In this text, first published in 1941, British theologian John Oman discusses how the First World War disturbed 'both faith and morals'.

The impacts of climate change are exposing vast stretches of dairy farms in the Waikato region of Aotearoa New Zealand to floods, droughts, and seawater inundation. This article describes how the Waikato ‘hazardscape’—co-created through processes of land dispossession, dairy intensification, and climate change—shapes the vulnerabilities and capacities of different dairy farming groups, specifically women, intergenerational, and Indigenous Māori farmers. Our findings show that while contemporary Māori owned dairy farms are sometimes situated on sub-optimal land as a result of decades of (...) land dispossession, their size and collective ownership structures can support greater flexibility, diversification, and adaptive decision-making processes. The longevity and financial security of many non-Indigenous intergenerational dairy farms means they are also more able to invest in long-term adaptation decisions, albeit often tied to the continuation of dairying. Furthermore, within these farm units, dairy farm women make a significant contribution to adaptation goals, yet their unique adaptation strategies and requirements are often overlooked, particularly in industry-run settings. The article foregrounds how achieving equitable adaptation in Aotearoa New Zealand’s agricultural landscape will require more attention to the gendered impacts of climate change, and the ways in which access to land (or lack thereof) supports or creates barriers to flexible adaptation. We call for more diverse and inclusive platforms for adaptation planning that are receptive to envisioning alternative, more equitable, and ultimately lower risk ways of co-existing with hazards, while managing productive land. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. Food production and farming are a key if troubling component of that challenge. Livestock production accounts for well over half of annual global consumption of antimicrobials, though the contribution of the sector to drug resistance is less clear. As a result, there is an injunction to act in advance of incontrovertible evidence for change. In this paper we engage with the role of market actors in the (...) precautionary regulation of farming practices and AMR threats. The paper takes the UK poultry sector as exemplary of an audit-led process that has, in recent years, achieved impressive reductions in antimicrobial use. Using qualitative interview data with farmers and veterinarians we chart the changing practices that have accompanied this reduction in treatments. We use this analysis to raise some cautions around audit-led systems of regulation. Audits can lock farms and animals into particular versions of farming and animal health; they can elevate harmful compensatory practices (including disinfectant uses); and they can reproduce an actuarial approach to an issue that does not fit the conventions of risk management. The paper presents the considerable successes that have been achieved over a short period of time in a livestock sector, while generating notes of caution concerning the audit-led management of livestock-related AMR threats. (shrink)

The current global ecological crises have, inter alia, led to an upsurge in massive migrations, food crises, diseases, pandemics, increased conflict and war especially in African societies. Most of those affected are the small farmers in rural communities who depend on agriculture. This crisis has not only raised concerns about the extent of the damage humans and human activities are causing to the natural environment but has also ignited discussions about the urgent necessity for a change in human behavior and (...) our obligations towards a new agrarian philosophy. In this chapter, I argue that Henry Odera Oruka’s Parental Earth Ethics could be adopted as a new principle of global justice and for grounding global environmental ethics. This principle invites us towards rethinking ecological fairness and global justice. Specifically, I opine that Oruka’s Parental Earth Ethics could be a veritable resource in our search for: (i) promoting global justice in the use and equal distribution of wealth and world resources for the common good and security of all, and (ii) global environmental ethics. It is basically driven by the ethical principle of the human minimum, which ought to inspire us humans to be more ethically and politically responsible in their use and distribution of world resources for the good and security of all. (shrink)

This is a review essay of Lagasnerie, Judge and Punish and Fassin, The Will to Punish. It explores the way that these two books challenge conventional thinking about the relationship between crime and punishment.

The fifth book in the series offers an historical and conceptual account of the criminal law, as it has developed in England and spread to common law jurisdictions around the world. It traces how and why criminal law has come to be accorded with a central role in securing civil order in modernity, and justifies who and what should be treated as criminal under the law. Farmer argues that the emergence of the modern state in which criminal law is (...) recognized as an instrument of government is a result of the distinct body of rules which have emerged from the modern criminal law. (shrink)

Dudgeon, William (1705/6–1743), freethinker and philosopher, is of unknown origins. A tenant farmer who resided at Lennel Hill Farm, near Coldstream, Berwickshire, he was one of several philosophers active in the borders area of Scotland during this period. Other figures in this group include Andrew Baxter, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and most importantly David Hume.....

PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy addresses the very issue of political correctness and the current skirmishes in the culture wars. It includes statements from many of our leading contemporary public intellectuals, including Joan Wallach Scott, Michael Be;rube;, Bruce Robbins, Henry Giroux, and Gerald Graff. The collection marks a watershed in the debate about "pc" in that it presents serious considerations and analyses of the factors, causes, and consequences of the culture wars. Carefully examining the construction of (...) "pc," PC Wars analyses political correctness by focusing on the mass media, class politics, and the ideology of managerial democracy. It places the disputes around "pc" in the context of contemporary developments in critical and cultural theory and the current backlash against theory, manifested in the recent attacks on Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. The book also scrutinizes the undercurrents of anti-intellectualism and anti-professionalism which have tended to create a fertile ground for the "pc" hysteria. Offering much more than slogans and slinging arrows, PC Wars provides a spirited and critical look at the reaction, ideology, and political forces that have coalesced around the term. Contributors: Michael Be;rube;, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Frank Farmer, Henry Giroux, Gerald Graff, Darlene Hantzis and Devoney Looser, John S. Howard and James M. Lang, Tom Lewis, James Neilson, Christopher Newfield, Richard Ohmann, Burce Robbins, Barry Sarchett, Joan W. Scott, Michael Sprinker, Jeffrey Williams. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classics and Complexity in Walden’s “Spring” M. D. USHER In 1843, two years before Henry Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond, the Fitchburg Railroad laid down tracks through the woods near the Pond for its line connecting Boston to Fitchburg. The original Fitchburg Line, at 54 miles long, was, until 2010, the longest run in the present -day MBTA Commuter Rail system. And it is one (...) of the oldest railways in New England. By 1900, fortunes swelled and the Fitchburg’s Hoosac Tunnel Line took passengers and goods westward toward Chicago. The Lake Champlain Route connected Boston to points north like Burlington, Vermont. (See Figure 1.) arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Figure 1 (left): Advertisement for the Hoosac Tunnel Route in The New England Magazine (Vol. 21, Issue 6, February, 1900). Figure 2 (right): Herbert Wendell Gleason. The Fitchburg Railroad and Walden Pond in winter, Concord, Mass., March 24, 1920. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library. The Railroad was literally a fixture in Thoreau’s landscape. Its tracks pass remarkably close to Walden Pond (Figure 2), and the Fitchburg Line—both its reality and the specter of it—is practically a character in his writing: “I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link,” Thoreau writes in “Sounds,” a chapter of Walden that contains what must be one of the most picturesque odes (or laments) to rail travel and commerce in all of American literature: The engine’s whistle, Thoreau complains, pierces the still silence of his idyllic retreat like a screaming hawk circling a farmer’s field, its billows of steam an ominous harbinger of “this travelling demi-god, this cloud-compeller.”1 Thoreau’s frequent, customary walks into Concord along the railroad tracks took him through a heavily excavated stretch of the line known as the Deep Cut, to which he returned again and again each year in early spring, even after leaving the cabin, to observe and to record his observations. The leaf-shaped sand flows and trickling surface erosion caused by melting frost in the banks of the Deep Cut are elaborately described in Thoreau’s chapter in Walden entitled “Spring,” what Laurence Buell calls the “high point of Thoreau’s epic.”2 And yet, in spite of the universal acclaim of this passage as a literary tour de force, it has not received the full attention it deserves. What warrants fresh consideration first and foremost is “Spring”’s deep-rootedness in classical sources. Many classical influences, allusions, and a good deal of etymological word play have gone so far unnoticed. The chapter is also important because it describes, by intimation, what contemporary scientists now call emergence. Emergent phenomena are properties or behaviors that arise in systems as a result of complex, dynamic interactions amongst constituent parts, including changes to a system brought about by human interventions3—not only, e.g., climate change and wildfires, but also traffic patterns and terrorist networks; kidney function in the body; the rings of Saturn. As he tries to capture the essence of the 114 classics and complexity in WALDEN’s “spring” Deep Cut and interpret its significance, Thoreau adumbrates this concept, but also grapples ingeniously with broader issues of perennial concern—the relationship of Nature to Culture, for example, of Wilderness to Civilization, of Science to the Humanities—making “Spring” not only a probing work of eco-criticism and environmental philosophy, but of scientific reflection and poetic experiment as well. In short, Thoreau’s “Spring” is that rare work of classical reception that transmits both literary and scientific insight. Perhaps at this point, in lieu of accolades, it is best to let Thoreau start speaking for himself. What I offer in the following pages is a commentary on the Deep Cut passage from “Spring.” Classical references and aspects of systems theory will be explained and contextualized as they emerge, as it were, from Thoreau’s text. The whole chapter corresponds to pages 289–308 in Cramer’s edition of Walden—26 paragraphs all told, of which only the relevant ones are printed and annotated here. (Transitions and extraneous material are briefly summarized, as needed, in paraphrase... (shrink)

Heartbreaking stories and pictures documenting the phenomenon of populations displaced by climate change—homes, neighborhoods, livelihoods, and cultures lost. "Our job is to tell stories we have heard and to bear witness to what we have seen. The science was already there when we started in 2004, but we wanted to emphasize the human dimension, especially for those most vulnerable." —Guy-Pierre Chomette, Collectif Argos We have all seen photographs of neighborhoods wrecked and abandoned after a hurricane, of dry, cracked terrain that (...) was once fertile farmland, of islands wiped out by a tsunami. But what happens to the people who live in these areas? According to the United Nations, some 150 million people will become climate refugees by 2050. The journalists and photographers of Collectif Argos have spent four years seeking out the first wave of people displaced by the consequences of climate change. Using the massive 2,500-page report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as their guide, these photographers and writers pinpointed nine locales around the world in which global warming has had a measureable impact. In Climate Refugees, they take us to these places—from the dust bowl that was once Lake Chad to the melting permafrost in Alaska—offering a first-hand look in words and photographs at the devastating effects of rising global temperatures on the daily lives of ordinary people. Climate Refugees shows us damage wrought to homes and livelihoods by rapid warming near the Arctic; rising sea levels that threaten the island nations of Tuvulu, the Maldives, and Halligen; farmers displaced by the desert's advance in Chad and China; floods that wash away life in Bangladesh; and Hurricane Katrina evacuees in shelters far away from their New Orleans neighborhoods. Added to the devastating environmental effect of climate change is the immeasurable and irretrievable loss of ethnic and cultural diversity that occurs when vulnerable local cultures disperse. It is this often forgotten and tragic consequence of global warming that Collectif Argos painstakingly documents. Collectif Argos Guy-Pierre Chomette Guillaume Collanges Hélène David Jérômine Derigny Cédric Faimali Donatien Garnier Eléonore Henry de Frahan Aude Raux Laurent Weyl Jacques Windenberger. (shrink)

"One of the outstanding authorities on the early days of the Republic, Saul K. Padover offers in this volume a generous sampling of the letters, essays, speeches, discourses, and personal documents--many of them previously unpublished--of the men who made America. Included are extensive selections from the papers and speeches of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. There are also copious extracts from the private and public utterances of secondary, but important, figures of the (...) founding days--Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, William Paterson, Benjamin Rush, George Wythe, and many others. A number of the speeches made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 are given in full, and several of the important debates are reproduced. John Dickinson's Letters from an American Farmer in Pennsylvania appear in these pages as well as many of Alexander Hamilton's famous and brief opinions. Also included are John Hancock's speech on the Boston Massacre; Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia; James Madison's Memorial against Religious Assessments; two of the most important of John Marshall's Supreme Court decisions (Marbury vs. Madison and McCulloch vs. Maryland); Robert Morris' Letters on Finance; John Taylor's paper On Aristocracy, and William Paterson's Plan for a Constitution. Taken together, these writings offer in one volume a complete picture of the thinking, the debate, the legal maneuvers, the compromises, the manners, and the morals of the American nation's earliest days. The book provides a sound basic appreciation of the atmosphere in which the Founding Fathers worked and planned and debated with one another. All the many counter-currents that contributed to the building of the Constitution, the stresses to which the young nation was subjected, the rebellion that continued to seethe, the moral climate of the days--these are all recreated in the speeches and writings of America's first patriots. Dr. Padover has bound the selections together with enlightening commentary that enables the reader to understand the exact circumstances of each utterance and brings the particular work into historical perspective."--Jacket. (shrink)

Multisensory stimulation has been shown to alter the sense of body-ownership. Given that perceived similarity between one’s own body and those of others is crucial for social cognition, we investigated whether multisensory stimulation can lead participants to experience ownership over a hand of different skin colour. Results from two studies using introspective, behavioural and physiological methods show that, following synchronous visuotactile stimulation, participants can experience body-ownership over hands that seem to belong to a different racial group. Interestingly, a baseline measure (...) of implicit racial bias did not predict whether participants would experience the RHI, but the overall strength of experienced body-ownership seemed to predict the participants’ post-illusion implicit racial bias with those who experienced a stronger RHI showing a lower bias. These findings suggest that multisensory experiences can override strict ingroup/outgroup distinctions based on skin colour and point to a key role for sensory processing in social cognition. (shrink)

We propose, following Clark, that generative models also play a central role in the perception and interpretation of linguistic signals. The data explanation approach provides a rationale for the role of prediction in language processing and unifies a number of phenomena, including multiple-cue integration, adaptation effects, and cortical responses to violations of linguistic expectations.

The Phenomenal Self (PS) is widely considered to be dependent on body representations, whereas the Narrative Self (NS) is generally thought to rely on abstract cognitive representations. The concept of the Bodily Social Self (BSS) might play an important role in explaining how the high level cognitive self-representations enabling the NS might emerge from the bodily basis of the PS. First, the phenomenal self (PS) and narrative self (NS), are briefly examined. Next, the BSS is defined and its potential for (...) explaining aspects of social cognition is explored. The minimal requirements for a BSS are considered, before reviewing empirical evidence regarding the development of the BSS over the first year of life. Finally, evidence on the involvement of the body in social distinctions between self and other is reviewed to illustrate how the BSS is affected by both the bottom up effects of multisensory stimulation and the top down effects of social identification. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that lack of access to the fruits of modern medicine and the science that informs it is an important and neglected topic within bioethics and medical ethics. This is especially clear to those working in what are now termed 'resource-poor settings'- to those working, in plain language, among populations living in dire poverty. We draw on our experience with infectious diseases in some of the poorest communities in the world to interrogate the central imperatives of (...) bioethics and medical ethics. AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria are the three leading infectious killers of adults in the world today. Because each disease is treatable with already available therapies, the lack of access to medical care is widely perceived in heavily disease-burdened areas as constituting an ethical and moral dilemma. In settings in which research on these diseases are conducted but there is little in the way of therapy, there is much talk of first world diagnostics and third world therapeutics. Here we call for the 'resocialising' of ethics. To resocialise medical ethics will involve using the socialising disciplines to contextualise fully ethical dilemmas in settings of poverty and, a related gambit, the systematic participation of the destitute sick. Clinical research across steep gradients also needs to be linked with the interventions that are demanded by the poor and otherwise marginalised. We conclude that medical ethics must grapple more persistently with the growing problem posed by the yawning 'outcome gap' between rich and poor. (shrink)

Summary This paper examines the entomological investigations carried out by the French naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau during a series of insect epidemics that ravaged France in the second half of the eighteenth century.1 This article began as a paper for Pamela H. Smith's ?Knowledge in Transit? graduate seminar. I would like to thank the participants of that seminar for comments and feedback. I would also like to thank Pamela Smith, Carl Wennerlind, Anya Zilberstein, Christopher L. Brown, Charly Coleman, Matthew (...) Jones, Peter Walker and Melissa Morris for their suggestions and comments on this paper. Finally, thanks to Vanessa Copeland for invaluable assistance in the archives in Paris. The author acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. It shows how a particularly fierce invasion of caterpillars in the Angoumois region in the 1760s sparked theoretical debates about the nature of animal generation between academic naturalists, farmers, provincial officials and amateur naturalists. As part of a wider effort to reform agricultural production in France, Duhamel du Monceau sought to eliminate vernacular understandings of insect generation and to reform local pest control techniques. In his attempt to develop a body of pest-control knowledge grounded in the systematic observation of insect generation, however, Duhamel du Monceau relied heavily on the efforts of amateur naturalists. The paper shows how he mobilized a nation-wide network of entomological observers, and collected specimens and observational reports from farmers, improving landlords and local officials throughout France. Some informants did not only act as ?mere? observers, but formulated their own causal claims about insect generation that sometimes contradicted those of their metropolitan counterpart. Finally, it demonstrates that a ?patriotic? discourse that joined agricultural improvement and civic virtue provided a powerful impetus for the formation of collaborative relationships between academic naturalists, state officials and enlightened agricultural improvers. (shrink)

First, to what level of quality can medical ethics a spire, if it ignores callous discrimination in medrcal practice against large populations of the innocent poor? Second, how effective can such theories be in addressing the critical issues of medical and clinical ethics if they are unable to contribute to the closing of the gap of sociomedical disparity?Marcio Fabri dos Anjos, Medical Ethics in the Developing World: A Liberation Theology Perspective.

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

Medicine and its allied health sciences have for too long been peripherally involved in work on human rights. Fifty years ago, the door to greater involvement was opened by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which underlined social and economic rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in (...) the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”. (shrink)

Church's simple theory of types is a system of higher-order logic in which functions are assumed to be total. We present in this paper a version of Church's system called PF in which functions may be partial. The semantics of PF, which is based on Henkin's general-models semantics, allows terms to be nondenoting but requires formulas to always denote a standard truth value. We prove that PF is complete with respect to its semantics. The reasoning mechanism in PF for partial (...) functions corresponds closely to mathematical practice, and the formulation of PF adheres tightly to the framework of Church's system. (shrink)

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals. Captured across the (...) nation from the northeast to the southwest, the images document the last generation of musicians who learned to play without the influence of recorded sound, as well as some of the pioneers of Chicago's R & B scene and the first years of amplified instruments. The best visual representation of American roots music performance during the Depression era, Hard Luck Blues features photographs by Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and others. Photographer and image researcher Rich Remsberg breathes life into the images by providing contextual details about the persons and events captured, in some cases drawing on interviews with the photographers' subjects. Also included are a foreword by author Nicholas Dawidoff and an afterword by music historian Henry Sapoznik. Published in association with the Library of Congress. (shrink)

This article focuses on the question of the function of imitation and whether current accounts of imitative function are consistent with our knowledge about imitation's origins. We first review theories of imitative origin concluding that empirical evidence suggests that imitation arises from domain‐general learning mechanisms. Next, we lay out a selective account of function that allows normative functions to be ascribed to learned behaviours. We then describe and review four accounts of the function of imitation before evaluating the relationship between (...) the claim that imitation arises out of domain‐general learning mechanisms and theories of the function of imitation. (shrink)

We establish natural criteria under which normally iterable premice are iterable for stacks of normal trees. Let Ω be a regular uncountable cardinal. Let m < ω and M be an m-sound premouse and Σ be...

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non‐ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context (...) and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing. (shrink)

The k-provability for an axiomatic system A is to determine, given an integer k 1 and a formula in the language of A, whether or not there is a proof of in A containing at most k lines. In this paper we develop a unification-theoretic method for investigating the k-provability problem for Parikh systems, which are first-order axiomatic systems that contain a finite number of axiom schemata and a finite number of rules of inference. We show that the k-provability problem (...) for a Parikh system reduces to a unification problem that is essentially the unification problem for second-order terms. By solving various subproblems of this unification problem , we solve the k- probability problem for a variety of Parikh systems, including several formulations of Peano arithmetic. Our method for investigating the k-provability problem employs algorithms that compute and characterize unifiers. We give some examples of how these algorithms can be used to solve complexity problems other than the k-provability problem. (shrink)

This book examines the relationship between legal tradition and national identity to offer a critical and historical perspective on the study of criminal law. It develops a radically different approach to questions of responsibility and subjectivity, and was among the first studies to combine appreciation of the institutional and historical context in which criminal law is practised with a critical understanding of the law itself. Applying contemporary social theory to the particular case of nineteenth-century Scottish law, Lindsay Farmer is (...) able to develop a critique of modern criminal law theory in general. He traces the development of the modern characteristics of criminal law and legal order, tracing the relationship between legal practice and national culture, and showing how contemporary criminal law theory fundamentally misrepresents the character of modern criminal justice. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

This paper presents an algorithm that, given a finite set E of pairs of second-order monadic terms, returns a finite set U of ‘substitution schemata’ such that a substitution unifies E iff it is an instance of some member of U . Moreover, E is unifiable precisely if U is not empty. The algorithm terminates on all inputs, unlike the unification algorithms for second-order monadic terms developed by G. Huet and G. Winterstein. The substitution schemata in U use expressions which (...) represent sets of terms that differ only in how many times designated strings of function constants follow themselves. The substitution schemata may contain unresolved ‘identity restrictions’; consequently, the members of U generally do not characterize all the unifiers of E in a completely explicit way. The algorithm is particularly useful for investigating the complexity of formal proofs. (shrink)

Although it is often said that economics is too much like physics, to a physicist economics is not at all like physics. The difference is in the scientific methods of the two fields: theoretical economics uses a top down approach in which hypothesis and mathematical rigor come first and empirical confirmation comes second. Physics, in contrast, embraces the bottom up ‘experimental philosophy’ of Newton, in which ‘hypotheses are inferred from phenomena, and afterward rendered general by induction’. Progress would accelerates if (...) economics were to truly make empirical verification the ultimate arbiter of theories, which would force it to open up to alternative approaches. (shrink)

The prevalence of psychosocial distress is increasing in the United States. At the same time, the American default lifestyle has steadily displaced household food production with industrial food production, despite increased cultural interest in cooking. An important focus of cooking research to date has been on cooking’s association with nutrition and dietary quality. Less focus has been placed on how cooking might foster the qualities that allow for mitigation of psychosocial distress and promote well-being. Rooted in its evolutionary role in (...) the human experience, cooking requires skills and knowledge that have the capacity to encourage aspects of well-being as described by Seligman as flourishing. Evidence for a beneficial role of cooking in psychosocial health exists, but the exploration is limited, potentially due to lack of a theoretical context to explain these benefits. From this perspective, we review the current literature showing the application of Seligman’s prominent well-being model, Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (PERMA), to cooking, defined as the activity related to the preparation of food or a meal. We propose that the PERMA model as applied to cooking may function as a theoretical framework to explore psychosocial outcomes associated with cooking. Broader application of this approach may also help to further the application of positive psychology in the developing literature around psychosocial health and nutrition-related chronic diseases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction:Developing Health Care in Severely Resource-Constrained SettingsPaul Farmer and Sadath SayeedThis symposium of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics catalogues the experiences of health care providers working in resource-poor settings, with stories written by those on the frontlines of global health. Two commentaries by esteemed scholars Renee Fox and Byron and Mary-Jo Good accompany the narratives, helping situate the lived experiences of global health practitioners within the frameworks of sociology (...) and medical anthropology respectively.The burgeoning interest in global health among students, health science trainees, clinical practitioners, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and government officials is often linked with substantial moral claims. People working in global health often start with the rhetorical premise that each and every human being, regardless of economic, social, or political circumstances that lie beyond his or her control, deserves equal access to quality health care services. This is a bold position at risk of trivialization, in part because the sentiment is so commonplace among global health equity activists.Despite this relatively recent global outpouring of solidarity and concern, billions of poor people still lack access to basic health services. All too often, interventions that perpetuate existing trade practices and market economics are promoted, usually to the detriment of the poor. As our good friend and colleague Arthur Kleinman warns:The irrelevance of ethics can be seen when considering universal ethical formulations of justice and equity that do not begin with the local moral conditions of poor people, those experiencing the systematic injustice of higher disease rates and fewer health-care resources because of their positioning at the bottom of local social structures of power.(1999, p.72)If we are serious about reducing health disparities globally, we must be prepared to mobilize resources in Africa just as we would in the United States or in Europe. If we fetishize cost-effective (read: low-cost) interventions for the poor, we must ask whether we use the same metrics in other situations. In other words, we must always strive to address the fundamental structural and social causes of health inequity.We believe that global health must avoid the "iron cage of rationality," to use sociologist Max Weber's words. One unanticipated consequence of the growth of global health as a field is that the "audit culture"—which encourages accountability and effectiveness—can at times reinforce power differentials between donors (whether government agencies or multilateral foundations) and their intended beneficiaries. Agendas are often set not by community members but by global health leaders who rarely demonstrate sustained commitments to a local community. [End Page 73]As the guest editors of this issue, we hope to recapture the soul of global health work through the art of storytelling. Narratives, even when presented as raw and unrefined as many within this issue, remind us of the immense challenges—both programmatic and moral—involved in this work. The profound scarcity of resources available to health providers in poor countries forces ethical questions on doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, and other health care workers, who make difficult choices every day about what to do with the few resources they have. These are the ethical dilemmas of mortal dramas at their most dire. Global health work demands of its practitioners an alternate mode of audit than academic methodologies can provide. Narratives return us to the basic human commitments that led many of us to this work, and they remind us to use words like equality and justice meaningfully.The narratives that follow offer unmitigated perspectives on the working lives of global health practitioners. They highlight the translation of the moral and programmatic challenges of health care delivery into real choices: for example, between a visiting surgeon's desire to treat a patient and his capacity (or really incapacity) to provide follow-up care. They acknowledge the necessity of interdisciplinary cooperation in resource-constrained settings, as well as the difficulties in collaborating across cultures and continents. Most importantly, they make the claim that a newborn in distress in a tent in Port-au-Prince merits the same resources and attention as one in Boston, and that his or her death merits the same indignation. They demonstrate the radical solidarity inherent in the... (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 110-113.

Moral philosophers generally regard pacifism with disdain. Forty years ago, Jan Narveson called it a "bizarre and vaguely ludicrous" doctrine, and that assessment is, in some form or other, still common today. Few contemporary ethicists self-identify as pacifists, and in peace and war studies, just war theory is now the standard. That standard perpetuates the stereotype of pacifism as naïve and wrongheaded. The only way to make nonviolent commitments respectable under the prevailing view is by subsuming them under just war (...) logic, as in John Lango's recent appeal for nonviolent interventionism. In brief, just war theory dominates the discourse. What makes this dominance problematic is that just war theory systematically misconstrues and caricatures the pacifist position. Pacifist commitments can only be properly understood when the lenses of just war theory are put aside. Only then is it possible to understand why pacifism appears ridiculous in the literature. Straw men usually do. (shrink)

Both in his preoccupation with practical ethics and in the positions that he took, Thomas of Chobham generally resembled other theologians who studied in Paris at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. On first consideration, however, his statements concerning married women appear quite eccentric. Thomas argued in his Manual for Confessors that women should employ persuasion, feminine enticements, and even deceit in their attempts to influence and correct the moral and economic behavior of their (...) husbands. (shrink)