In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionAnna Mastroianni (bio) and Jeffrey Kahn (bio)In this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, we subject the work of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to examination from many angles. Nearly one year has passed since the release of the Committee’s final report and recommendations, and it seems an appropriate time to invite discourse and reflection on the influence and impact of the Committee (...) and its efforts. Our intent is to advance understanding of the Committee and its work, its place in the evolution of bioethics and public policy, as well as the broader legacy of restoring trust in the conduct of human subjects research.In 1993, President Clinton and Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary initiated an investigation of America’s involvement in radiation experiments on its citizens during the Cold War. The investigation resulted in the appointment of the Committee in January 1994. Some issues raised by these radiation experiments were brought to the attention of the nation by revelations contained in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of newspaper stories about plutonium injections carried out by the government on allegedly unsuspecting subjects during the Cold War. The Committee faced a broad mandate, which included piecing together the history of Cold War radiation experiments and human subjects research, as well as recommending remedies for past wrongs and mechanisms to ensure that such wrongs could not be repeated in the future.This issue of the Journal consists of articles and accompanying commentaries on historical, philosophical, policy, and political aspects of the Committee’s work that are important to bioethics. This collection of articles, authored by Committee members, staff, and leading scholars, is designed to paint a picture of the breadth and complexity of the Committee’s efforts and to provide context and to stimulate discussion of significant issues.In the first article, Ruth Faden provides her unique perspective as chair of the Committee. She goes beyond the necessary overview and background of the Committee to reflect on the impact and meaning of the Committee’s work to bioethics and public policy.Much of the Committee’s effort was directed at gathering and uncovering information about the history of Cold War radiation experiments, an endeavor fairly foreign to bioethics but critically important to understanding the context in which to make moral judgments about the past. Jonathan Moreno and Susan Lederer discuss how the Committee’s work changed some of the traditional views of the history of research ethics. The commentary by Allan Brandt and Lara Freidenfelds further illuminates the value of understanding this recovered history. [End Page ix]In making moral judgments about the past, the Committee confronted complex questions about how to assess wrongdoing and the culpability of the government and its agents. Allen Buchanan explains why this was such a difficult but crucial task and how the Committee worked through some of the answers to these questions. His discussion illustrates the challenges to consensus in the committee decision-making process described in Ruth Macklin’s article in this issue on committees and consensus. Tom Beauchamp analyzes the frameworks for making retrospective moral judgments developed by two committees, the Advisory Committee and the University of California at San Francisco Ad Hoc Fact Finding Committee on World War II Human Radiation Experiments, and critiques their applications of the frameworks in the case of the plutonium injection experiments.The Committee recognized that in order to prevent wrongs seen in the past from occurring in the future, it would be necessary to understand the human subjects protections now in place. Nancy Kass and Jeremy Sugarman discuss the results of the Committee’s attempts to measure the operation and effectiveness of the current system for protection of human subjects. Paul Appelbaum comments on the relevance and value of the Committee’s empirical projects to contemporary human subjects research.The Committee’s work, and the products of any commission’s work, must be viewed partly in light of the place of commissions in bioethics scholarship and policymaking. Appointed commissions can have significant impacts on scholarly and public thinking, policymaking, and future direction, and bring high visibility to issues. It is important to realize that the conclusions of the Committee... (shrink)

: During the nearly 10 years since its introduction, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has been used predominantly to avoid giving birth to a child with identified genetic disease. Recently, PGD was used by a couple not only to test IVF-created embryos for genetic disease, but also to test for a nondisease trait related to immune compatibility with a child in the family in need of an hematopoetic stem cell transplant. This article describes the case, raises some ethical and policy issues, (...) highlights gaps in U.S. policy, and finally makes some recommendations for addressing advancing genetic and reproductive technologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Books ReceivedThe Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China. By G.E.R. Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 175. Price not given.The Art of the Han Essay: Wang Fu's Ch'ien-Fu Lun. By Anne Behnke Kinney. Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1990. Pp. xi + 154. Paper $10.00.The Autobiography of Jamgön Kongtrul: A Gem of Many Colors. By Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrön (...) Thayé and translated by Richard Barron (Chökyi Nyima). Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2003. Pp. xxii + 549. Price not given.Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Times, and Poetry of Saigyō. By William R. LaFleur. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. xiii + 173. Paper $14.95.Becoming the Compassion Buddha: Tantric Mahamudra for Everyday Life. By Lama Thubten Yeshe, edited by Robina Courtin, and foreword by Geshe Lhundub Sopa. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. xi + 194. Paper $14.95.Between Two Worlds East and West: An Autobiography. By J. N. Mohanty. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 134. Hardcover RS 525.00.The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ. Edited by Roman Malek, S.V.D. Sankt Augustin, Germany: Institut Monumenta Serica and China-Zentrum; and Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag, 2002. Pp. 391. EUR 40.00.Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis. By Volker Scheid. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 407. Hardcover $69.95. Paper $23.95.Confucian Feminist: Memoirs of Zeng Baosun (1893-1978). Translated and adapted by Thomas L. Kennedy. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002. Pp. xxi + 170. Price not given.Consciousness Studies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. By K. Ramakrishna Rao. Jefferson (North Carolina) and London: McFarland and Company, 2002. Pp. 367. Hardcover $65.00.Constituting Communities: Theravāda Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by John Clifford Holt, Jacob N. Kinnard, and Jonathan S. Walters. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 224. Hardcover $65.50. Paper $21.95.Developments in Indian Philosophy from Eighteenth Century Onwards: Classical and Western. By Daya Krishna. Volume X Part 1 of History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, edited by D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New [End Page 110] Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2001. Pp. xxiii + 417. Hardcover RS 1200.East and West: Identità e dialogo interculturale. By Giangiorgio Pasqualotto. Venezia: Marsilo Editori, 2003. Pp. 210. EUR 16.00.Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. By Edward Slingerland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 352. Price not given.Encountering Kā lī: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West. Edited by Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 321. Hardcover $55.00, £37.95. Paper $21.95, £15.95.Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy. Edited by Antonio S. Cua. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. xx + 1020. Hardcover $150.00.Essays on Indian Philosophy. By J. N. Mohanty and edited by Purushottama Bilimoria. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xxxvii + 347. Paper RS 525.00.Faith, Humor, and Paradox. By Ignacio L. Götz. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2002. Pp. 136. Hardcover $61.95.Four Illusions: Candrakīrti's Advice for Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path. Translated by Karen C. Lang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 240. Price not given.The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory. By David R. Loy. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. 223. Paper $16.95.The Hidden History of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. By Bryan J. Cuevas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 328. Price not given.Huang Di nei jing su wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text. By Paul U. Unschuld. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 520. Hardcover $75.00, £52.00.In Dewey's Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction. Edited by William J. Gavin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. vi + 249. Hardcover $71.50. Paper $23.95.Knowledge and Freedom in Indian Philosophy. By Tara Chatterjea. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002. Pp. xvi + 159. Hardcover... (shrink)

In the academic world, a researcher's number of publications can carry huge professional and financial rewards. This truth has led to many unethical authorship assignments throughout the world of publishing, including within faculty-student collaborations. Although the American Psychological Association passed a revised code of ethics in 1992 with special rules pertaining to such collaborative efforts, it is widely acknowledged that unethical assignments of authorship credit continue to occur regularly. This study found that of the 604 APA-member respondents, 165 felt they (...) had been involved in an unethical or unfair authorship assignment. Furthermore, nontenured faculty members and women were statistically more likely to be involved in an unethical or unfair assignment of authorship credit than tenured faculty members or men. (shrink)

This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in cultural sociology — can art provide a window into social life? An examination of Giacometti's Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience remains at the basis of contemporary social life. It explains (...) how we feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy. (shrink)

A challenge to the orthodoxy, which shows that quantificational accounts are not only as effective as direct reference accounts but also handle a wider range of ...

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning (...) is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

Philosophy, science, and common sense all refer to propositions--things we believe and say, and things which are true or false. But there is no consensus on what sorts of things these entities are. Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and each defend their own views on the debate.

The works of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus--two of the most compelling political thinkers of the "resistance generation" that lived through World War II--can still provide penetrating insights for contemporary political reflection. Jeffrey C. Isaac offers new interpretations of these writers, viewing both as engaged intellectuals who grappled with the possibilities of political radicalism in a world in which liberalism and Marxism had revealed their inadequacy by being complicit in the rise of totalitarianism. According to Isaac, self-styled postmodern writers (...) who proclaim the death of grandiose ideologies often fail to recognize that such thinkers as Camus and Arendt had already noted this. But unlike many postmodernists, these two sought to preserve what was worthy in modern humanism--the idea of a common human condition and a commitment to human rights and the dignity of individuals. Isaac shows that both writers advanced the idea of a democratic civil society made up of self-limiting groups. Although they criticized the typical institutions of mass democratic politics, they endorsed alternative forms of local and international organization that defy the principle of state sovereignty. Isaac also shows how Arendt's writings on the Middle East, and Camus's on Algeria, urged the creation of such institutions. The vision of a "rebellious politics" that Arendt and Camus shared is of great relevance to current debates in democratic theory and to the transformations taking place in Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data, we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with (...) the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task. (shrink)

Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context invariant meanings arguably do not suffice to secure semantic values in context. Demonstratives and demonstrative pronouns are the examples of such expressions that have received the most attention from philosophers. However, arguably this class of contextually sensitive expressions includes among other expressions modals, conditionals, tense, gradable adjectives, possessives, ‘only’, quantifiers, and expressions that take implicit arguments (e.g. ‘ready’ in sentences like ‘Molly is ready.’). Most theorists, including me, think that since the (...) context invariant meanings of such expressions do not by themselves secure semantic values in context for these expressions, they must be supplemented in some way in context in order to secure semantic values in context. For this reason, I call these expressions supplementives. I just said that supplementives need some sort of supplementation to secure semantic values in context. Of course, the question of what form the supplementation in context takes is controversial. For example, ever since Kaplan claimed that the semantic value of a demonstrative or demonstrative pronoun in context is the demonstratum of its associated demonstration, there has been a lively controversy over whether that or some other account is the correct one. Call an account of how a given supplementive secures a semantic value in context a metasemantics for the supplementive. In King [2018] I argue that all supplementives have felicitous uses in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context. This conclusion is somewhat surprising, since many uses of supplementives in which they have not been assigned unique semantic values in context are quite infelicitous. I call felicitous uses of supplementives in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context instances of felicitous underspecification. The central idea is that in cases of felicitous underspecification, supplementives get assigned a range of candidates for being their semantic values in contexts rather than being assigned unique semantic values in contexts. Consider an example. Glenn and I are out surfing at Lost Winds beach. There are some surfers to our south stretching a quarter mile or so down the beach. I notice that some surfers in an ill-defined group to our immediate south are getting incredible rides. I say to Glenn looking south toward them ‘Those guys are good.’ It seems easy to imagine that nothing in the context of utterance determines a unique group of surfers as the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. For example, it is easy to imagine that I didn’t intend any specific, unique group to be the semantic value in context. Instead, there is a range of overlapping groups that are legitimate candidates for being the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. Nonetheless, my utterance is felicitous: Glenn had no qualms about my utterance and took it to be impeccably acceptable. So this is an instance of felicitous underspecification. As its title suggests, felicitous underspecification is the main topic of the present book. Here is a summary of what is in each chapter. Chapter 1 provides examples of felicitous underspecification for a variety of supplementives. In each case of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1, I say how I think conversational participants update the Stalnakerian common ground after accepting the utterance of the sentence containing a felicitous underspecified use of a supplementive. I do so without there formulating a principle that determines the updates in question. In Chap. 2, I formulate such a principle and illustrate its predictions with some of the cases of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1. I claim the principle correctly predicts the updates discussed in Chap. 1. In Chap. 3, I consider and discuss the mechanism that I claim associates ranges of candidate semantic values in context with felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives. In Chap. 4, I discuss cases in which felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are embedded in certain ways: under negation, and under ‘believes’ and ‘doubts’. In Chap. 5 I take up I take up the question of why sentences containing felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are felicitous in the contexts in which they are uttered. In particular, I formulate a notion of a context being appropriate for an LF, where an LF is felicitous in a context only if the context is appropriate for the LF. In particular, an LF ϕ containing a use of an underspecified supplementive in a context c will be felicitous only if c is appropriate for ϕ. In Chap. 6, I take up some problems that arise with underspecified uses of pronouns, demonstratives and possessives and consider revising the appropriateness condition of Chap. 5. (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

Webb has articulated a clear, multi-dimensional framework for discussing simulation models and modelling strategies. This framework will likely co-evolve with modelling. As such, it will be important to continue to clarify these dimensions and perhaps add to them. I discuss the dimension of generality and suggest that a dimension of integrativeness may also be needed.

Despite anxieties about the growing power of neo-liberalism, the crisis of the EU and the upsurge of right-wing political movements, it is important to recognize that utopian movements on the left have also in recent years been symbolically revitalized and organizationally sustained. This article analyses three recent social upheavals as utopian civil society movements, placing the 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement in the USA inside the narrative arc that (...) began with the non-violent democratic uprisings against authoritarian governments four decades earlier. In this new utopian surge, however, there is an unprecedented connection of eastern and western impulses, demonstrating that the tide of democratic thought and action is hardly confined to Judeo-Christian civilizations. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Armstrong and Stanley argue that despite being initially compelling, a Russellian account of singular thought has deep difficulties. I defend a certain sort of Russellian account of singular thought against their arguments. In the process, I spell out a notion of propositional constituency that is independently motivated and has many attractive features.

Andrews et al. argue for adaptationism in cognitive research. However, the problem of evolvability brings into question the number of genes required for the evolution of cognitive mechanisms. Are there enough? Also, greater consideration should be given to alternative vicarious selection processes, which may produce cognitive mechanisms. Finally, identifying constraints with optimality arguments is more difficult than the authors think.

This essay provides an intellectual history for the cultural turn that transformed the human sciences in the mid-20th century and led to the creation of cultural sociology in the late 20th century. It does so by conceptualizing and contextualizing the limitations of the binary primitive/modernity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, leading thinkers – among them Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud – confined thinking and feeling styles like ritual, symbolism, totem, and devotional practice to a primitivism that would be (...) transformed by the rationality and universalism of modernity. While the barbarisms of the 20th century cast doubt on such predictions, only an intellectual revolution could provide the foundations for an alternative social theory. The cultural turn in philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology erased the division between primitive and modern; in sociology, the classical writings of Durkheim were recentered around his later, religious sociology. These intellectual currents fed into a cultural sociology that challenged the sociology of culture, creating radically new research programs in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (shrink)

Written in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and in the midst of the second wave of Black Lives Matters protest, this article suggests that Americans experienced these shocking social events as a double-whammy cultural trauma, as deeply troubling to their collective identity as nation. How the trauma played out would determine the near-term future of American politics. Were the poor and non-white the principal victims of the double whammy, or were white Americans and the ‘hard-working middle class’ actually (...) the injured parties? Who was the trauma’s perpetrator? Was it China, inadequate healthcare, government bureaucracy, or Trump and ‘know-nothing’ populism? The performances that provided the most felicitous answers to such questions would determine whether the country moved to the left or the right in the months before the Presidential election that would take place before year’s end. (shrink)

Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative (so the story goes) mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic theatre and society are fundamentally (...) wrong. As modern societies have expanded and differentiated, the elements that compose performances have become separated and often fragmented in both theatre and society. If they can be brought back together again, performances are viewed as authentic and meaningful. If (re)fusion cannot be achieved, performances fail to communicate meaning. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that a shared ambition to (re)fuse fragmented performative elements has defined the most important strain of avant-garde theatre over the last two centuries. Most radical theatrical innovation has sought to open live drama back up to the telos of myth and ritual. Neither in theatre nor social life can the world transcend dramaturgy; it is fundamental to the search for meaning in a world beyond cosmological religion. (shrink)

This article offers an introduction to the question of God’s omnipresence as debated within the late medieval scholastic tradition as seen through the lens of Francis of Meyronnes. In Meyronnes’s commentary on distinction 37 of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, he attempts to categorize the various ways one might prove God’s existence in all things through a four-fold classification. In following his classifications, we are able to look back at some of the historical ways earlier scholastics have attempted to prove God’s omnipresence (...) and follow some of the changes in those approaches as the tradition has developed. Likewise, Meyronnes’s fourth and final classification will point us toward the future. His fourth way—interesting and puzzling in and of itself—offers early hints of future debates about God’s omnipresence and his relationship to place that will emerge in the late 14th century and then again in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. (shrink)

The semantic fluency task is commonly used as a measure of one’s ability to retrieve semantic concepts. While performance is typically scored by counting the total number of responses, the ordering of responses can be used to estimate how individuals or groups organize semantic concepts within a category. I provide an overview of this methodology, using Alzheimer’s disease as a case study for how the approach can help advance theoretical questions about the nature of semantic representation. However, many open questions (...) surrounding the validity and reliability of this approach remain unresolved. (shrink)

Although some critics of Eric Voegelin’s later work have faulted his failure to deal with the historical Jesus and to address the implications of Christianity for social and political life, the recent publication of Voegelin’s _History of Political Ideas_ has allowed a more complete assessment of his position regarding the Christian political order. This book addresses that criticism through an analysis of Voegelin’s early work. In _Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order_, Jeffrey C. Herndon analyzes the (...) development of Voegelin’s thought regarding the origins of Christianity in the person of Jesus, the development of the church in the works of Paul, and the relationship between an immanent institutional order symbolizing the divine presence and the struggle for social and political order. Focusing on the tension between a spiritual phenomenon based on Pauline faith and the institutionalization of that experience in the church, Herndon offers one of the first examinations of the relationship of the _History of Political Ideas_ to Voegelin’s larger body of work. In his wide-ranging study, Herndon explores Voegelin’s examination of the problem of Christian political order from the inception of Christianity through the Great Reformation. He also presents a clarification of Voegelin’s theory of civilizational foundation and of Voegelin’s philosophy of history with regard to Christianity and Western political order. Herndon addresses not only the nagging problem in Voegelin scholarship regarding his relationship with the historical Jesus but also the “Pauline compromises with the world” that enabled Christianity to become the instrument by which the West was civilized. He also shows that Voegelin’s interpretation of the historical pressures released by the Great Reformation is important to an understanding of his later work regarding the negative effect of Christian symbols in the creation of ideological disorder. _Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order_ clarifies issues in Voegelin studies regarding the intersection between political theory and Christian concerns, addressing the relation of religious experience to the public sphere of political life in the West and helping to explain Voegelin’s contention that the death of the spirit is the price of progress. It offers scholars a perspective heretofore lacking in Voegelin scholarship and a clearer view of Voegelin’s understanding of the Christian dispensation and its influence on the course of Western development, history, and philosophy. (shrink)

To show the importance of preparing historical editions as textual data first, while leaving presentation (whether in print or on the web) as a secondary down-stream task, this article identifies beneficial outcomes for research that can be achieved through computational analysis when such a corpus of textual data is at hand. With a focus on the deep intertextuality characteristic of the medieval scholastic corpus, it reviews three distinct methods for detecting different forms of textual relatedness within the corpus: n-gram intersections, (...) document embeddings, and convolution. In each case, special attention is given to how the availability of a domain specific knowledge graph helps us both properly prepare the corpus for analysis and visualize the results in ways that enhance research. Such results include observing trends in citation practices across different genres and sub-genres of the corpus, automatically grouping questions by similarity, and detecting sustained and uncited textual re-use. (shrink)

Publication de deux poèmes byzantins du 12ème s. attribués à Théodore Prodomos, qui fournissent un certain nombre de renseignements sur les tentes des camps d'hiver des Comnène, et en particulier sur celle de la maison d'Irène la Sevastokratorissa. Cette étude mène l'auteur à un commentaire historico-artistique des éléments décrits: il compare d'abord ceux-ci avec l'art des 11ème et et 12ème s., et particulièrement avec l'art profane, puis il s'interroge sur l'authenticité des descriptions par rapport aux figures de rhétorique employées dans (...) ces textes. (shrink)