The Treatise on Giving Rise to Faith in the Great Vehicle is one of the most important foundational texts of East Asian Buddhism. This new annotated translation of the Treatise draws on the historical and intellectual contexts of the work's composition and pays close attention to its interpretation in early commentaries.

This book addresses one of the most controversial topics in restorative justice: its potential for resolving conflicts within families. It focuses on feminist and indigenous concerns in family violence that may warrant special caution in applying restorative justice. At the same time, it looks for ways of designing a place for restorative interventions that respond to these concerns.

Each chapter heading bears a phrase from a contemporary author, held to incorporate the character of that section of the study under consideration. Chapter 1 carries the title given to early English translations of the Lettres provinciales; chapter 2 recalls the description of Pascall by Boyle and other English scientists; and chapter 3 draws from Kennett's preface to his version of the Pensees. The heading of chapter 4 is from Pope's Essay on Man. The exclamation which introduces chapter 5 concludes (...) an essay in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, probably by Boswell; the words for chapter 6 come from a pastoral letter of John Wesley; and chapter 7 represents the verdict of Coleridge. The title of the book itself is derived from the heading to the twenty-first chapter of Kennett's Pensees, which seems to have forecast the essence of the eighteenth-century's perplexity upon the issues raised by Pascal: 'The strange Contrarieties discoverable in Human Nature, with regard to Truth, and Happiness, and many other things.'. (shrink)

When we think of getting older, we know we will slowly lose more and more of our memory—and with it, our sense of where we belong and how we connect to others. We might relax a little if we considered the improvements in computer data storage, which may lead us into a future when the limits of our memory become less constricting. In this book, John Scanlan explores the nature of memory and how we have come to live both (...) with and within it, as well as what might come from memory becoming a process as simple as retrieving and reading data. Probing the ways philosophers look at memory, Scanlan reveals that some argue that being human means having the ability to remember, to see oneself as a being in time, with a past and future. At the same time, he shows, our memories can undo our present sense of time and place by presenting us with our past lives. And in a digital age, we are immersed in a vast archive of data that not only colors our everyday experiences, but also supplies us with information on anything we might otherwise have forgotten—breaking down the distinction between the memories of the individual and the collective. Drawing on history, philosophy, and technology, _Memory_ offers an engaging investigation of how we comprehend recollection and how memory, as a phenomenon, continually remakes everyday life. (shrink)

This essay is a discussion of Aquinas’s argument “from motion” to the existence of God as the argument is found in his Summa Contra Gentiles. The aimof the essay is to suggest an approach to Aquinas’s argument that emphasizes its particular context, where “context” signifies not so much the assumed Aristotelian physics as Aquinas’s larger project of carrying out “the office of a wise man,” namely, “to order things.” Construing the relevant “ordering” as a making sense of things—indeed of “the (...) whole of things”—the argument from motion is thus seen as part of an attempt to make sense of what, following Aristotle, can be called “the whole of life,” that whole within which any one of us must live out his or her particular life. Several ideas found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are introduced in the conviction that they may help at least some of us to see the “strangeness” of the conclusion of Aquinas’s argument, the conclusion, namely, that the first principle of the whole of being is an “unmoved mover”—the strangeness of which conclusion, it is argued, is essential to its significance. (shrink)

Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, by NöeAlva. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. Pp. xiii + 285.

Bruno Latour (2004) claims that modernist critique, the kind that removes the false veils of ideology, ‘has run out of steam’. Despite its theoretical variety, it often consists in pointing out how...

Driven by the desire to fill newspaper pages with sensational images, press photographers shot everything, day and night: automobile accidents, fires, murders, all the cop news that fought for a hot spot on the Front Page. And they covered uncounted numbers of social affairs -- pictures called 'grip-and-grins' in the trade: school events, sports, celebrities, oddities both of nature and humanity. Veteran journalist and mystery writer Larry Millett has unearthed over 200 of the best photos from the archives of the (...) St Paul Pioneer Press and the St Paul Dispatch for 'Strange Days, Dangerous Nights'. Included are the sensational stories behind the photos and biographies of some of the top press photographers of the day. An evocative look at another time, this is a visual history like no other, a feast for fans of photography and photojournalism, crime buffs, and urban historians -- and a testament to the craft of those photographers who documented their era one shot at a time. (shrink)

The essays in this new book from John Milbank range over the entire field of theology, and both extend and enrich the theological perspective underlying his earlier Theology and Social Theory. The essays are focused around the theme of a theological approach to language, and offer a richly textured and broad ranging inquiry which will contribute to a variety of contemporary debates.

By John R. Searle Copyright John R. Searle I. Naturalizing Language I believe that the greatest achievements in philosophy over the past hundred or one hundred and twenty five years have been in the philosophy of language. Beginning with Frege, who invented the subject, and continuing through Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin and their successors, right to the present day, there is no branch of philosophy with so much high quality work as the philosophy of language. In my view, (...) the only achievement comparable to those of the great philosophers of language is Rawls’s reinvention of the subject of political philosophy (and therefore implicitly the subject of ethics). But with this one possible exception, I think that work in the philosophy of language is at the top of our achievements. Having said that, however, I have to record a serious misgiving I have about the subject. The problem is that its practitioners in general do not treat language as a natural phenomenon. This may seem a strange charge to make, given that so many contemporary and recent philosophers of language are anxious to emphasize the empirical character of their theories of language. Quine and Davidson are striking examples of resolute empiricism. My objection is that few contemporary and recent philosophers of language attempt to treat language as a natural extension of non-linguistic biological capacities. Language is not seen as continuous with, nor as an extension of, the rest of our specifically human biological inheritance. I think there is a deep reason, both historically and intellectually, why language has not been treated naturalistically. It is.. (shrink)

We tend to seek theoretical explanations of our own human behavior, to understand everything we do as arising, computationally, from a systematic set of simple laws, principles, or rules. Here, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, I argue that the very possibility of the kind of talk we use in our theorizing arises out of the joint or dialogical activities in which we engage in our practical lives together, and only has its meaning within the context of such activities – thus (...) we cannot turn it around to explain its own genesis. We can, however, achieve a greater reflective awareness of our own structuring of our own activities through the new, nontheoretical methods Wittgenstein introduces into our intellectual practices. Here, I explore some of these methods, and the strange nature of our dialogical activities when seen in their light. (shrink)

This paper seeks to address the problem of strangeness within the context of migration in Africa. I draw on historical realities that inform existing international and African discourses on migration. I hope to show that most African countries have unconsciously bought into international arguments that drive the legitimacy of building walls, visible and invisible, and the promotion of stringent migration policies that minimise the influx of African immigrants. I draw on political and philosophical positions of African thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, (...) among others, in my theorisation of strangeness and the need to dispel the potential negative conception of strangeness within Africa’s migration policies. I juxtapose these positions with Western political theories with the hope of emphasizing African humanism as a key conception worth considering when decolonising borders. (shrink)

Economic sociologists have developed and applied theories and concepts in close connection with broadly economic phenomena, including, recently, embeddedness and actor network theory. Key to these theories is understandings of action given uncertainty in which actors develop calculative capabilities, and an emphasis on markets with boundaries and interstices as essential properties. This article reflects upon the connections between Parsons' and Smelser's economic sociology and that of contemporary authors including Granovetter, Callon and White. As a strange other to economics and (...) to sociology, economic sociology can develop research questions in considering arbitrage generally, rather than only restricted to financial markets. (shrink)

A great philosopher will change the way you think about your life. For most of human history, religion provided a clear explanation of life and death. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries new ideas -- from psychiatry to evolution to Communist -- seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. We would ourselves become God. This is the theme of a remarkable new book by one of the world's greatest lving philosophers. It is (...) a brilliant and frightening look at the problems and opportunities of a world coming to grips with humankind's now solitary, unaided place in the universe. Gray takes two major examples: the belief that the science-backed Communism of the new USSR could reshape the planet, and the belief among a group of Edwardian intellectuals -- popularized through mediums and automatic writing -- that there was a non-religious form of life after death. Gray presents an extraordinary cast of philosophers, journalists, politicians, charlatans and mass murderers, all of whom felt driven by a specifically scientific and modern world view. He raises a host of fascinating questions about what it means to be human. The implications of Gray's book will haunt its readers for the rest of their lives. (shrink)

The appearance of Priestley's electrical work as a brief and irrelevant prelude to his more substantial chemical enquiries may explain why it has been strangely overlooked by historians of science. It was only fairly recently that Sir Philip Hartog sought to rectify this situation with the affirmation that ‘Priestley's electrical work offers the key to Priestley's scientific mind’. Attacking traditional chemical historiography for tracing Priestley's opposition to Lavoisier's theory to a deficiency in his scientific sensibilities, Hartog insisted that Priestley's natural (...) philosophy can properly be understood only in relation to his ‘profound convictions on scientific method’ as fully expressed in the History of electricity. Only thus would Priestley's scientific thought be related correctly to his ‘work as a whole’. (shrink)

My 2019 article ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (P2P) drew attention to some shortcomings of the kinds of critical, reformist impulses fostered in law and development work. I sought to show that persistent preoccupations with the destructive hubris of ‘top-down’ planning—especially state planning—bypassed the tendency for great power to be deployed in other stylistic modes: through the release and responsive tweaking of prototypes, for instance. This article engages with later developments—at one of P2P’s main (...) field sites and scholarly literature in dialogue with P2P—to build upon the analysis therein. It elaborates on the kinds of power animated through prototyping, showing how prototyping is often combined with other governance styles and what it makes of the inputs on which law has typically been said to draw and of law’s claims to autonomy. It complicates the provenance of this style by reference to mid-to-late-twentieth century UN sanctions regimes, highlighting that governance prototyping is as much state-made as business-led and not restricted to the development field. With particular attention to the strangeness of the human user presupposed by prototyping, this article also aims to identify some modes of critical engagement to which this governance style might be answerable. (shrink)

This book explores the logic and historical origins of a strange taboo that has haunted literary critics since the 1940s, keeping them from referring to the intentions of authors without apology. The taboo was enforced by a seminal article, "The Intentional Fallacy," and it deepened during the era of poststructuralist theory. Even now, when the vocabulary of "critique" that has dominated the literary field is under sweeping revision, the matter of authorial intention has yet to be reconsidered. This work (...) explains how "The Intentional Fallacy" confused different kinds of authorial intentions and how literary critics can benefit from a more up-to-date understanding of intentionality in language. The result is a challenging inventory of the resources of literary theory, including implied readers, poetic speakers, omniscient narrators, interpretive communities, linguistic indeterminacy, unconscious meaning, literary value, and the nature of literature itself. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn described the progress of science as comprising occasional paradigm shifts separated by interludes of ‘normal science’. The paradigm that has held sway since the inception of molecular biology is that genes (mainly) encode proteins. In parallel, theoreticians posited that mutation is random, inferred that most of the genome in complex organisms is non‐functional, and asserted that somatic information is not communicated to the germline. However, many anomalies appeared, particularly in plants and animals: the strange genetic phenomena of (...) paramutation and transvection; introns; repetitive sequences; a complex epigenome; lack of scaling of (protein‐coding) genes and increase in ‘noncoding’ sequences with developmental complexity; genetic loci termed ‘enhancers’ that control spatiotemporal gene expression patterns during development; and a plethora of ‘intergenic’, overlapping, antisense and intronic transcripts. These observations suggest that the original conception of genetic information was deficient and that most genes in complex organisms specify regulatory RNAs, some of which convey intergenerational information. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/qxeGwahBANw. (shrink)

This paper responds to John Milbank's essay, `The Poverty of Niebuhrianism' in The Word Made Strange, in which Milbank critiques Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism for reliance on Stoic natural law thinking and its deficiency in regard to original sin. While Milbank rightly detects naturalism in Christian realism, this naturalism is inaccurately identified as Stoic in conception. Additionally, more detailed analysis of Niebuhr's thought reveals similarities between Niebuhr and Milbank on original sin, as this article seeks to demonstrate.

Sadi Carnot’s 1824 Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire created the new science of thermodynamics. It succeeded in its audacious goal of finding a very general theory of the efficiency of heat engines, by introducing and exploiting the strange and unexpected notion of a thermodynamically reversible process. The notion is internally contradictory. It requires the states of these processes to be both in unchanging equilibrium, with a perfect balance of driving forces, while also changing. The work of Sadi’s (...) father, Lazare Carnot, on the efficiency of ordinary machines provided Sadi with a template of a very general theory of the efficiency of ordinary machines; and a characterization of the most efficient processes in them as those that minimize differences of driving forces and can be run in reverse. Lazare’s work could provide these resources because of its choice of a dissipative ontology of inelastic collisions among hard bodies. This historically ill-fated choice meant that Lazare’s machines were analogous to Sadi’s heat engines in their key aspects: they are built from essentially dissipative processes. Lazare’s strategies for controlling dissipation and optimizing his machines were transferrable to the analogous problems Sadi found in heat engines. The unanswerable historical question is whether Sadi would have sought a general theory of heat engines at all or found these general theoretical devices without the template provided in analogy by the prior work of Lazare. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 429-432 [Access article in PDF] John Miles Foley. Homer's Traditional Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. xviii + 363 pp. Bibl., indexes. Cloth, $48.50. With Homer's Traditional Art, which may well prove his most popular book, Foley attempts a synthesis of his theory of traditional oral aesthetics, which has been under construction for a decade, since Traditional Oral Epic (Berkeley (...) 1990) and Immanent Art (Bloomington 1991). Because substantial passages in the book have lived past lives, and the fresh material adapts arguments made elsewhere, we are looking here for a statement that gives coherence and new force to a program of study; one that cultivates, rather than breaks, new theoretical ground. That this is Foley's aim is confirmed by a description of his audience: "a wide spectrum of readers, from the advanced undergraduate to the professional scholar" (xv), representing "the greatest number and variety of readers" possible (317 n. 1). Foley offers three main justifications for this new synthesis. First is the doctrine of the Homeric sêma (a key sign open to interpretation), which Foley ingeniously cites as evidence for a Greek concept similar to that of the South Slavic rec=, or "word." This he takes from Parry's interviews with Yugoslav epic singers in which they proclaim the term's application to various levels of traditional discourse, from the formula to the proverb to larger narrative patterns. The second--if I read the book's stylistic motives correctly--is a new "Homeric" technique in scholarly prose. Homer's Traditonal Art is a rhetorical juggernaut that creates inevitable momentum by frequently signaling the progress of Foley's argument, often rewording parts of the theory, and, as if to demonstrate in prose the referential power of Homer's "traditional register" of speech, offering some sêmata of his own (5-7): six "proverbs" of his own coining that encapsulate the main findings of his previous studies (e.g., "Oral tradition works like language, only more so"). These recur steadily throughout, often in closing paragraphs or summing up evidence, and are lightly varied according to context, but always point back to larger critical vistas. Third is the début of the apparatus fabulosus, or running cues to the "traditional referentiality" of a passage; here some lines from Odyssey 23 (reproduced 254-55; cf. the similar printing of the Old English poem Deor, 275). This is an attempt to approximate an "original" experience of a traditional text in performance, though Foley has no illusions about its perfection. Again, the effort requires that he supply conventions of his own (introduced in chapter 7), which he promises to refine for future "editions" on traditional principles.The book is laid out in four large sections, subdivided into an introduction, eight main chapters, an afterword on Old English poetics, two appendices, a large [End Page 429] apparatus of notes, and a rich bibliography (with few serious omissions, such as Manetti's Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity [Bloomington 1993]), a good general index (including scholars cited), and index locorum. If this does not sound like a work for a general readership, that is because Foley has expressly sought to divide his voice in two: the main discussion was to be plainly worded and clearly laid out; the scholarly audience to be addressed in the notes. On the whole, this technique works well, only occasionally failing one side or the other. The editors made the strange and regrettable decision of omitting non-Greek works from the index locorum, so that you have to check all entries in the general index for discussions of key passages in Beowulf, Deor, the many recorded South Slavic epics discussed, and so on. Greek traditional phrases are indexed in translation, so that for a discussion of (e.g.) chlôron deos, you need to know how Foley happens to translate it. The Pennsylvania State University Press has atoned for such lapses by producing a handsome volume, printed on good paper and bound in signatures with linen thread, a delight to hold. (Teachers will want... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:354 BOOK REVIEWS (continuously) revisable character, he falls back on an account of theology as rhetoric so as to make the best of a bad job. For persuasion is what we use when we know demonstration is hopeless. As a result, Professor Cunningham's study, which could most usefully have "placed" a variety of theologies of past, present, and, prospectively, future on the spectrum of (onto-) logic, poetic, and rhetoric, (...) concludes instead that theology must regard itself as rhetorical or perish! This inevitably narrows the several services theologies of different kinds can perform for the Church. Imagine how biblical studies would be reduced were the exegete only to treat his text as paraenesis, and never as history or as a symbolic world. Nonetheless, on the way from its (as I find) unsatisfactory startingpoint and to its depressing conclusion, Faithful Persuasion has worthwhile points to make about a number of authors (of various periods) and topics, though it might have made them more persuasively (its author's key term) had the intended audience (middle-brow or academic?) been more clearly viewed in advance. AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P. Blackfriars Cambridge, England Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860-1914. By THOMAS FRANKLIN O'MEARA, O.P. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. x + 260. $35.95 (cloth). " In 1925, Baden's Kultusminister, a Protestant, began an address to the Gorresgesellschaft in Heidelberg by describing this era: ' Brave men like Hertling, Schell, Julius Bachem, and Carl Muth, shook the German Catholic world in order to lead it out of its fortress, to lead it again into the midst of the life and activity of the entire people, even when this seemed at first strange and uncomfortable ' " (pp. 159f.). Even to many theologians, the era in question-the last four decades of the nineteenth century through the outbreak of the "Great War"is comparatively unknown. There has been, of course, renewed interest in prominent theological figures like John Henry Newman, but his German-speaking contemporaries are for the most part strangers to the English-speaking world. And this is the first reason why this book is important: it describes a forgotten world of a century or so ago, yet one whose theological problematic was strikingly similar to our own. The " contours " of this period, deftly described in the first part of this book, were both varied and complex. Politically speaking, during the nineteenth century, " Germany " changed from an assortment of BOOK REVIEWS 355 geographically contiguous minor and medium-sized states to an Empire dominated by Prussia. Such a political re.arrangement had ecclesiastical implications: Roman Catholics, who previously had been the majority in places like Bavaria found themselves a persecuted minority during the Kulturkampf under Bismarck. And like many other victims of persecution, Roman Catholics adopted a "fortress mentality"fearful of Berlin, which was influenced by both the Lutheran Reformation and the Enlightenment, and mesmerized by Rome, which was coming under the increasing influence of neoscholasticism in doctrine and ultramontanism in discipline. German Catholic theologians found themselves in a quandary: what direction should they take? Many, like Joseph Kleutgen, took refuge in Rome; a few, like Joseph Schnitzer, found the appeal of Berlin more attractive; still others, however, tried to steer an independent course in dialogue with the culture of their day. The second and major part of this book focuses on five such theologians: Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Alois Schmid, Paul Schanz, Herman Schell, and Carl Braig. Scheeben (1835-88), "the best known and the most read in the first half of the twentieth century " (p. 53), pursued an independent route in seeking a " transcendent synthesis " incorporating both patristic and idealist thought; indeed, his lengthy Mysteries of Christ"ianity continued to enjoy a certain popularity up till the time of Vatican II, though more as a resource for spiritual reading than as a work of systematic theology. Like Newman, Scheeben's thought was sui generis, "and inspired the most divergent evaluations " (p. 65) ; unlike Newman, Scheeben has few disciples today. In contrast to Scheeben, the other four theologians attempted to emerge from the " fortress " of Roman Catholic defensiveness and to engage the historical and philosophical currents of their age. The... (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the claim that Nietzsche was already mad (or on the verge of madness) when he wrote Ecce Homo, arguing that this assumption, not the book’s quasi-autobiographical style, has been the chief impediment to a serious philosophical consideration of the text. I briefly take up several recent treatments of the work that attempt to counter the claim of madness commonly made about it, noting that while each of them gives us a good partial rejoinder, they all (...) miss a crucial approach that helps make a great deal more sense of the text. Ecce Homo’s exceedingly bombastic claims, and much of its strange style, can be best explained by noticing Nietzsche’s incorporation of several traditional elements of Judeo-Christian apocalyptic narratives: a first-person narrative describing a revelatory disclosure (and the subsequent interpretation of that revelation); a cosmic dualism of forces (Dionysus and “the Crucified”) and radical eschatological worldview; and an exhortation to shift our cognitive and behavioral comportment to reflect the altered perspective on the world disclosed in that revelation. Thus construed, the text is no more a work of “madness” than the book of Revelation. It is, rather, the ironic appropriation and redeployment of a series of literary techniques and stylistic elements that highlight the importance of Nietzsche’s life and work as the destined surmounting of the (ostensibly) life-denying Christian worldview. (shrink)

Over the past few years postmodernism has been gaining popularity. Because the works of writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Félix Guattari, for example, are now readily available to the English reader, a novel intellectual force is present that must be assessed (Hassan, 1985). Terms such as “mise en abîme”, “libido”, “schizo-analysis”, “undecidables”, and so forth must be explained and their relevance for social analysis deciphered. Furthermore, a conception of knowledge, a research methodology, and (...) an image of social order that are consistent with these somewhat odd ideas have been introduced, and thus must be evaluated with respect to their sociological importance. At first, due to the strange language that is adopted and the nature of the philosophy offered, postmodernism appears to the uninitiated as an attempt to subvert rational discussion. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces, the book to which this is the preface, defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are ‘stored’ only superpositionally, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. (...) Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim. (shrink)

IT is strange that the informal fallacies should strike us as such obvious breaches of thinking and advocacy, yet should have met with such little success in finding a respectable home within mature logical theory. It might seem that respectable and mature logical theory is most mature and most respectable in the theory of propositions, and that its maturity and respectability in the other logical domains rapidly diminish in inverse proportion to the susceptibility of those domains to be reduced (...) to the logic of propositions. But we are not anxious to promote so severe a view of theoretical accomplishment, and we shall suppose that, at the very least, the informal fallacies have a degree of systematicity that will at once advance our understanding of them nicely beyond the level of intuitive impressions, and also place into retirement the hopelessly inadequate accounts that litter too many otherwise admirable textbooks. (shrink)

Critical realism has been an important advance in social science methodology because it develops a qualitative theory of causality which avoids some of the pitfalls of empiricist theories of causality. But while there has been ample work exploring the relationship between critical realism and qualitative research methods there has been noticeably less work exploring the relationship between dialectical critical realism and qualitative research methods. This seems strange especially since the founder of the philosophy of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, employs (...) and develops a range of dialectical concepts in his later work in order to extend the main tenets of critical realism. The aim of this paper is to draw on Bhaskar's later work, as well as Marxism, to reorient a critical realist methodology towards a dialectical approach for qualitative research. In particular, the paper demonstrates how dialectical critical realism can begin to provide answers to three common criticisms made against original critical realist methodology: that the qualitative theory of causal powers and structures developed by critical realists is problematic; that critical realist methodology contains values which prove damaging to empirical research; and that critical realists often have difficulties in researching everyday qualitative dilemmas that people face in their daily lives. (shrink)

Oddity One : Kripke claims that Wittgenstein has invented "a new form of scepticism", one which inclines Kripke "to regard it as the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date, one that only a highly unusual cast of mind could have produced" (K, p. 60). However, Kripke also claims that there are analogies (and sometimes the analogies look very much like identities) between Wittgenstein's sceptical argument and the work of at least three and maybe four (...) other philosophers, viz., Quine, Goodman, Hume and Berkeley. Strange stuff indeed. The originality of Wittgenstein's work is especially difficult to see after Kripke claims that Wittgenstein presents a problem concerning the nexus between past . . . 'meanings' and present practice" (K, p. 62), and says that Hume is said to have questioned "the causal nexus whereby a past event necessitates a future one, and the inductive inferential nexus from the past to the future." (K, p. 62). Whither the originality? And the connection with Goodman's work with 'grue' is even closer than that between Kripke's Wittgenstein and Hume. Given that Kripke had read Goodman before "discovering" the rule-following paradox in Wittgenstein, one ought to be sceptical of Kripke's claim that Wittgenstein has invented a new form of scepticism. It would be much more accurate to say that Kripke has strapped Wittgenstein with a hybrid scepticism drawn from Hume and Goodman. (shrink)

The article suggests that the best examples of textual work in the computational humanities are best understood as motivated by aesthetic concerns with the constraints placed on literature by computation’s cultural hegemony. To draw these concerns out, I adopt a middle-distant depth of field, examining the strange epistemology and unexpected aesthetic dimension of numerical culture’s encounters with literature. The middle-distant forms of reading I examine register problematically as literary scholarship not because they lack rigor or evidence but because their (...) unacknowledged object of study is the infrastructure of academic knowledge production. Work in the computational humanities is approaching a point at which the scale of analyzed data and data analysis washes out readings, the algorithms are achieving opaque complexity, and the analytical systems are producing purposive outputs. These problems cannot be addressed without attending to the aesthetics of data-driven cultural encounters, specifically the questions of how we produce readings/viewings and how they change our perceptions and characterize the interesting, critical theorization on method and meaning that make the best work in the computational humanities legitimately humanistic. I contribute a working example: a recommendation system for passages within the Shakespearean dramatic corpus, built using a large bibliographical dataset from JSTOR, a counting/ranking algorithm used at large scale. The system returns passages as intertexts for the passage a reader has selected. I explain how and why this system provides meaningful intertextual connections within the Shakespearean dramatic corpus by tracing the legible structural effects of disciplinary knowledge formation on the shape of this dataset. I close by suggesting how the computational and more traditional methods in the humanities might begin to stop debating past one another. (shrink)