The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate (...) students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the first-hand accounts of everyday people, including city dwellers and farmers, businessmen and bankers, artisans and merchants, artists and their patrons, politicians and their constituents. Original texts make the American, French, and Industrial revolutions vividly contemporary. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library T100404 With a half-title. Anonymous. By P. P. F. J. H. Le Mercier de la Rivière. Possibly printed in Paris (or the Low Countries). Londres: chez Jean Nourse; & se trouve à Paris, chez Desaint, 1767. [2], vii, [1],511, [1]p.; 4°. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 58-77 [Access article in PDF] The Ethics of Care and the Private Woodwind Lesson Nancy Nourse Jeremy's family was getting ready for the concert. It wasn't that he was tired of watching his father conduct. He loved his father and he loved the concerts. But people were always asking Jeremy the same question and that question didn't seem to have an (...) answer....They weren't even inside the concert hall before the doorman smiled at Jeremy and asked, "Well, young man, do you think you'll be a conductor like your father?" 1Children like Jeremy, situated in the world of established music-making, are routinely subjected to stereotypical expectations, often not seen for who they are themselves, but for the qualities of their situatedness. Jeremy, as a result, found himself continually bombarded with this question which spokein fortissimo tones that the inquirer was impressed by the stature of his maestro father, but really did not seem to care to see the young boy as a person in his own right. The dreaded question, that he so frequently faced, festered in him, shouting of his own lack of personhood in its flagrant assumptions. But what voice did he have? After the concert: a lady in a long gown and a huge strand of pearls came in next [backstage]...."So this is your little son," she cried. Jeremy blushed as she kissed the top of his head and squeezed his face so that he looked like a fish. "Tell me, young man, are you going to be a conductor like your father?" 2Of course stories such as Jeremy's in which individuals suffer because others have not been truly caring, are not unique to the world of music. Such thoughtless pleasantries are nothing more than symptoms of the widespread absence of knowing and care experienced in day-to-day living. While Patricia Benner and Suzanne Gordon suggest that there are few people who would wish to be perceived as uncaring persons, there are often spoken platitudes about care, especially about large institutions, that seemshallow and meaningless. 3 Take, for example, a hospital whose slogan claims [End Page 58] it is caring, but is only really interested in research or profit, or the doctor who quadruple books patients for appointments all the while insisting that he really does care about his patients. The obstacles to true understanding about care include the view that care is merely a sentiment that need be expressed, but not the thoughtful planning out of means to create ample opportunities to enact deeds of caring. 4 In day-to-day situations of modern living with big corporations, governments, and institutions, there may be individuals who claim to care, but there are no features in these organizations' blueprints that ensure and take responsibility for providing care. Care must extend beyond sentiment into action.In the name of superior curriculum and specialist teachers and programs,tiny rural schools were abandoned and students were moved into bigger and bigger schools. As schools and educational institutions have greatly increased in size over the past century, teachers have found it more and more difficult to connect to the larger and larger number of students found on their class rosters. Beyond their class lists how can teachers really be responsible for the sea of faces for whom they cannot even supply names? In The Students are Watching, Theodore and Nancy Sizer ask: Do [current] conditions in the school allow each student to be known well?...Anonymity is the curse of good teaching and inevitably contributes to corner-cutting. If no one knows the students in a high school, it is easy for them to drift through. 5Benner and Gordon cite the shop program in a vocational school as an ideal setting in which teachers have the opportunity to develop caring relationships with their students since the settings are informal, class time is significantly extended, and the teachers work with the same students over several years. 6 Special education teachers as well usually... (shrink)

How should judges decide which linguistic canons to apply in interpreting statutes? One important answer looks to the inside of the legislative process: Follow the rules that lawmakers contemplate. A different answer, based on the “ordinary meaning” doctrine, looks to the outside: Follow the rules that would guide an ordinary person’s understanding of the legal text. Empirical scholars have studied statutory interpretation from the inside—revealing what rules drafters follow—but never from the outside. We offer a novel framework for empirically testing (...) interpretive canons “from the outside,” recruiting 4,500 people from the United States, as well as a sample of U.S. law students, to evaluate hypothetical scenarios that correspond to each canon’s triggering conditions. -/- The empirical findings provide crucial evidence about which traditional canons “ordinary meaning” actually supports, and they carry several further implications. First, interpretive canons are not a closed set. We discovered new canons that are not yet reflected as legal canons, including one we term the “non-binary gender canon” and another the “quantifier domain restriction canon.” Second, the results support a new understanding of the ordinary meaning doctrine itself, as one focused on the ordinary interpretation of rules, as opposed to the traditional focus on “ordinary language” generally. Third, many of the canons reflect that ordinary people interpret rules with an intuitive anti-literalism. This anti-literalism finding challenges textualist assumptions about ordinary meaning, as well as offering a theme for researching other currently unrecognized canons. Most broadly, we hope the Essay initiates a new research program in empirical legal interpretation. If ordinary meaning is relevant to legal interpretation, interpreters should look to evidence of how ordinary people actually understand legal rules. We see our experiments as a first step in that new direction. (shrink)

Textualism is now the Court’s lingua franca. In response, some have proposed a “progressive textualism,” defined by the use of traditional textualist methods to reach politically progressive results. This Article explores a different kind of “progressive textualism.” Rather than starting with the desired policy outcome—politically progressive or conservative—we begin from one of modern textualism’s central values: A commitment to “democratic” interpretation. As Justice Barrett argues, this commitment views textualists as “agents of the people” who “approach language from the perspective of (...) an ordinary English speaker.” Textualists thereby claim to promote democracy by interpreting law consistently with what it communicates to the ordinary public. However, recent empirical studies reveal discrepancies between textualist interpretive commitments and how ordinary people understand legal texts. These discrepancies undermine claims that textualists’ methodology is committed to democratic interpretation. -/- A textualism centered on democratic interpretation would be methodologically more progressive if it centered facts rather than fictions about how ordinary people interpret language. It would recognize that people understand legal language in light of linguistic “(co)text” and “(con)text,” and sometimes nonliterally; they often understand ambiguous terms in law to have legal, not ordinary, meanings; and their understanding of law is informed by its apparent purpose and sometimes by interpretive rules that are conventionally justified on normative grounds. In contrast, current textualism is often methodologically regressive, crafting a fictional “ordinary person” more closely connected to ideological policy goals than facts about ordinary language comprehension. (shrink)

Perhaps the most fundamental principle of legal interpretation is the presumption that terms should be given their “ordinary” (i.e., general, non-technical) meanings. This principle is a central tenet of modern textualism. Textualists believe a universal presumption of ordinary meaning follows from their theory’s core commitment: A law should be interpreted consistently with what its text communicates to the ordinary public. This Article begins from this textualist premise, empirically examining what legal texts communicate to the public. Five original empirical studies (N (...) = 4,365) reveal a surprising finding: Ordinary people consider genre carefully and regularly take terms in law to communicate technical legal meanings, not ordinary ones. -/- This discovery carries implications for legal interpretation’s theory and practice. Modern textualists—especially at the Supreme Court—justify their theory through “democratic,” fair notice, and rule-of-law appeals to ordinary people. But the empirical studies reveal that fidelity to ordinary people does not imply an unwavering commitment to ordinary meaning. Instead, it requires interpreters to also look to technical meanings. On a practical level, the results support a new presumption of legal meaning and ground a new challenge to textualism’s claim to promote fair notice. As a case study, we consider Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which held that both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are prohibited forms of sex discrimination. The Article’s empirics and theory offer a new justification of the Court’s landmark decision. (shrink)

J.S. Mill's plural voting proposal in Considerations on Representative Government presents political theorists with a puzzle: the elitist proposal that some individuals deserve a greater voice than others seems at odds with Mill's repeated arguments for the value of full participation in government. This essay looks at Mill's arguments for plural voting, arguing that, far from being motivated solely by elitism, Mill's account is actually driven by a commitment to both competence and participation. It goes on to argue that, for (...) Mill, much of the value of political participation lies in its unique ability to educate the participants. That ability to educate is not, however, a product of participation alone; rather, for Mill, the true educative benefits of participation obtain only when competence and participation work together in the political sphere. Plural voting, then, is a mechanism for allowing Mill to take advantage of the educative benefits that arise from the intersection of competence and participation. (shrink)

J M Tarrant; J. Wilson and B. Cowell on the Democratic Myth, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 123–127, https://doi.org.

Thomas J.J. Altizer is one of the most important theologians of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and all radical theology must pass through and be conversant with his work and the historical significance of his earlier contributions. This chapter presents Altizer’s essential ideas in a straightforward and accessible manner and provides a guide for the beginning reader.

The texts collected in this volume, which was originally published in 1969, contain Herder's most original and stimulating ideas on politics, history and language. They had for the most part not been previously available in English. In his introduction, Professor Barnard analyses the basic premises of Herder's political thought against the background of the Enlightenment. He examines Herder's concepts of language, community and culture, his theory of historical interaction, and his approach to the problem of change and progress. Finally, he (...) provides a brief comparative analysis of traditionalist thought following the French Revolution, showing how substantive writers like Burke differed from Herder despite the close similarity of political vocabulary. (shrink)