow, and J. D. Salinger became a standard critical work, an indispensable tool for readers concerned with contemporary American literature. The New York Times described (...) the book as “a seminal study of the modern literary imagination." David Galloway, himself an established novelist, later extensively revised The Absurd Hero to include authoritative discussions of more than a dozen novels which had appeared since the first revised edition was released in 1970. Among them are John Updike’s Couples, Rabbit Redux, and The Coup; William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice; and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift. Through detailed analyses of these works, Galloway demonstrates the continuing relevance of his own provocative concept of the absurd hero and provides important insights into the literary achievements of four of America’s most influential postwar novelists. (shrink)

"An admirable accomplishment.... Roberts provides valuable insights into the current debate on the nature of historical knowledge in our present 'postmodern' time. Anyone concerned with the philosophy of history will need to reckon with this book."--Allan D. Megill, author of "Prophets of Extremity".

Unlike the memory of the querulous and time-bending White Queen inThrough the Looking Glass, mine befits her complaint, inclined as I am to thinking backwards when asked to contemplate the state of our field. Backwards, then, I go in the first section of this essay, after a few opening comments on the situation of our field at the present moment. Thereafter, I describe the emergence of cultural history and summarize some of its strengths and weaknesses, to the end of reflecting (...) on its implications for intellectual history. (shrink)

Political science faces a challenge from a “Mr. Perestroika,” who decries the hegemony of formal and statistical analysis in the discipline. Although not connected with this movement, Bent Flyvbjerg makes the best case for a renewed dominance for qualitative and case study work throughout the social sciences. This article challenges Flyvbjerg’s call for a phronetic as opposed to an epistemic discipline. It challenges as well the unqualified call for pluralism advocated by many in the perestroika movement. It offers instead an (...) integrated tripartite method in which narrative, statistics, and formal modeling fill in a scientific frame. (shrink)

Can civic engagement rescue the humanities from a prolonged identity crisis? How can the practices and methods, the conventions and innovations of humanities teaching and scholarship yield knowledge that contributes to the public good? These are just two of the vexing questions David D. Cooper tackles in his essays on the humanities, literacy, and public life. As insightful as they are provocative, these essays address important issues head-on and raise questions about the relevance and roles of humanities teaching and (...) scholarship, the moral footings and public purposes of the humanities, engaged teaching practices, institutional and disciplinary reform, academic professionalism, and public scholarship in a democracy. Destined to stir discussion about the purposes of the humanities and the problems we face during an era of declining institutional support, public alienation and misunderstanding, student ambivalence, and diminishing resources, the questions Cooper raises in this book are uncomfortable and, in his view, necessary for reflection, renewal, and reform. With frank, deft assessments, Cooper reports on active learning initiatives that reenergized his own teaching life while reshaping the teaching mission of the humanities, including service learning, collaborative learning, the learning community movement, and student-centered and deliberative pedagogy. (shrink)

An alternative approach to emotion is presented here, which differs from that of Kagan and others. It orders emotion along a continuum of the embodiment of emotion, starting with a clear but rare case of pure emotion and at the other extreme discusses Damasio’s intelligent prefrontal patients who could not feel emotions critical to social life.