John Cowdrey was Anglican chaplain and medieval scholar at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His work Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 was hailed as a masterpiece. Obituary by Jean Dunbabin.

Among the high aristocrats of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian world, the naming of children was a serious business—so serious as to be almost immune to fashion and to personal taste. Before the twelfth-century demographic upswing, the number of children in each family who survived childhood and could be counted on to continue the tradition of their parents was small. Many illustrious lines, like that of Gerald of Aurillac or of William the Pious, duke of Aquitaine, died out rapidly; other families, (...) like those of the dukes of Normandy or the counts of Flanders, survived by the skin of their teeth. Therefore, in christening their first legitimate male offspring, early-medieval aristocrats would choose a name designed to underline family continuity, usually the name of the child's paternal grandfather. (shrink)

In his masterly work on Tarentum, P. Wuilleumier identifies the Galaesus with the Citrezze or Giadrezze, a small stream running into the north side of the Mare Piccolo, about two miles from the channel on the west side of the citadel of Tarentum which connects the Mare Piccolo with the sea. This identification, which has been often repeated since Lenormant's time and spread beyond the narrow bounds of pure scholarship by the writings of George Gissing , Norman Douglas , and (...) David Randall-Madver , is likely to hold the field by virtue, of Wuilleumier's support. But it is irreconcilable with the only ancient evidence on the position of this river, given in the account of Hannibal's movements in 212 B.C. (shrink)

Although literary sources from the early Empire attest to the importance attached to the presence of a large staff of specialized servants at the banquets of the wealthy, in the art of this period little emphasis is placed upon the servants in banquet scenes, who serve essentially utilitarian functions. By the later Empire, however, figures of attendants bearing offerings become much more prominent and convey messages of the wealth and status of the owners and of the lavishness of their hospitality. (...) The article studies the iconographical sources of these figures and compares the processions of servants shown in other contexts as part of the general representation of the life of luxury. (shrink)

This review seeks to present a comprehensive picture of recent discussions in the social sciences of the anticipated impact of AI on the world of work. Issues covered include: technological unemployment, algorithmic management, platform work and the politics of AI work. The review identifies the major disciplinary and methodological perspectives on AI’s impact on work, and the obstacles they face in making predictions. Two parameters influencing the development and deployment of AI in the economy are highlighted: the capitalist imperative and (...) nationalistic pressures. (shrink)

According to a well-known view in the philosophy of mind, intentional attitudes by their very nature satisfy requirements of rationality (e.g. Davidson 1980; Dennett 1987; Millar 2004). This view (which I shall call Constitutivism) features prominently as the ‘principle of minimal rationality’ in de Sousa’s monograph The Rationality of Emotion (1987). By explicating this principle in terms of the notion of the formal object of an attitude, de Sousa articulates an interesting and original version of Constitutivism, which differs in important (...) respects from other extant versions. In this paper, I explore this version of Constitutivism against the background of recent developments in the theory of rationality and make explicit its ramifications for the long-standing dispute over whether the mind is essentially normative. My focus will be on how to conceive of the form of the rationality requirements that attitudes as such must satisfy according to this principle. I argue that, although de Sousa seems officially to endorse a structuralist conception of rationality, according to which these requirements are requirements of coherence, his considerations on formal objects suggest that they are more aptly conceived in terms of a reasons-responsive conception of rationality. I further argue that which of these two readings we choose makes a significant difference to the prospect of vindicating the essential normativity of mind by invoking the principle of minimal rationality. (shrink)

In the Canadian forensic psychiatric context, the concepts of risk and dangerousness interact, intersect, and morph into the notion of significant threat to the safety of the public. Stemming from the results of a critical ethnography of the Ontario Review Board, this article unpacks the central role of forensic psychiatric nursing, as an example of a 'psych' discipline (e.g., psychiatry and psychology), in a system that is built to produce risky persons and to legitimize their detention and supervision. By using (...) excerpt of interviews conducted with nurses, ethnographic observations of Review Board hearings, and other documentary artifacts, the findings illustrate how rationalizations of risk and dangerousness are contingent on space, time, and observer. Depending on the time of the assessment or on the health‐care professional who performs it, different elements including, but not limited to, mental illness, interpersonal relationships, financial instability, and sexual vulnerability, are relied upon in very fluid, interchangeable, and discretionary ways to justify findings of dangerousness. Such a dynamic expands the reach of psychiatry's legitimacy at identifying risky conduct and controlling risky persons to domains very loosely associated with the notion of dangerousness. The work of Foucault and Castel provides the theoretical backdrop on which rests the discussion and the implications for nursing. (shrink)

It is time to challenge the issue of pleasure associated with the core of medical practice. Its importance is made clear through its opposite: unhappiness—something which affects doctors in a rather worrying way. The paper aims to provide a discussion on pleasure on reliable grounds. Plato’s conception of techne is a convenient model that offers insights into the unique practice of medicine, which embraces in a single purposive action several heterogeneous dimensions. In Aristotle’s Ethics, pleasure appears to play a central (...) role for action’s assessment and intensification. Pleasure is also tightly associated with the Kantian faculty of reflective judgment, which operates at the heart of clinical reasoning. Indeed, practicing medicine means to deal with the particular and the manifold, requiring clinical judgment, but also relying on embodied habitus . With Bourdieu’s notion of habitus , pleasure is the mark of a happy practice, which presupposes a deep involvement in one’s field. Throughout our inquiry, the question of pleasure comes to offer a critical reappraisal of real medical practice and leads to consider ethics more as a component of techne than as a separate realm of concern. (shrink)

From the seventh to the fourteenth century, the Muslim world’s key actors were free peasants working limited and scattered cultivated areas, whose communities paid heavy taxes. A distinct nomadic mode of production dominated the arid lands and their warlike pastoral tribes. Wealthy merchants and artisans controlled urban ideological production, living next to actual ruling classes, who drew exceptional material privileges from their proximity to the state. Since the latter’s status contradicted the contractual community’s values, political power was socially alienated and (...) needed support from paid soldiers and often co-opted religious notables. The author describes Islamic social formations as real flesh-and-blood beings who developed original features on the same tributary mode of production’s skeleton. He shows that comparable dialectical oppositions enlivened them, stemming from uneven and combined development processes. Thus, their states and villages, barren lands and city markets, contractual ideology and monarchical powers were permanently in conflictual interaction. (shrink)

The End of the Avant-Gardes : May 68 and the Situationists What emerges first and foremost from Debord’s writings in 1968 is that the situationists’ initial reaction to the May “events” was to interpret them as the first example of a spontaneous general strike in the context of what he called “overdeveloped capitalism”. Debord’s position on this question is linked to his questioning of the status of the avant-gardes. At the time, Debord and those close to him sought both to (...) conceptualise and to enact the end of the avant-gardes. And this included the Internationale Situationniste in its status as political, philosophical and artistic avant-garde. e article subsequently sets out to show that if the situationists did have any leverage on the events of May, it was insofar as they practised a maverick Marxism centred on the concept of alienation. is enabled them to conceptualise both the exploitation of the wage-earner and the condition of the consumer. Because they represent a comprehensive critique of capitalism and because, furthermore, they refuse to compromise on the revolutionary and worker dimension of the May-June 1968 moment, Debord’s writings of the period enable us to grasp what, in the strict sense, remains beyond any opportunistic recuperation in these events. (shrink)