T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is foremost a meditation on the significance of place. Each quartet is named for a place which holds importance for Eliot, either because of historical or personal memory. I argue that this importance is grounded in an ontological topology, by which I mean that the poem explores the fate of the individual and his/her heritage as inextricably bound up with the notion of place. This sense of place extends beyond the borders of a single (...) life to encompass the remembered past and the unknown future. How this broader narrative of the passing and enduring of human existence can be better understood is a primary concern of the work of Martin Heidegger, in whose Being and Time the historical, situated context of an individual within a community is an important theme. Even more important is his later work in which this theme is extended to include place and dwelling. Dwelling is a particularly rich and poetic idea, weaving the narratological, topological and temporal aspects of human existence together, offering a challenge to modern technology thinking. This paper explores Heidegger’s thoughts on the topology of Being within the context of a poem which, I contend, is also telling the story of human situatedness, and attempting to understand what it means to truly dwell. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Warner PHILOSOPHICAL POETRY: THE CASE OF FOUR QUARTETS I FOR plato the quarrel between philosophy and poetry was already an ancient one. Since his day strenuous efforts have been made to eliminate it by circumscribing each widiin carefully specified boundaries, on die principle that strong fences make good neighbors, and allowing die one to venture onto the territory of the other only as licensed. Thus until (...) recently assessments of the literary quality of a philosopher's writing have commonly been treated as extraneous to its value as philosophy, and philosophical probing of die thought of a poem as irrelevant to a literary critic's final assessment ofit. For some works, however, such compromises seem forced; Four Quartets is a case in point. Here we have a sustained effort to explore issues of a philosophical and theological nature in poetic terms — in a manner that challenges our understanding and lays claim to our assent. The poetry does not merely encapsulate a theoretical position, but enacts a process ofthought perceived as bearing on diese topics at least as significandy as do those processes commonly termed "philosophical," and diereby raises by implication more general issues concerning die status of those "philosophical" modes themselves. F. R. Leavis is well known both for his engagement with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and for his insistence on a clear separation between literary criticism and philosophy; dius his raising of philosophical questions as an integral and decisive element in his final and most extensive analysis ofthe Quartets is particularly striking: That Four Quartets offers us thought, searching, basic and rigorous, we have our assurance in the first ten lines of"Burnt Norton".... As thought, it aspires to a general validity.... 222 Martin Warner223 The questions, how must reality be conceived, and what is the nature of the human situation, have been raised in a way diat compels one to determine and verify one's own ultimate beliefs.1 Of course, Leavis is clear that the manner in which die poem raises these questions is not that traditionally associated with philosophy: "The 'music' of Four Quartets challenges a criterion that is not logic, but something equivalent in the field of total meaning. We can only tell what it is by intelligent self-exposure to the poetry" (p. 159). Similarly his mode of"determining " and "verifying" his own beliefs in response is that proper to literary criticism. But the questions are plainly philosophical ones, and one does not need the authority of Leavis to see that the poem raises them. From a philosophical point ofview, the interesting questions are the status of the manner in which it does so and the nature of the "criterion that is not logic" which is said to have an internal relation to that "intelligent selfexposure to the poetry" which Leavis in his critical practice seeks to exemplify. Unfortunately, this late commentary on Eliot's poetry is among the weakest in the Leavis corpus, precisely lacking "intelligent self-exposure to the poetry";2 but this should not lead us to dismiss its more general claims. In earlier and far stronger criticism Leavis had already argued that "Burnt Norton" does "by strictly poetical means the business ofan epistemological and metaphysical inquiry" ("Eliot's Later Poetry," p. 65). Further, die most distinguished recent criticism of Eliot's poetry is probably that of A. D. Moody,3 and he too finds himself driven to place his own "ultimate beliefs" in relation to it. On the one hand, "There is likely to be at least some degree of essential conformity between the way we live now and die way in which the poem would order life; and to that extent the poem can be said to express, and to give a form to, the sensibUity ofits age" (p. 264). But on the other, "It is a neurotic vision, one arising from some disorder or disease of the personality — or of his culture.... It is not easy to attain a detached view of die neurosis which is like a dominant gene in our culture. It is a matter... of the alienation ofman from mat to which he properly, of his nature, belongs — his being cut off from... (shrink)

Presents a penetrating study of Eliot's Four Quartets. Begins with an account of the intellectual and personal context for Eliot's mature work, explaining how his influences shaped his mind, then discusses Eliot's own personal circumstances and the contemporary relevance of his work a half century after it appeared, offering comparisons with Samuel Beckett. A central motif of analysis of "Burnt Norton" is Augustine's discussion of time in relation to subjective memory. Other literary references brought to bear on the (...) Four Quartets include work by Yeats, Milton, and St. John of the Cross, as well as the Bible and the Bhagavad-Gita. Warner is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

A Philosophical Study of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets By MartinWarner. The Edwin Mellen Press. 1999. xi + 138.

This paper sings a song — a song created by bringing together the work of four great names in the history of logic: Hans Reichenbach, Arthur Prior, Richard Montague, and Leon Henkin. Although the work of the first three of these authors have previously been combined, adding the ideas of Leon Henkin is the addition required to make the combination work at the logical level. But the present paper does not focus on the underlying technicalities rather it focusses on (...) the underlying instruments, and the way they work together. We hope the reader will be tempted to sing a long. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Milanese Quartet FRED LICHT Milan, so often thought of as the heartless capital of grinding industry and heedless hedonism, is nevertheless home to at least four of the highest achievements of western art. Considered as a quartet, they represent both the greatness and the equivocal nature of human endeavor. Two of them, Raphael’s Sposalizio and Bramante’s Church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, deal with the harmonious (...) congruence of human aspirations and human achievement attained by the grace of Providence. The limitations of human experience are accepted not as a curse but as a blessing because they are imposed by Divine Will. For Raphael as for Bramante, the artist’s obligation is to penetrate to the uttermost limits that circumscribe human existence. Having reached those limits he transmits to us the assurance that supreme fulfillment and serenity lie within and not beyond our grasp. The other two works, Leonardo’s Last Supper and Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, conceive of the limits so gratefully acknowledged by Raphael and Bramante as nothing but the tragic starting point for their art. We can assume that all four artists had read Eccclesiastes and knew that “All is Vanity!” and consequently knew of the inevitable ruination that befalls everything terrestrial. Bramante and Raphael never mentioned the knowledge they had acquired from Ecclesiastes. Leonardo and Michelangelo made their recognition of Vanitas the very essence of their art. i. of this quartet, Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin is by far the least popular today (fig. 1). The most obvious factor that arion 27.2 fall 2019 tends to make us wary of Raphael’s early work is its criminal overuse by religious as well as profane publicity. It has been massively reproduced in edulcorated colors, fragmented to yield sentimental details, visually bowdlerized. We cannot help but be heartily sick of Raphael Madonne on those hideous little catechism-class handouts and on expensive as well as cheap bonbonnières. We have become wary of seductive paintings and Raphael’s Sposalizio is eminently seductive. We may have sloughed off nearly all the Victorian hypocrisies and strictures, but in art we continue to be stoutly puritanical. We are more than a little convinced that seduction must necessarily be the result of a false or calculating appeal for our sympathies which we should resist. And there can be no doubt about it, Raphael, especially during his youth and early maturity, seduces and intends to seduce. Since we have little reason for self-esteem, we dismiss out of hand the possibility that Raphael might genuinely love us sight unseen. Indeed, who are we that he should want to seduce us? The love he bears us is a nuisance because it is hard to deserve or live up to such affection. So it is natural to suspect him of ulterior motives that might demean or disappoint us were we to fall victim to his seduction. Yet love is one of Raphael’s great gifts. If we feel unworthy of what he offers us, if we have been conditioned to distrust anyone who courts us without an obvious motive, then that’s our loss, not his. Perhaps if we look a little more closely at this particular seducer’s methods, we will find that they are practiced in good faith. He loves us because he sees the world sub specie amoris. The particular task he sets himself is not an easy one. The narrative, the wedding of the Virgin, is both intimate in spirit and minuscule in action. It hardly seems suitable for an altar that has to have an immediate effect on the faithful who approach it. It is a story that has been illustrated by many artists before Raphael—Perugino’s painting of the same subject is rightly and frequently cited—but it was Raphael who gave it its ideal and definitive representation. Just as paint20 a milanese quartet ings of the Last Supper painted after Leonardo’s version always strike us as a bit of a failure even when attempted by such giants as Tintoretto, Rubens or Tiepolo, so is it impossible to think of any Sposalizio after Raphael’s without an edge of disappointment. In fact... (shrink)

'Philosophy in a world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip and Elizabeth, how much I love them.' Two brilliant young scholars uncover the major philosophical contributions of four women whose ideas could have changed the course of twentieth-century thought. Written with energy, expertise and panache, The Quartet is a page-turning blend of research and recovery, storytelling, and a call to arms. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual (...) trenches, rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy when the men 'left the room' and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman bring these women out of the shadows and into vivid colour. (shrink)

Quite rightly, philosophers of physics examine the theories of physics, theories like Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, the Special and General Theories of Relativity, and Statistical Mechanics. Far fewer, however, examine how these theories are put to use; that is to say, little attention is paid to the practices of theoretical physicists. In the early 1950s David Bohm and David Pines published a sequence of four papers, collectively entitled, ‘A Collective Description of Electron Interaction.’ This essay uses that quartet (...) as a case study in theoretical practice. In Part One of the essay, each of the Bohm-Pines papers is summarized, and within each summary an overview is given, framing a more detailed account. In Part Two theoretical practice is broken into six elements: (a) the use of models, (b) the use of theory, (c) modes of description and narrative, (d) the use of approximations, (e) experiment and theory, (f) the varied steps employed in a deduction. The last element is the largest, drawing as it does from the earlier ones. Part Three enlarges on the concept of ‘theoretical practice,’ and briefly outlines the subsequent theoretical advances which rendered the practices of Bohm and Pines obsolete, if still respected. (shrink)

No one is quite sure what happened to T.S. Eliot in that rose-garden. What we do know is that it formed the basis for Four Quartets, arguably the greatest English poem written in the twentieth century. Luckily it turns out that Martin Heidegger, when not pondering the meaning of being, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about the kind of event that Eliot experienced. This essay explores how Heidegger developed the concept of Ereignis, “event” which, (...) in the context of Eliot’s poetry, helps us understand an encounter with the “heart of light” a little better. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger defines the world as ‘the ever non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death . . . keep us transported into Being’. He writes that the world is ‘not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand . . . The world worlds’. Being able to fully and richly express how the world worlds is the task of the artist, whose artwork is the (...) crystallization of this ‘worlding’. For Heidegger it is especially the poet who is attuned to this ‘worlding’, for the poet’s work is focussed on and happens within language itself. The poet is a ‘world-maker’, but this ‘worlding’ is not directed at creating a fictional world; rather it is aimed at revealing the world itself, drawing to the foreground the ‘ever non-objective’ nature of the world, the world happening and unfolding through and with us. This paper, using T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly Four Quartets as an example, will delve into how the language of the poet is able to articulate this seemingly invisible boundary between the everyday world and that same world revealed as a mysterious potential that ‘worlds’. The ‘religious imagination’ is central in how this transformation of reality, through poetic language, can manifest. Paul Ricoeur’s work on the poetic and religious dimensions of imagination, particularly the notion of ‘hope’ provides the theoretical underpinnings to explain this transformation. (shrink)

This thesis explores, thematically and chronologically, the substantial concordance between the work of Martin Heidegger and T.S. Eliot. The introduction traces Eliot's ideas of the 'objective correlative' and 'situatedness' to a familiarity with German Idealism. Heidegger shared this familiarity, suggesting a reason for the similarity of their thought. Chapter one explores the 'authenticity' developed in Being and Time, as well as associated themes like temporality, the 'they' (Das Man), inauthenticity, idle talk and angst, and applies them to interpreting Eliot's poem, (...) 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Both texts depict a bleak Modernist view of the early twentieth-century Western human condition, characterized as a dispiriting nihilism and homelessness. Chapter two traces the chronological development of Ereignis in Heidegger's thinking, showing the term's two discernible but related meanings: first our nature as the 'site of the open' where Being can manifest, and second individual 'Events' of 'appropriation and revelation'. The world is always happening as 'event', but only through our appropriation by the Ereignis event can we become aware of this. Heidegger finds poetry, the essential example of language as the 'house of Being', to be the purest manifestation of Ereignis, taking as his examples Hölderlin and Rilke. A detailed analysis of Eliot's late work Four Quartets reveals how Ereignis, both as an ineluctable and an epiphanic condition of human existence, is central to his poetry, confirming, in Heidegger's words, 'what poets are for in a destitute time', namely to re-found and restore the wonder of the world and existence itself. This restoration results from what Eliot calls 'raid[s] on the inarticulate', the poet's continual striving to enact that openness to Being through which human language and the human world continually come to be. The final chapter shows how both Eliot and Heidegger value a genuine relationship with place as enabling human flourishing. Both distrust technological materialism, which destroys our sense of the world as dwelling place, and both are essentially committed to a genuinely authentic life, not the angstful authenticity of Being and Time, but a richer belonging which affirms our relationship with the earth, each other and our gods. (shrink)

The task of theologizing literature in the twentieth century -- Bergonsian conceptions of time : duration, dualism, intention -- Meeting the eternal in the present : Bergsonsism and the theology of present time in C.S. Lewis's The great divorce -- T.S. Eliot's Bergonsian "always present" : incarnation and duration in Four quartets -- W.H. Auden's themes of time and dualism : the Bergsonsian theology of "kairos and logos.".

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Conceivability of Artificially Created EnlightenmentPaul Andrew PowellPointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like [Roger] Mexico, survive anyplace in between.... [H]e imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.... [E]ach point is allowed only the two states:... [o]ne or zero.... [B]rain mechanics assumes the presence of these bi-stable points....If ever the Anti-pointsman existed, Roger Mexico is the man.... (...) How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware—perhaps—that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of history.—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's RainbowWhen I first read about the Dalai Lama's remark that "if all the external conditions and the karmic action were there, a stream of consciousness might actually enter into a computer,"1 I couldn't help but wonder if a computer could then attain enlightenment. The answer, at first, seemed simple and obvious (though perhaps distasteful for some): if the machine was self-aware, sentient, and conscious, then it would be only reasonable to assume that it could also attain enlightenment. Yes, simple and obvious, of course, but this takes for granted some very large and complex issues. After all, what makes for self-awareness, sentience, and consciousness to begin with, and how would we manufacture them in a machine?If we take a moment to think about the creation of artificial enlightenment the paradox becomes clear. In order to manufacture enlightenment, we must first manufacture samsara, because for a Buddhist, enlightenment is the "event" of deconstructing the problematic natures of "self," sentience (suchness), and consciousness, all of which are samsaric illusions. "Self," sentience, and consciousness represent the prerequisites of samsara/Nirvana, realized or unrealized, artificial or organic. They represent the prerequisites of desire. They represent the prerequisites for the illusion of death and birth. And thus they represent the truly salient issues that must be addressed before we can assemble our complicated hard (and soft) ware. Interestingly, because computational information consists of a conceptualized, dualistic [End Page 123] binary system of ones and zeroes, and because the nature of Nirvana/samsara also consists of a conceptualized, dualistic system of "self"/"other," technology, in theory anyway, may probably be capable of manufacturing a facsimile of samsara, if only because computational information is, by its very nature, samsaric to begin with. Of course, all this demands that consciousness, self-awareness, and sentience be a function of information processing. Personally, I believe they are, and that, in fact, the words information and samsara are synonymous with one another. Thus it follows that information technology will most certainly be capable of manufacturing the prerequisites, at least, of enlightenment. If that blunt statement strikes you as utterly preposterous, technically impossible, or even offensive, you might want to first read any number of excellent texts describing the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Two of the best popular books on the subject are Robot by Hans Moravec and The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. These will assuage your doubts concerning the soft problem, or, as it is sometimes called, the nuts-and-bolts problem.With these considerations in mind, let's see what we can come up with.In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not.—T.S. Eliot, "East Coker" (The Four Quartets)For most Buddhists, enlightenment can be defined as seeing through the illusion of the self and experiencing unadulterated suchness. In the words of Master Wolfgang Kopp, "The seer, the seen, and the process of seeing are one. The thinker, the thought, and the process of thinking fall together into one and multiplicity melts away. There is neither inside, nor outside in this state. There is only 'suchness,' tathata."2 So, enlightenment is suchness, or, things as they are, revealed as all that there is. As engineers of enlightenment, it would appear then that are at least two components we need to build into our machine: an illusionary "self" and suchness, or things as they are. As we shall see, the... (shrink)

This second volume of Eric Voegelin’s miscellaneous papers contains unpublished writings from the time of his forced emigration from Austria in 1938 until his death in 1985. The volume’s focus is on dialogue and discussion, presenting Voegelin in the role of lecturer, discussant, and respondent. “The Drama of Humanity” presents the Walter Turner Candler Lectures delivered in four parts at Emory University in 1967. This text, a small book in itself, addresses the themes of “The Contemporary Situation,” “Man in (...) the Cosmos,” “The Epiphany of Man,” and “Man in Revolt,” providing the reader with a good introduction to Voegelin’s later work. Another extensive text included in this volume is “Conversations with Eric Voegelin at the Thomas More Institute” in Montreal. These exchanges include lectures and discussions given by Voegelin between 1967 and 1976. A number of other sections offer insight into Voegelin’s intellectual development over a period of forty years. These include the complete “Foreword” to the second edition of _The Political Religions, _which is published here for the first time; “Notes on T. S. Eliot’s _Four Quartets_;” the “Cycle Theory and Disintegrations;” “What Is Political Theory?;” “The Spiritual and Political Future of the Western World;” “Notes on ‘Civilization and Foreign Affairs;’” “Structures of Consciousness;” “The Beyond and Its Parousia;” and the 1983 “Responses at the Panel Discussion of ‘The Beginning of the Beginning.’” Several lengthy excerpts from conference dialogues with other scholars are also included: “The West and the Meaning of Industrial Society,” “Natural Law in Political Theory,” and “Man in Political Institutions.” Volume 33 concludes with Voegelin’s “Autobiographical Statement at the Age of Eighty-Two,” his last public utterance on the course of his life and his life’s work. By choosing dialogue as the focus of this volume, Petropulos and Weiss are able to show not only the extent to which Voegelin engaged in an exchange of ideas but also his abiding concern for the practical and theoretical conditions necessary in order for this exchange to take place. (shrink)

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, śūnyatā, saṃsāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and ‘Burnt (...) Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references. (shrink)

Of the later dialogues of Plato, the Sophists stand out. This article highlights the concept of sophist as propounded by Plato. A didactic approach runs through the text. Socrates harps on the relation between sophist, philosopher and a statesman. Are they three different or they are the same. The basic idea that Plato wants to convey is, both features highlight some of the key enigmas of the dialogue: What is the relation between the outer and middle parts? How seriously are (...) we to take the outer part? And is there a genuine, and successful, attempt to say what the sophist is? The article focuses on two key problems discussed and solved in the middle part: the late-learners' problem, and the problem of false statement. The article also discusses communion of kinds and Plato's idea of the four quartets. (shrink)

Time arises in the theory of gravity through the semiclassical approximation of the gravitational part of the solution of the Wheeler-De Witt equation in the manner shown by Banks (SCAG). We generalize Banks' procedure by grafting a Born-Oppenheimer type approximation onto SCAG. This allows for the feedback of matter onto gravity, wherein the latter is driven by the (quantum) mean energy-momentum tensor of matter. The wave function is nonvanishing in classically forbidden configurations of gravity. In SCAG this is described by (...) the evolution of matter in imaginary time. This is interpreted as an inverse temperature, and the norm of the matter wave function, no longer conserved for these gravitational configurations, is a partition function. A simple cosmological model is worked out to illustrate these ideas. In this model it is shown that the temperature of the matter which emerges into the classically permitted region is the inverse bounce time of the bounce executed by the system in the forbidden region (behind the horizon).Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,”Four Quartets, 1943. (shrink)

Professor Brett has some direct acquaintance with a Joint Honours Degree in English Literature and Philosophy: and it is therefore on the basis of his own experience that he warns us that poetry and philosophy are “difficult pursuits for any man to combine” . This book has an introductory chapter and a short epilogue which deal in a philosophical way with meaning in poetry and in imaginative literature generally and with the nature of critical interpretation.In the four middle chapters (...) the author gives his account of four well-known and much discussed poems: Lycidas, the Essay on Man, the Ancient Mariner and the Four Quartets . One could imagine these chapters presented independently as interpretations and discussions of the literary and historical background of the poems: but they certainly illustrate Mr. Brett's theory of meaning in poetry and this provides a certain unity. Parts of Chapter I were first published by the author in Philosophy . What is new is the particular application of the theory to didactic and discursive poetry. To this is now added a discussion of rival theories of interpretation: first, the view expressed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in “The Intentional Fallacy” ; and, second, the views expressed by Miss Kathleen Raine in her essay on Blake. (shrink)

In ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of his ‘four quartets’, Eliot selected two Heraclitus’ fragments as epigraphs. In quoting fragment B 60 (‘the way up and the way down are one and the same’) he was reminding his readers that entrance into a spiritual life calls for both engagement and withdrawal, for both descending and ascending. And in quoting B 2 he reaffirmed Heraclitus’ conviction that most people fail to recognize the truth even when it is directly presented to (...) them. In his later Cocktail Party Eliot revisited these themes by converting a depiction of a failed social gathering into an exploration of forms of authenticity. He also exploited the dual nature of the Heraclitean daimôn—as external overseer and as the soul which lies within each person—to transform an account of a gathering of friends and strangers into an extended reflection on the conflicts lying within each human soul. (shrink)

This study forms a part of a larger investigation of the influence of the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus on modern poetry. T. S. Eliot, to mention the best known of the many poets inspired by Heraclitus, selected two Heraclitus fragments (B 2 and B 60) as epigraphs for his “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot explained that he was drawn to the fragments because of their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘extraordinary poetic suggestiveness’. Similarly, in ‘This Solitude (...) of Cataracts’, Wallace Stevens spoke of ‘the flecked river which kept flowing and never the same way twice’ and elsewhere noted the ‘inherently poetic quality’ of many Heraclitean sayings. To gain some sense of the nature and magnitude of Heraclitus’ legacy for modern poetry we must first explore his vision of ‘a fiery cosmos being kindled in measures and extinguished in measures’ and a river into which one cannot step twice. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose New American Poetry? Anthologizing in the NinetiesMarjorie Perloff (bio)In the two-year span 1993–94, no fewer than three major poetry anthologies appeared that featured the poetry of what has been called “the other tradition”—the tradition inaugurated thirty-five years ago by Donald M. Allen’s New American Poetry: 1945–1960. These three anthologies are, in order of publication, Eliot Weinberger’s American Poetry since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders, Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry, (...) and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century. A New American Poetry 1960–1990. 1 In 1994, moreover, there were two other large anthologies of alternate poetries by “younger” poets, 2 these two in the tradition of Ron Silliman’s In The American Tree: Language, Poetry, Realism and Douglas Messerli’s earlier ‘Language’ Poetries: An Anthology. They are Peter Gizzi, Connell McGrath, and Juliana Spahr’s two-volume anthology called Writing from the New Coast, 3 and Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick’s The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets.Five volumes, then, of the “new” alternate poetries. And a sixth—this time a real blockbuster—is in progress: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s two-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, which differs from all of the above by covering poetry and poetics of the entire twentieth century and from around the world. The first volume of Poems for the Millennium, From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude (1995), takes us from such “forerunners” of Modernism as Blake, Hölderlin, Dickinson, and Rimbaud through the Futurisms, Dada, Surrealism, and Objectivism, along with complex “galleries” of individual poets, while the second—and sure to be more controversial—volume (1997) brings us up to the global present.A new avant-garde thus seems to be in the making—indeed, oxymoronic as it may sound, a new avant-garde consensus. Yet the countercanonizing of the recent anthologies is not without its own aporias. What these are is my subject here.The Modest OppositionMy starting point is that of the avant-garde anthologists themselves: Donald Allen’s New American Poetry of 1960. From the vantage point of 1995, the most startling thing about the Allen anthology—still acknowledged by all later anthologists as the fountainhead of radical American poetics—is its modesty. The New American Poetry runs to 454 pages, including statements of poetics, biographical notes, and a short bibliography; it contains forty-four poets, all of them having come to prominence in the period between 1945 (the [End Page 104] end of World War II) and 1960 (the date of publication). The four-page preface opens as follows:In the years since the war American poetry has entered upon a singularly rich period. It is a period that has seen published many of the finest achievements of the older generation: William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, The Desert Music and Other Poems, and Journey to Love; Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, Section: Rock-Drill, and Thrones; H. D.’s later work culminating in her long poem Helen in Egypt; and the recent verse of E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, and the late Wallace Stevens. A wide variety of poets of the second generation, who emerged in the thirties and forties, have achieved their maturity in this period: Elizabeth Bishop, Edwin Denby, Robert Lowell, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louis Zukofsky, to name only a few very diverse talents. And we can now see that a strong third generation, long awaited but only slowly recognized, has at last emerged.[xi]Note that Allen introduces the “new” American poetry, not as an “alternative” to anything else but as the successor of two preceding generations. He does not quarrel about the Moderns: if Eliot isn’t included in the above list, it is because he had stopped writing lyric poetry after Four Quartets and had turned to the theater. The cited second generation, moreover, is more “diverse” (Allen’s word) here than it will ever be again in the anthologies: Bishop and Denby, Lowell and Rexroth and Zukofsky. And the third generation, presumably following in the footsteps of the first and second, is now said to... (shrink)

At Oxford University, in the context of WW2, when men were largely obliged to abandon the university benches to take part in the war effort, four women philosophers, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Mary Midgley (1919-2018), Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and Philippa Foot (1920-2010), formed a group of philosophical reflections that would become a competitor, after the war, to John L. Austin’s famous ‘Saturday Mornings’. At the heart of the concerns of this ‘wartime quartet’: putting the importance of being human back at (...) the centre of ethics. They opposed “modern moral philosophy” and its many presuppositions, including the claim that ethical questions are independent of the facts of human life or concern a purely rational subject abstracted from everyday issues and from its belonging to the human species. By putting the importance of being human back at the heart of their ethical reflections, these philosophers came to reflect on issues that directly concern human life, far from the philosophical abstractions that interested their men homologues. In this paper, I explore the extent to which this re-inscription of philosophy into everyday life and into ordinary human concerns, opens the way to a feminist philosophy and ethics. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to explore a new research methodology that will improve our understanding of “flow” through indicators of physiological and qualitative state. We examine indicators of “flow” experienced by musicians of a youth string quartet, two women (25, 29) and two men (23, 24). Electrocardiogram (ECG) equipment was used to record heart rate variability (HRV) data throughout the four movements in one and the same quartet performed during two concerts. Individual physiological indicators of flow were (...) supplemented by assessments of group “state flow” (means from standardized questionnaires) and a group interview in which the musicians provided qualitative data. A matrix was constructed for the characterization of different kinds of demands in the written music in each one of the four movements for each one of the musicians. HRV derived from ECG data showed non-significant trends for group state flow across the eight musical episodes. Individual-level analysis showed that compared to the other players the first violin player had the highest mean heart rate and the lowest increase in high frequency (HF) power in HRV during this particular movement, particularly during the second concert. The qualitative data illustrated how an interplay of synchronized social interactions between this player and their colleagues during the musical performance was associated with a feeling of group state flow and served to support the first violinist. The case illustrates that the proposed mixed methodology drawing on physiological and qualitative data, has the potential to provide meaningful information about experiences of a flow state, both at individual and group levels. Applications in future research are possible. (shrink)

Parallels between the mathematics of tiling, which describes geometries of visual space, and neo-Riemannian theory, which describes geometries of musical space, make it possible to show that certain paradoxes featured in the visual artworks of M. C. Escher also appear in the pitch space modelled by the neo-Riemannian Tonnetz . This article makes these paradoxes visually apparent by constructing an embodied model of triadic pitch space in accordance with principles drawn from the mathematics of tiling, on the one hand, and (...) from cognitive science, on the other – specifically, the notion that our experience of pitch relationships is governed in part by the metaphorical projection of patterns abstracted from embodied experience known as image schemas. These paradoxes are illustrated with reference to passages drawn from four compositions to whose expressive character such paradoxes contribute: the fifteenth-century motet 'Absalon fili mi'; the finale of Haydn's String Quartet in G major, Op. 76 No. 1; Brahms's Intermezzo in B minor, Op. 119 No. 1; and Wagner's Parsifal. (shrink)

Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself. Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying (...) together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol’s desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, “The dead dealer”; and he reads Duchamp as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx—though perhaps no longer the “Marxist” Marx of yore—can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity’s many unmet promises. An intriguing look at these four influential artists, _Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx_ is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms. (shrink)

In a series of works published over a period of twenty five years, C.W. Huntington, Jr. has developed a provocative and radical reading of Madhyamaka inspired by ‘the insights of post- Wittgensteinian pragmatism and deconstruction’. This article examines the body of Huntington’s work through the filter of his seminal 2007 publication, ‘The Nature of the M?dhyamika Trick’, a polemic aimed at a quartet of other recent commentators on Madhyamaka who attempt ‘to read N?g?rjuna through the lens of modern symbolic logic’, (...) a project which is the ‘end result of a long and complex scholastic enterprise … [which] can be traced backwards from contemporary academic discourse to fifteenth century Tibet, and from there into India’ and which Huntington sees as distorting the Madhyamaka project which was not aimed at ‘command[ing] assent to a set of rationally grounded doctrines, tenets, or true conclusions’. This article begins by explicating some disparate strands found in Huntington’s work, which I connect under a radicalized notion of ‘context’. These strands consist of a contextualist/pragmatic theory of truth, a contextualist epistemology, and a contextualist ontology where entities are viewed as necessarily relational I then use these linked theories to find fault with Huntington’s own readings of Candrak?rti and N?g?rjuna, arguing that Huntington misreads the semantic context of certain key terms and fails to follow the implications of N?g?rjuna and Candrak?rti’s reliance on the role of the pram??as in constituting conventional reality. Thus, I find that Huntington’s imputation of a rejection of logic and rational argumentation to N?g?rjuna and Candrak?rti is unwarranted. Finally, I offer alternate readings of the four contemporary commentators selected by Huntington, using the conceptual apparatus developed earlier to dismiss Robinson’s and Hayes’s view of N?g?rjuna as a charlatan relying on logical fallacies, and to find common ground between Huntington’s project and the view of N?g?rjuna developed by Tillemans and Garfield as a thinker committed using reason to reach, through rational analysis, ‘the limits of thought.’. (shrink)

Cynthia Freeland’s investigation of four kinds of ‘fidelity’ in portraiture is cut across by more general philosophical concerns. One is about what might be called the expression of persons--the persons or ‘inner selves’ of portrait subjects and of portrait artist: whether either is possible across each of the four kinds of fidelity, and whether these two kinds of expression are in tension. More fundamental is the problem of telling how self-expression is at all possible in any of these (...) forms. Finally, she wonders how photography affects all these questions. This comment addresses portraiture not so much in terms of the four fidelities, but with another quartet of concepts: four ordinary types of ‘display’, in terms of which we see how artists’ self-expression is possible in all these forms, also including photography. Its key idea is that portraits are displays simply by being pictures or sculptures, which are kinds of artifacts, hence things that we perceive as having intentional affordance: that is, as being intentionally made ‘for’ something. (shrink)

This essay explores the legacy of the four philosophers now often referred to as ‘The Wartime Quartet’: G.E.M. Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley. The life and work of the four, who studied together in Oxford during the Second World War, is the subject of two recently published books, The Women Are Up to Something, by Benjamin Lipscomb, and Metaphysical Animals, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman. The two books show us how Anscombe, Murdoch, Foot (...) and Midgley became friends united in their hostility to the logical-positivist orthodoxy of the day and its deleterious influence on Oxford moral philosophy. And we see how their friendship had a formative influence on their subsequent—highly distinguished—careers, so that it is possible to discern, if not exactly a school of thought, then various common themes, ideas and concerns, which are expressed and developed in contrasting ways. While Lipscomb represents the work of the Quartet as of largely historical significance, my paper defends what I take to be Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman's position that their legacy is very much a living one, containing insights that are not just of enduring relevance, but can transform how we see ourselves and how we do philosophy. For Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, the key idea shared by the members of the Quartet is to place the concept of life at the centre of philosophical attention. This commitment has at least four dimensions: (i) an interest in the ordinary; (ii) a focus on virtue, goodness and human flourishing; (iii) an affirmation of our animal nature; (iv) recognition of the normative landscape that structures our lives. I try to bring out the philosophical significance of these themes in a way relevant to the philosophical elucidation of education. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy and--more significantly--theology, historicism came to be attacked by its critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, historicism was seen by many (...) as a grinding force that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern society's gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of exchange and adaptation rather than influence.After examining the growing dominance of the new historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, the book analyzes the critical responses of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer. For this fascinating and diverse quartet of thinkers, historicism posed a stark challenge to the ongoing vitality of Judaism in the modern world. And yet, as they set out to dilute or eliminate its destructive tendencies, these thinkers often made recourse to the very tools and methods of historicism. In doing so, they demonstrated the utter inescapability of historicism in modern culture, whether approached from a Christian or Jewish perspective. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (...) (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to develop a religion-science relationship attitude scale prepared to determine the approaches of the students studying at the faculties of theology/Islamic sciences towards the religion-science relationship. The relationship between religion and science constitutes one of the most important intersection points of religion, science and philosophy. In the modern period, the debates on the questioning of this relationship have reached quite advanced dimensions with the influence of different elements. In recent years, one of the environments (...) in which this situation has intensified in our country is theology/Islamic sciences faculties. Especially for the students of these faculties, it is important to deal with the issue from different dimensions. However, the studies are mainly carried out in the theoretical dimension and it can be said that the quantitative dimensions are inadequate. In this respect, the article is the first example in the field. Ian G. Barbour's quartet typology, which is one of the most comprehensive studies on the religion-science relationship was used as a basis in the formation of the scale questions. Especially conflict, separation and reconciliation approaches in this typology have been decisive. Three different study groups were formed and a total of 594 students studying at Atatürk University Faculty of Theology were studied. In the development of the scale, exploratory sequential pattern model from mixed method research was used and there are four steps. In the first step, the items were written by the researchers and corrections were made by taking the opinions of the field experts. In the second step, an application was made for item analysis; in the third step, an application was made for exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and in the fourth and final step, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed. According to the findings obtained from the study, a scale consisting of two sub-dimensions called conflict/separation and dialogue/consensus was developed. The reliability of the scale was analyzed with the internal consistency (cronbach alpha) method, and the cronbach alpha values for each sub-dimension were calculated as.90 for the conflict sub-dimension and.77 for the dialogue consensus sub-dimension. These results indicate that each sub-dimension of the scale is reliable. (shrink)

The term “contemplation” has played a significant role in the history of Christian spirituality. Regardless of the tradition, whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, contemplation has been valued. Recently, however, some Evangelicals have raised various concerns about contemplation, including its Roman Catholic origin, the tendency to devalue Jesus Christ and his atonement, the marginalization of Scripture, and the assertion that a person who seeks to grow in the contemplative life will no longer be active to witness to the gospel in (...) the world. This article while recognizing the potential for possible theological distortions argues that there is a biblical and theologically accurate manifestation of contemplation. In particular, this essay seeks to examine the presence of contemplation within the Evangelical church. To that end, the writings of four Americans representative of the beginning of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism are examined to discern whether they display a biblical and orthodox expression of contemplation. In all cases, whether male or female, Calvinist or Wesleyan, this quartet of spiritual leaders reveal and challenge contemporary Christians of all traditions to be more intentional about cultivating a loving and grateful gazing on God and desire to delight in and enjoy God more fully. (shrink)

Care, we suspect, is initiated with an appeal. Something appeals to us which becomes a matter of concern. In accordance with this concern, we develop a volition: we want that which promotes the thriving – even to the smallest extent – of that which has appealed to us, regardless of how we may establish what that entails. Eventually we take practical action: we act according to our volition. Immediately after this has taken effect, as the case may be, we release (...) the source of the appeal from our care. As far as we can see, this quartet – appeal, concern, volition and practice – covers the four constitutive moments of care, although these moments are only theoretically separable from one another. The practice, as we have said, follows the volition. The volition, however, has arisen because we wanted to foster the wellbeing, however we may have recognised this, of the subject from which the initial appeal came. We have thus placed our volition in the service of this wellbeing, that is to say: we have subjected ourselves to an ought which we instantiated ourselves with the acceptance of the appeal. This seems to us to be the decisive point: in the act of caring, we instantiate an ought, a regulative element, which we then willingly follow. In the process of caring, we thus bring forth an ought, from our own being as it were – and as short-lived as this may be – to which we subject ourselves: in the process of caring, normativity only appears at all because we produce a will in the interest of the subject of the initial appeal to which we then dedicate ourselves, as if this were not our own will. Normativity is thus, as we further suspect, to be understood as a descriptive term of a phenomenology of care, or indeed a phenomenology of normativity. The phenomenon of caring provides the first indication that the ought arises directly from the practical experience of our lives. The phenomenology of care seems to us to be of eminent importance for health care ethics. To denote professional caring, we use the term nursing. The professional caregiver purposefully exposes him/herself to appeals, making him/herself receptive to such an appeal and reliably allowing the appeal to become a concern. The first fundamental principle of nursing ethics thus appears to us to be: to make known one’s receptiveness to an appeal – in a particular situation at a particular time – and to process this appeal reliably such that it becomes a concern. This encompasses the professionalism of care at its initiation. We believe that a precise phenomenology of care will provide, on the one hand, an exact understanding of the genesis of normativity, and on the other hand, in its practical application, a definition of the professional care that is nursing and an ethics of nursing for the care-giving professions. (shrink)

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a jobbing critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein signs away his inheritance to teach schoolchildren in a provincial Austrian village, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and align his fortunes with the phenomenological school of Edmund Husserl. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture at the back of a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold over (...) the next decade. The lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine as each gains world historical significance, between them remaking philosophy. Time of the Magicians tells the story of this revolution in Western thought through the remarkable and turbulent lives of its four protagonists, showing philosophy not gifted from on high but worked out in the mess of everyday life, and illuminating with rare clarity their ideas. (shrink)

In recent years, a new scholarly gaze has been cast on four women‒Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch‒who have come to be known as the ‘Wartime Quartet’. During the postwar period, when women were still scarce in the discipline, these four flourished as philosophers. New details about their wartime education give us materials to reflect on what enabled them to develop their unique philosophical voices. Their work dispels widespread philosophical dogmas, especially scientistic interpretations of naturalism (...) that exclude value from the fabric of reality. Through their attention to the details of ordinary life, they avoid flattening the complexities of moral learning, especially where this involves navigating intergenerational differences. The articles in this Suite look to the Wartime Quartet's writings and learning conditions to show that, far from being of purely historical interest, they shed fresh light on the aims and challenges of moral education and offer a critical perspective on current pedagogical practices‒particularly in the teaching of philosophy. (shrink)

The question of what constitutes a finished work is thrown open, reminding us that in certain of his completed autographs Beethoven continued the process that he normally reserved for the earlier stages of composition, setting out further choices, possibilities, and interchangeabilities, including radical alterations in goal as well as detail. In particular, the revision of movement endings was one of his long-standing preoccupations. In works of his middle period, Emil Platen observed, Beethoven continued to make essential alterations in the closing (...) sections of movements after the works had already taken concrete notational form; for example, in the scores of the String Quartets, op. 59, “out of a total of seven movement endings, six were altered after the fact, four in essential ways.”6 Indeed the relationship between sketches and compositional goals was always more problematical than traditional scholars were willing to allow. As Lewish Lockwood has shown, the closer one looks at the sketches the less one can continue to accept as an article of faith that “as a work progresses from first inklings to final realization it should pass through successive phases of growth and clarification of structure, and of complication of detail in relation to that structure, becoming progressively more definite en route to its goal.”7 To further thicken the issue, Janet Levy has pointed out that one “cannot assume that the goals of a completed work are necessarily the same as the goals of the sketches for it,” inasmuch as the composer’s intentions may well have changed during the course of composition and we may be left with sketches made in connection with goals no longer reflected in the final work.8 Composition is only partly a teleological process whereby the composer eventually finds a lapidary form for a predetermined idea. With Beethoven, not only is there no prospective inevitability, there may even be no inevitability after the fact. His sketches and autographs may well be series of rough maps to the multiplicity of universes he glimpsed, to a plurality of possibilities, a jammed crossroads of paths taken and not taken. 6. Emil Platen, “Beethovens Autographen als Ausgangspunkt morphologischer Untersuchungen,” in Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress: Bonn 1970, ed. Carl Dahlhaus et al. , p. 535. See also Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven and the Problem of Closure: Some Examples from the Middle-Period Chamber Music,” in Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik, p. 270.7. Lockwood, “On Beethoven’s Sketches and Autographs: Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation,” Acta Musicologica 42 : 34.8. Levy, Beethoven’s Compositional Choices, p. 3. Maynard Solomon’s books include Beethoven , Beethoven Essays , and, most recently, Beethoven’s Tagebuch . He has also written on Schubert, Ives, and Freud, and has edited a standard work on Marxist aesthetics. He is currently writing a life of Mozart and a study of the origins of music. In 1990 he was visiting professor of music at Columbia University. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 236 - 253 There are four books that have been advertised in sales catalogues as possessing the inscription ‘Tho. Hobbes’ and having once been owned by Thomas Hobbes. But how confident can we be that they belonged to the famous philosopher? This research note gathers evidence for assessing whether or not this quartet of books were once in the possession of Hobbes of Malmesbury, with particular attention given to a previously undiscussed edition (...) of Josuah Sylvester’s _Devine Weekes and Workes_ sold to the University of Illinois in 1951 as Hobbes’s copy. The evidence is insufficient to connect any of the four books to Hobbes securely, and in at least one case an Oxford undergraduate of the same name emerges as a stronger candidate. This conclusion confirms that the catalogues at Chatsworth are our principal source for knowing which books Hobbes might have read. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam: Eleanor V. Stubley (1960–2017)Roberta LambIt is dusk in the desert—that bewitching hour when the intensity of today’s unrelenting heat suddenly lifts with the hint of a breeze and a promise of darkness. Worn and weary with dust trailing my every movement, I am inexorably drawn forward by the distant sounds of drums and community. I am curious to see what lies ahead, but for one brief minute (...) I look back from where I have come. A single window penetrates the gloom. It opens on a small room, cluttered with mementos celebrating a long history of great artistry. I feel the weight of this history, even at this distance; but what captures my attention is the music making in the only uncluttered corner of the room where four musicians are poring over a recently discovered score of a late Beethoven string quartet. While the music making appears to be motivated and bound by the score, it is as if the musicians are searching for something that lies beyond the score. At times, the searching seems to question the shape or presence of a particular note or melodic motive; other times, it appears to be a quest for “the work,” the string quartet written by Beethoven. As I continue to eavesdrop, I am struck by the way in which the searching in both instances ultimately seems to evolve into a question of ensemble. It is as if the musicians are not only trying to discover the music implied by [End Page 203]the score notations, but also trying to find themselves, trying to get a sense of who they are in relationship to this music. It is a phenomenon that I have encountered frequently in my travels, and I wonder, as the sounds in the distance reenter my consciousness, why of all possibilities the window of my mind opened on this particular room.1Thus, Eleanor V. Stubley began a moving evocation of body, sound, and shifting identities in philosophical argument. It remains my favorite opening of any philosophical essay I have ever read, even though her skill and artistry grew immensely in the subsequent nineteen years. To be honest, the connection with this particular essay comes from my bond with Eleanor at a particular time and particular place, when each of us was establishing our career in a recognized university. We shared a lot through extensive phone calls and my visits to Montreal. While Eleanor was able to travel, we also shared conference spaces together, when I often functioned as her advocate as well as her friend. As I re-read this essay and the others, I remember fondly particular conversations where we discussed ideas and feelings about music, teaching, and life. We shared our health challenges and their effects on our lives and work. We talked about being female in the academy; she shared issues around disability; I around homophobia. I see sources in the endnotes for this essay resulting from those conversations and the ideas Eleanor worked out as we chatted. I find similar memories in her other philosophical essays. I am happy to have contributed to the thinking that came out of this heady time. We were slaying dragons!Eleanor (and I must be personal because we were friends) contributed an original and strongly philosophical base to music education within a handful of articles. She never wrote the book she intended in those earlier years. Instead, she refocused her career outside of music education, partly because she realized she had much to say, do, and create within a limited lifespan and partly because music education did not have room for such brilliance and creativity. In fact, music education gave Eleanor a not so gentle shove. She worked nearly all of the last two decades of her life in the departments of musicology and performance. In addition, she served McGill’s students as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. She knew she had no time to slay music education’s dragons. Even so, Eleanor continued to contribute philosophical columns to the Canadian Music Educator. She wrote regularly for volumes 42–44 (2001–2003) and intermittently before and after those years. These thirteen columns... (shrink)

The Le Quesne test of character compatibility uses pairwise comparisons of characters to detect homoplasy in phylogenetic character data. If a pair of characters fails this test we can conclude that a minimum of a single extra step is required by the pair of characters. The rationale of the Le Quesne test is extended to comparisons of triplets of characters. The triplet homoplasy test can reveal that that there is a minimum of four extra steps across a triplet of (...) characters and thus that there are at least two extra steps associated with one of the characters. The triplet homoplasy test can thus detect higher orders of homoplasy than can be detected by the pairwise Le Quesne test. The possibility of quartet and other higher-order homoplasy tests is discussed. The utility of higher-order homoplasy tests is discussed. It is suggested higher-order homoplasy tests have potential uses analogous to the uses of the Le Quesne test, particularly with respect to data exploration. (shrink)

First published in 1848, Christian Discourses is a quartet of pieces written and arranged in contrasting styles. Parts One and Three, "The Cares of the Pagans" and "Thoughts That Wound from Behind--for Upbuilding," serve as a polemical overture to Kierkegaard's collision with the established order of Christendom. Yet Parts Two and Four, "Joyful Notes in the Strife of Suffering" and "Discourses at the Communion on Fridays," are reassuring affirmations of the joy and blessedness of Christian life in a world (...) of adversity and suffering. Written in ordinary language, the work combines simplicity and inwardness with reflection and presents crucial Christian concepts and presuppositions with unusual clarity. Kierkegaard continued in the pattern that he began with his first pseudonymous esthetic work, Either/Or, by pairing Christian Discourses with The Crisis, an unsigned esthetic essay on contemporary Danish actress Joanne Luise Heiberg. (shrink)