Identity and Experience: The Constitution of the Human Being According to Early Buddhism. Sue Hamilton. Luzac Oriental, London 1996. xxxi, 218 pp. £30.00. ISBN 0 898942 10 2. The Five Aggregates: Understanding Theravada Psychology and Soteriology. Mathieu Boisvert. (Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religious Writings, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, 1995. xii, 168 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-88920-257-5.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 278-282 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations. Edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 326. This collection of essays on women in Buddhism largely succeeds in fulfilling Tsomo's goal of documenting "Buddhist women's actual involvement" in the Buddhist tradition (p. 1). Her introduction provides a (...) very informative and well-supported description of the history and current status of Buddhist women around the world, focusing on Asia but including the West as well. In the introduction and in her essays on women in the Tibetan and Himalayan region and in Buddhist and Christian traditions, she provides a feminist critique of gender discrimination in the Buddhist tradition as well as prescriptions for transforming the existing tradition in ways that would make it more egalitarian. These include "consciously validating women's accomplishments," reinterpreting religious texts with gender sensitive lenses, and the ordination of women (pp. 256-257). The essays in the volume as a whole carry forward Tsomo's examination of both sides of the equation of women and Buddhism--that is, how the Buddhist tradition has treated women overall as well as how women have responded to and are working to alter Buddhism, what Tsomo characterizes as "the ongoing process of women transforming and being transformed by, the tradition" (p. 1). The essays highlight a number of dichotomies in the experiences of Buddhist women, the primary one being that of gender disparities in the status and experience of women. Several essays in the collection detail the hardships that Buddhist women encounter because of gender inequalities that persist to the present day, even in Western cultures. Tsomo's essay comparing the experiences of Buddhist and Christian women in particular illustrates that in most areas, gender-based inequalities are more pronounced in Buddhist contexts than in Christian ones. Tsomo observes that [End Page 278] both traditions have fallen short of their egalitarian ideals, expressed within Christianity as the imago dei (creation in the image of God) and in Buddhism as tathagathagarbha (the seed or essence of Enlightenment present in all sentient beings). While noting that both traditions in general permit women to participate in religious practices on an equal basis with men, that neither legally mandates an inferior status for women, and that the highest stage of religious attainment is the same for both genders, Tsomo finds gender discrimination still functioning in both religions: both Buddhism and Christianity traditionally have assigned subordinate roles to women (especially with respect to monastic life), depict females negatively in scriptures, and generally ignore women's contributions to religious life.Despite these similarities, Tsomo thinks that in most respects Christian women have made more progress in securing equal rights to participate in the religious life of their faith than have Buddhist women. The only reason she provides for the greater extent of change in Christianity is that "Christian women have been far more active than Buddhists" (p. 253). Yet she fails to probe the possible reasons for this disparity in respect to the broader cultural, social, and economic differences in Christian and Buddhist contexts that have fostered a more activist and socially acceptable feminism in the former. The greater gender discrimination in Buddhist cultures has less to do with differences between Christianity and Buddhism per se than it does with other aspects of culture. Unfortunately, Tsomo does not develop the thesis she presents in the introduction to this essay that "Christian women have much to learn from the Buddhist tradition with respect to meditation and that Buddhist women have much to learn from Christian women with respect to service to society" (p. 241). Indeed, it is difficult to understand the basis for the latter claim, given Buddhist women's primary roles as service providers in most Buddhist cultures, unless she is speaking of the so-called socially engaged religious movement. If so, then as other scholars have noted, there are impediments to social action within certain interpretations of the Buddhist teachings themselves that would need to be resolved first. A... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 222-228 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds. Edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997. 467 pp. As Mary Evelyn Tucker's foreword explains, this book is part of a series of conferences and publications exploring the relationship between religion (...) and ecology initiated by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. The volume is divided into several sections. In the first section, "Overview: Framing the Issues," Lewis Lancaster provides an excellent overview of the important role of religion in relation to ecology in "Buddhism and Ecology: Collective Cultural Perceptions." In addition, he discusses some of the promise and pitfalls of interpreting Buddhism to ascertain its perspectives on nature, the human/nature relationship, and so forth.The first substantive section, "Theravada Buddhism and Ecology," has a focus on Thailand, with essays by Donald Swearer on Thai Buddhist perspectives on nature, and Leslie Sponsel and Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel, entitled "Theoretical Analysis of the Potential Contribution of the Monastic Community in Promoting a Green Society in Thailand." Swearer describes the approaches of two preeminent Thai Buddhist monk scholars and activists, Bhikkhu Buddhadasa and Phra Prayudh Payutto, concluding that these two offer distinct but similarly proenvironmental interpretations of Buddha dharma.The Sponsels' essay is less persuasive. Their thesis is that "the local monastic communities of Thailand have the potential to serve as working models of a green society and that some actually do" (48). The evidence they offer is that "by drawing on the environmental wisdom of the dharma, by serving as a model of a green society, and through the power afforded by their liminal status, local monastic communities have significant potential to contribute to the environmental awareness, information, and ethics of the populace" (Sponsel and Sponsel 53). Since the monastic environment is comprised predominantly of males, however, what contribution do women make to these goals, and how do they become educated into environmental awareness? The authors do acknowledge the gender discrimination of the sangha and recognize both that "one of the concomitants of a green society is gender equity" as well as that the gender bias of the sangha and society in Thailand need to change if a green society is to be realized in Thailand (56). However, assuming that women are equal contributors to environmental destruction as well as the potential for rehabilitation, it would seem to be important to use vehicles for environmental education that provide access to females as well as males, rather than monastic institutions composed exclusively of males (at least the formally recognized ones).However, the Sponsels see the greatest obstacle to the attainment of a green society in Thailand to be "the disparity between Buddhist ideals and teachings, on the one hand, and the actual practices of Buddhists, on the other" (56). The authors note that in reality, Thailand is increasingly becoming an environmental disaster rather [End Page 222] than an ecotopia. Although the authors contend that Buddhism is one of the most important resources for resolving environmental problems in Thailand because of its ability to "penetrate to the very roots of the problems and to find lasting solutions rather than merely treat superficial symptoms and single issues," they have failed to describe what these principles are in any detail other than the doctrine of interdependent origination and care for all sentient beings, as well as failing to demonstrate specifically how monks actually provide an example of a green society. Thus, their "hypotheses" remain largely unproven and unsupported.The third section of the volume, "Mahayana Buddhism and Ecology," focuses on Japan. Paul O. Ingram's essay, "The Jeweled Net of Nature," supports the thesis that Shingon (esoteric) Buddhism, especially that of the Japanese monk and scholar Kukai, offer resources for resolving the environmental crisis (as Graham Parkes also does in a later essay in this section). Beginning from the premise that the dualistic, hierarchical, atomizing, androcentric, and sexist characteristics of Western monotheistic religion and... (shrink)

Past studies have shown that the perceived time of actions is retrospectively influenced by post-action events. The current study examined whether rewarding performance feedback altered the reported time of action. In Experiment 1, participants performed a speeded button press task and received monetary reward for a presumed “fast,” or a monetary punishment for a presumed “slow” response. Rewarded trials resulted in the false perception that the response action occurred earlier than punished trials. In Experiments 2 and 3, the need (...) for a speeded response and reward were independently manipulated in order to decouple the cognitive and reward components in the feedback signal. When tested independently, neither variable affected the judged time of action. We conclude that meaningful feedback is only used when made salient by reward, to modulate the judged time of an action. (shrink)

In the early morning hours of August 4, 2013, Joy Pavelich's world was shattered when she found out that her twenty-year-old son Eric had taken his own life at the family farm in Saskatchewan. Struggling to make sense of Eric's sudden and unexpected suicide, Joy takes a deeply personal and difficult journey through his past--from his happy childhood, to his mental health struggles in his early teens, to his death and the resulting aftermath of his passing. CHASING MY SON ACROSS (...) HEAVEN demonstrates how to rebuild a life fractured by extreme trauma using storytelling as a powerful healing tool. The author tackles some of the most pressing issues facing society today: youth mental health, suicide and post-traumatic stress. Through her explorations, Joy reveals how we can all find the courage to rebuild our lives while continuing to honor the deep love for those we've lost."--Back cover. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated profound global transformations, and in the Philippines, Emergency Remote Learning (ERT) emerged as a vital response to address the educational needs of students during this crisis. While existing research has extensively examined the challenges faced by parents during ERT, limited attention was devoted to understanding the unique experiences of parents of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) and hearing impairments (HI). Using a qualitative descriptive case study within interpretative paradigm, this study aims to fill this gap (...) by exploring the challenges encountered and coping strategies employed by 15 parents in the Philippines who have children with ID and HI. Findings illuminate the multifaceted challenges faced by parents, encompassing their roles as caregivers and facilitators of their children’s education. Moreover, it reveals the support mechanisms available to these parents, while also highlighting the pressing need for additional assistance to better meet the complex needs of these children. The research also identifies the most effective strategies employed by parents to navigate the challenges of remote learning. The results serve as a critical resource for parents, educators, and policymakers, providing a roadmap for enhancing the support system for families with children who have ID and HI, particularly during times of crisis. (shrink)

This book addresses the challenges of living together after empire in many post-colonial cities. It is organized in two sections. The first section focuses on efforts by people of multiple faiths to live together within their contexts, including such efforts within a neighborhood in urban Manchester; the array of attempts at creating multi-faith spaces for worship across the globe; and initiatives to commemorate divisive conflict together in Northern Ireland. The second section utilizes particular postcolonial methods to illuminate pressing issues within (...) specific contexts—including women’s leadership in an indigenous denomination in the variegated African landscape, and baptism and discipleship among Dalit communities in India. In the context of growing multiculturalism in the West, this volume offers a postcolonial theological resource, challenging the epistemologies in the Western academy. (shrink)

The central argument of Youpa's book is that Spinoza's moral philosophy offers a distinctive variety of moral realism, grounded in a standard of human nature. In this review essay, I provide an overview of Youpa's remarkably lucid interpretation of Spinoza. However, I also critique Youpa's conception of the 'free man' as an objective standard of perfection which (a) applies equally to all humans, and (b) which has objective moral force in the sense that it ought to be approached. I sketch (...) an alternative reading of Spinoza which denies a shared human essence, and which denies that an individual ought to become more perfect than they in fact are. I argue that Youpa's reading rests on the conflation of Spinoza's concepts of active power and adequate causation. I then suggest that Youpa's resultant excessive focus on a rational human essence as 'what we fundamentally are' leads him to downplay a more developmental and imaginative dimension to Spinoza's moral philosophy. (shrink)

Radio Nation is a methodologically sophisticated book on the mutual relationships among radio broadcasting, popular culture, and nationalism in Mexico at the local, regional, national, and global levels, covering the period from 1920 to the end of World War II. An epilogue continues the story through the radio‐based transition to television in the postwar era. The main social groups examined include the Mexican government, the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Inter‐American Affairs , the Raul Azcárraga radio conglomerate, and listeners.Joy (...) Hayes carries out her ambitious project by developing a multilayered methodology. She brings together the concepts of antimodernism and hegemony from her mentor, T. J. Jackson Lears; recent literature on Mexican nationalism and nation‐building as a negotiated process; cultural studies work on the aural characteristics of the radio medium ; and the formation of culture and nation as a communications process. Hayes argues that “both radio and nation are social practices that interract to actively resist the concept of modernity” . Thoroughly modern as far as their both being forward looking, the radio and the nation are nevertheless antimodern institutions in overall effect, because they recreate premodern traditions of music, storytelling, and paternalism that can be developed into other forms of mass communication. In this regard, government station XEQ promoted a “musical nationalism,” but the “market nationalism” of Azcárraga's powerful, 200‐kilowatt, commercial station XEW eventually triumphed. Even though Azcárraga depended upon radio manufacturers and networks in the United States, his market nationalism was structured by the Mexican state.An intriguing diagram of power relations in Mexico during World War II shows triangular negotiations between the Azcárraga Group, U.S. media corporations and the CIAA, and the Mexican state—producing and influencing culture markets, U.S. politics, and national culture. Unfortunately from my point of view, the diagram shows radio content and radio audiences as groups outside these negotiations, even though the author pays attention to listening contexts, audience reactions, and the creation of new forms of “traditional” Mexican music for the aural needs of the radio.The book discusses other issues of interest to historians of science and technology, including government regulation , the agency of users , and the appropriation of a technology for use in another society. Very little is said about physical aspects of radio, except for the “presence” of the radio voice, problems with shortwave transmission, which hampered U.S. efforts to beam its message of Pan Americanism and consumer culture to Mexico during World War II, the high power of XEW, and Azcárraga's building a radio network by means of bicycle messengers because of the lack of telephone lines.Although Radio Nation is convincing, its brevity left me wanting to hear more about programming in the commercial and government stations, changes in regional culture and in Mexico City that might have influenced radio listening habits and vice versa, and more examples of antimodernist tendencies . Theory and context tend to crowd out discussions of radio programs, producers, and listeners. That said, Radio Nation is a stimulating book that significantly contributes to our understanding of the complex relationships between communications technology and cultures other than those in the United States and Europe. (shrink)

This is a review of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Adrian Del Caro, trans. The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881– Summer 1882): Volume 6 (The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. x + 772 pp. $28.00, paper, ISBN 978-1-5036-3232-5.

It may seem perplexing to read a book that ranges from a fresh interpretation of the myth of Demeter and Persephone to a detailed sensuous discussion of the smell, taste, production, and the regional localities of French cheeses; that moves from a new reading of Antigone—one that challenges many standard feminist readings and argues that the real hero of the play is Ismene—to a critique of corporate capitalism with its relentless drive to commodify everything, including our body parts; that begins (...) with a close reading of Hobbes and Rousseau and concludes with the “right to joyful.” Yet, I hope to show that there is a deep thematic unity that underlies Mary C. Rawlinson’s varied discussions. Just... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Review Wayne C. Booth. For the Love ofIt: Amateuring and Its Rivals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For the Love ofIt is a delightful exposition on life-long music making written with love by amateur cellist Wayne Booth (professor emeritus ofEnglish, University ofChicago). Employing a combination of journal entries, memories, and romantic prose on the topic oftaking up the cello at age thirty-one, he writes insightfully on (...) the challenges and triumphs inherent in amateur pursuits (musical, or otherwise). Written from a classical music perspective, he analyzes the reasons for amateuring, all the while extolling his community offellow amateurs, pro-amateurs, and teachers who make the journey worthwhile. He imparts many valuable insights from which music educators can benefit. I will summarize Booth's main points, highlighting these insights, and conclude with a brief criticism of the book from theperspective ofone who has worked with adult amateurs for more than fifteen jears. Boothplayfullypresentshis text in the form ofa symphony. In the "Overture," he encourages people to pursue actively an amateur love and desires growth in the ranks of amateurs. Just as Christopher Small encouraged a mental shift from to musictothemoreactive gerund formmusicking in his book of that title,1 Booth promotes a shift from the noun amateurto the gerund amateuring. He defines amateuringas doing something for the sheer love of it, adding the caveat: "Amateurs don't just dabble, like serious professionals, they work at learningto do it better^11). This idea of constant improvement is reiteratedthroughout the book with detailedrecounting ofBooth's forty-six years of cello studies, especially his pursuit of excellent thumb position. Why one should study to this degree when full success (that is, professional performance) is out of reach? Booth suggests the following rewards: joyful friendship, spiritual ecstasy, and gratitude for life's mysterious unearned gifts (5, 6). Indeed, throughout the book Booth finds himself "getting better all the time," often "playing better than ever"(58, 112, 123, 137, 140). His feelings ofimprovement and the accompanying self-satisfaction are ajoy to see and reinforce the idea that theserewards make true amateuring worth it. In"First Movement: The Courtship,"music educators find a staunch supporter in Booth and gain insight into the importance of childhood music activities as seen through amateureyes. As Booth wiselystates,"No one inmidlifeis likelyto take up any instrument, let alone the cello, without having fallenin lovewithmusic longbefore"(21). Clearlyfrom a musical family, he describes beautiful childhood memories including dancing with his mother at age five; making up songs; taking piano and clarinet lessons; singing three-part solfège exercises in sixth grade; and hearing his first live orchestra concert, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski (22-8). These types ofactivities lay an important foundation for the pursuit of music by adults as "amateuring in our early years can lead to a lifetime ofamateuring" (22). Booth is a champion ofmusic education in the schools. Concerned with music program cuts and the prevalence of personal stereos that keep young people from "getting music into their bones, not just their ears," he encourages the funding of music lessons rather than computer games (22). After describing how he was "seducedbythe cello," he concludesthis section with a discussion of how other pleasures rival for the amateur's attention, suggesting that leisure activities often take the form of passive pastimes, not the active work oftrue amateuring. LikeVemon HowardmLearningByAllMeans, Boothgrapples with the concept of work versus play. 2 If amateurs are to spend their leisure hours working diligently at getting better, the work must be©Philosophy ofMusic Education ReviewlO, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 140-143. Book Review 141 experienced as play-something they love to do. While professional musicians are paid to play, often playing for the love ofit fades as themoney blossoms. He maintains the distinction between amateurs and professionals lies not with being paid or unpaid, but with playing for love or solely for money. "My heroes... are the professionals Icallpro-amateurs-thosewillingtojoinamateurs, pursuingthe love together," statesBooth (59, 60). I believe music educators are foremost among these heroes. In "Second Movement: The Marriage," many insights into the teachingofaging amateurs are provided. First, he observes that while his level of cello playing rises with age... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transforming Music EducationCarolyn LivingstonEstelle R. Jorgensen, Transforming Music Education ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003)Estelle Jorgensen's vision of the transformation of our profession is lofty but not ostentatious, exacting but not rigid. The dream she unveils in her latest book, Transforming Music Education, "challenges music educators to raise their expectations of themselves, their colleagues, their students, and their publics; to look beyond the ordinary; and to (...) aspire to distinction in every facet of its enterprise" (145). A powerfully convincing writer, Jorgensen, author of In Search of Music Education, begins appropriately in her preface by detailing the reasons why music education needs to be transformed. Many of her students and former students at Indiana University are not only satisfied with the status quo in music education, but demonstrate reluctance about even considering the need for change. Others, she has found, long for improvement, having encountered paternalistic administrators, loneliness, fear, and a loss of enjoyment in teaching and in music. Although the author is happy for the former group, she empathizes with the latter. "Gone are the hope, joy, and love of connecting with students or of the art that led them to teaching in the first place," she writes. "In their place I hear the voices of weariness, discouragement, and ennui" (x). [End Page 211]In addition, Jorgensen has observed the anti-intellectualism abroad in education, evident in a variety of symptoms. One of the most troubling is the idolization of scientific research resulting in a loss of interest in philosophical and historical inquiry. She decries the "declining regard for the long and distinguished narratives of education and for the critical insights that would help guard the profession against repeating past mistakes and making ill-conceived plans. Pretentious jargon invoked by educational scientists and theorists often cloaks a paucity of ideas frequently unintelligible to the teachers it is supposed to benefit, and few teachers read it," she asserts (x).Pointing out that we have lost much of our culture other than that promoted in the popular media, Jorgensen reminds us that, after graduation, high school students no longer play their instruments and that some churches now project words to hymns on large screens for parishioners no longer willing or able to read from a hymnal. She is as appalled as the rest of us by restaurant employees' attempts to sing "Happy Birthday" to celebrating patrons, and she notices that even consumers of culture increasingly rely on media opinions for assistance with choices about art exhibits, books, recordings, and performances.The resegregation of schools, the "back to basics" movement, and public apathy about education are other indicators that transformation is needed. If these reasons are not enough, Jorgensen states that ongoing renewal will always be a necessity for education. Since education is often defined as the process by which culture is transmitted, musicians and artists, as purveyors of culture, Jorgensen believes, can create a humane and holistic music education to serve as a model for education in general. "To conceive of music education as enculturation... requires placing culture at the heart of education," she states. "Regarding music along with other arts as important manifestations of human expression suggests that they should be central and essential to a complete education" (9).The purpose of each chapter is clear from its beginning, and the chapters are concisely summarized. The first, "Setting the Stage," discusses several problems of our present society as they affect education. Jorgensen considers possible resistance to transformation and the need for support from organizations like MENC and NASM. She maintains that transformation can only be achieved through the cooperation of many groups and individuals. One of the most difficult problems would seem to be the one that occurs when groups who have previously been oppressed, such as members of female, economic, ethnic, racial, religious, or other minorities, achieve a measure of power and then begin to behave toward others as their oppressors behaved toward them. She cites the work of Paulo Freire who believes that this phenomenon can only be eradicated through emancipatory education.Jorgensen gives homage to past and present music educators who have already recognized the need for change. She makes the point... (shrink)

Leibniz studies is a distinctive kind of joy. The seventeenth-century polymath made remarkable impacts in a wide-ranging number of domains and their subdomains. The attempt to study one domain in d...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Moral Sentiments and the Structure of the Treatise LOUIS E. LOEB ACCORDING TO NORMAN KEMP SMITH and Thomas Hearn, Hume classified moral sentiments as direct passions.' According to Pb.II A,rdal, Hume classified the basic moral sentiments of approval and disapproval of persons as indirect passions. if either of these interpretations is correct, there is an intimate connection between Books II and 111 of Hume's Treatise. This is because (...) the direct and indirect passions (together with the will) are the subject of Book 11 and moral sentiments are discussed in Book 111. So if moral sentiments are special cases of either direct or indirect passions, the treatment of passions in Book Ii is central to the understanding of Book 111. 1 contend, on the contrary, that Hume's moral sentiments are neither direct nor indirect passions. Consequently, the connection between Books 11 and 111 of the Treatise is much less intimate than A,rdal and Hearn have recently suggested.' i. Hume's Classification of the Impressions of Reflection In the four paragraphs of II, i, I Hume provides an exhaustive "Division of the Subject"--the "subject" being "all the perceptions of the mind. ''4 Nowhere else in the Treatise is a complete "division" to be found. As A,rdal points out, such introductory chapters "are likely to be written after the bulk of the book has been completed, or at least to be carefully revised in the light of the main arguments in the book. ''~ For these reasons, there is a strong presumption that the "division" in!I, i, 1should be taken as canonical. Hume's "division" is straightforward. In the first paragraph, perceptions are divided into ideas and impressions; in the first and second paragraphs, impressions are divided into those of sensation and those of reflection; in the third paragraph, impressions of reflection are divided into the calm and the violent; in the fourth (as I am indebted to Wdham Frankena, Ronald Glossop, and Peter Jones for their most helpful comments. ' Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume (New York: St. Martm'~ Press, 1966), pp. 167-168; and Thomas K. Hearn, Jr., "Ardal on the Moral Sentiments in Hume's rreattse," Phtlosophy 48 (1973):290. z Passton and Value m Hume's "Treatise" (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), pp. I 1, 109-133. For a discussion heavily influenced by Ardal, see Stewart R. Sutherland, "Hume on Morality and the Emotions," Phllosophwal Quarterly 26 (1976) : 14-19 especially. ' See Ardal, pp. I-5, 109-133; and Hearn, pp. 288, 292. 9 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 275; hereafter cited as T followed by page number. 9 Ardal, p. 94. 13951 396 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY indicated by the last sentence of the third), the violent impressions of reflection are divided into the direct and the indirect. The structure is of a genus-species sort, and none of the distinctions cut across each other: J calm i sense of beauty and deformity (T, 276), moral sentiments impressions of reflection = emotions (secondary impressions) violent = passions direct indirect desire, aversion, grief, joy, pride, humility, love, hope, fear (T, 277, 439) hatred (T, 276-277) This classification is based upon the only natural reading of paragraph three and the first sentence of paragraph four of II, i, I. I quote this material, adding my own emphasis and deleting Hume's: The reflective impressions may be divided into two kinds, viz. the calm and the violent. Of the first kind is the sense of beauty and deformity in action, composition, and external objects. Of the second are the passions of love and hatred, grief and joy, pride and humility. This division is far from being exact. The raptures of poetry and music frequently rise to the greatest height; while those other impressions, properly called passions, may decay into so soft an emotion, as to become, in a manner, imperceptible. But as in general the passions are more violent than the emotions arising from beauty and deformity, these impressions have been commonly distinguish'd from each other. The subject of the human mind being so copious and various, I shall here take... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way by Richard SchachtRex WelshonRichard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. xvii + 375 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-82283-3 (cloth); 978-0-226-82286-0 (e-book). Cloth, $49.00; e-book, $48.99.Over the course of his distinguished career, Richard Schacht has written on alienation, value theory, and philosophical anthropology; he has analyzed the work of Hegel and coauthored a set of (...) reflections on Richard Wagner with Philip Kitcher. He has also recently completed the gigantic task of editing the two-volume Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant, and he is the sole editor of the set’s second volume, The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition. Still, for all of these achievements, his most enduring influence on philosophy is likely through his fifty-year-long engagement with the work of Nietzsche, which has produced several books and several dozen articles.Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way is Schacht’s most recent contribution to Nietzsche scholarship. In this book, Schacht investigates the following two-part question: What kind of philosopher was Nietzsche, and what kind of philosophy did he produce? Each of Schacht’s answers reveals a consummate knowledge of Nietzsche’s entire corpus, a comprehensive appreciation of his philosophical project, and a scrupulous appraisal of his philosophical contributions. At once magisterial, scholarly, astute, judicious, congenial, challenging, and occasionally frustrating, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy could have been written only by Schacht, and that is to say, among other things, that it is unique and deserving of praise.Schacht divides Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy into two parts. In the six chapters of the first and longer part, he canvases Nietzsche’s philosophical self-discovery following BT and UM. For Schacht, Nietzsche’s philosophical development begins in the latter half of the 1870s, after he resigned his professorship at the University of Basel, and ends with his 1889 collapse. So, after a prologue first chapter in which the challenges of understanding what kind of philosopher Nietzsche strove to become are discussed, Schacht examines, [End Page 232] in turn, 1878’s HH and 1881’s D (chapter 2); 1882’s Joyful Inquiry (GS), Books I–IV (chapter 3); Z, published in installments between 1883 and 1885 (chapter 4); BGE, from 1886, and 1887’s Joyful Inquiry, Book V (chapter 5); and then 1887’s GM and the final works from 1888, TI, CW, The A, and EH (chapter 6). In the second and somewhat shorter part of the book, Schacht allots five successive chapters to consider whether, and in what ways, Nietzsche can be identified as a nihilist, an existentialist, an individualist, a free spirit, and a naturalist.Given its scope, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy cannot be expected to provide, and should not be criticized for not providing, the kind of detailed topical analyses typical of so much Nietzsche scholarship from the past forty years. Indeed, diving deeply into the current scholarly debates is not one of Schacht’s goals. He tells us he is not interested in trying “to read and understand Nietzsche in terms of the conventions in the recent philosophical literature on various matters being debated as though he were a participant in them” (xiv). Rather, he wants to provide a reading of “Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy on its own terms,” as presented by someone who not only has “a lifetime of engagement with Nietzsche’s texts and thought” but also “cares deeply about philosophy and its future, and Nietzsche’s potential importance in that context” (xiv).Interpreting Nietzsche thusly has limitations. After all, the relation between philosophy and its own past is intimate, reflexive, and continuously interpretive, so one might wonder how Schacht proposes to exhibit Nietzsche’s importance to philosophy without understanding how his thought relates to the discipline’s current state or to what its future might yet become. But perhaps this concern is uncharitable; perhaps Schacht’s point is instead an admonishment against thinking too quickly that because Nietzsche was so far ahead of his time and anticipated so much that has... (shrink)

This book has been written for our time of need. It is an affirmative declaration of human values at a time of crisis in what the author regards as the great moral revolution of our age. It began when Paul Kurtz published the four-page Humanist Manifesto II in The Humanist magazine. The reaction was volcanic. The New York Times carried an extensive front-page story on it, as did hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States and abroad. The controversy is unabated. (...) Theologians throughout the country continue to attack and defend the Manifesto. In Russia, Andrei Sakharov, one of the signers of the Manifesto, was given a warning about his collaboration with Western liberals, and then subjected to a large-scale attack in the Soviet Press. The generative ideas presented in the controversial Manifesto are fully developed in this powerful book. In Part I, Kurtz takes us on a tour of the chief religious and moral philosophies available to Western man at this time. He gives detailed critiques of Christian theism and of Marxism. He shows how the original humanism of Marx has been betrayed in the Communist nations. "The crux of the tragedy of modern Communist societies is that they have abandoned these fundamental human rights . . ." In Part II, "The Humanist Alternative," Kurtz brilliantly develops a positive viewpoint, a dynamic presentation of the elements of "the good life" in which we may realize "the human potential and the fullness of being." The author here describes the virtues of the sensual life, the joys and benefits of physical pleasure, and the various ways by which we achieve true self-realization. This section concludes with chapters on libertarianism, the principle of equality, and the democratic ethic inherent in the humanist philosophy. In Part III the author provides an arresting exposition of international problems and their intelligent solution. He stresses the global consciousness of the humanist outlook and its allegiance to all humanity, and demonstrates how the methods of reason can be applied in our personal lives and in world affairs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12.1 (2002) 103-113 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note Update Searching Across Boundaries: National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetics* While indeed an historical moment, the announcement of the mapping of the human genome has been treated in the literature as a beginning—a new way to think about biology and the ways in which biological concepts are applied to medicine. Issues of both (...) Science and Nature magazines celebrated the event by establishing interdisciplinary websites where readers can access essays on aspects of genome mapping and directly link to databases to search for more information on the topics (IV. Genome Gateway 2001; The Human Genome 2001). Since 1994, the National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetics (NIREHG), a special project of the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRC), has been providing such an integrated information service on ethics and genetics. Designed to enable a wide range of users to go from annotated bibliographies (Scope Notes) and brief essays (called "enotes") to database searching, NIREHG fosters an interdisciplinary approach to research on ethics and genetics. Links are provided between and among Scope Notes and enotes to information maintained on the NIREHG site as well as to sources found throughout the Internet. In providing the following annotations added to NIREHG materials since 1997, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (in its online presence through Project Muse) becomes an additional forum for NIREHG links. "It is a rare and wonderful moment when success teaches us humility, and this, I argue, is precisely the moment at which we find ourselves at the end of the twentieth century" (IV. Keller 2000, p. 7). It is with both joy and humility that we celebrate the mapping of the human genome. [End Page 103] I. Genetic Testing Andrews, Lori B. Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions About Genetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 264 p.Noting the wide impact of genetic testing, Andrews discusses patient self concept, reproduction decisions, confidentiality, discriminations in health insurance and employment, the need for competent counseling, and the legal, ethical, and social regulations she deems important to help solve dilemmas arising from the tests and their ensuing ramifications. She describes three models, pointing out both advantages and problems: a medical model with physician gatekeepers, a public health model that could provide education as well some testing for those unable to afford tests, and a fundamental rights model that could give greater weight to individuals decisions about the use of health care services. The book has 85 pages of footnotes.American Society of Human Genetics. Social Issues Subcommittee on Familial Disclosure. Professional Disclosure of Familial Genetic Information. American Journal of Human Genetics 62 (2): 474-83, February 1998.The ASHG statement outlines points to consider: the general rule of confidentiality, exceptional circumstances that permit disclosure, and the ethical duty to inform patients about familial implications. Background discussion includes: ethical frameworks for disclosure of otherwise confidential information, the duty to warn under law, and international trends and positions.Boetzkes, Elisabeth. Genetic Knowledge and Third-Party Interests. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 8 (4): 386-92, Summer 1999.Protection from the interests of insurers or prospective employers are discussed from the point of view of the ethical basis of the professional obligation to confidentiality as well as the right to privacy of those tested. However, the author supports family members, saying that "first-party resistance to disclosure may be overcome by weighty third-party claims."Chadwick, Ruth; Shickle, Darren; ten Have, Henk; and Wiesing, Urban, eds. The Ethics of Genetic Screening. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. 255 p.Twenty-one chapters and 23 authors provide views of genetic testing/screening in different European countries and offer brief discussions of sociological perspectives, moral and philosophical issues, privacy, reconciling liberty and the common good, and questions raised in genetic testing of children.Clayton, Ellen Wright. Genetic Testing in Children. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 22 (3): 233-51, June 1997.Clayton argues that there is room for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Biblical Economic Ethics: Sacred Scripture’s Teachings on Economic Life by Albino BarreraRaymond Kemp AndersonBiblical Economic Ethics: Sacred Scripture’s Teachings on Economic Life By Albino Barrera LANHAM, MD: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2013. 353 PP. $89.65; KINDLE, $54.49You will not find much direct application of biblical theology to pressing economic issues in this book. Albino Barrera, a Dominican monk who teaches economics and theology at Providence College, gave us that in (...) well-received earlier works on market complicity, political economy, and the evils of scarcity. Keeping to this book’s title, he now gives us a remarkable collation of recent studies on the social and theological contexts of the Bible itself. He seems quite confident that given a comprehensive review, we will intuit modern implications for ourselves and be drawn closer together by our common heritage.Written for a wide audience, Barrera’s clear and readable book compiles fascinating snapshots of the diverse cultural situations and beliefs that unfold across the millennium-spanning canon. Even biblical scholars will enjoy this lively, up-to-date tour of their field.As a monastic, Barrera is careful to show that those New Testament texts that seem to call for divestment of property describe a situation-related special calling and do not make poverty an end in itself. Yet he stresses how the “preferential status of the poor” and the “devaluation of wealth” are prime norms that recur throughout both the Old Testament and New Testament and that he sees backed by both revelation and natural experience.One may find the book limited by the procrustean selectivity that seems inevitable when pre-formed notions (e.g., what is proper to our modern discipline of ethics or to the field of economics) shape our apperceptions of ancient [End Page 205] peoples’ concerns. From Barrera’s viewpoint, ethics has to do primarily with the promulgation and refinement of set norms. So his main goal is to uncover abstract principles and norms for behavior that recur insistently across scripture’s enormous diversity. This, he does beautifully. But in the process, he lets the recurrent trump the emergent.For example, Barrera seems to not fully appreciate the revolutionary impact where Jesus finally declares it impossible for people to bolster their personal stature by pursuing such norms (see, e.g., Mk 10:27). Little attention is given the apostles’ insistence (with Ps 14 and Ps 53) upon this same ethical impasse. For when they find the normative redefined by Christ’s excruciatingly holistic love command, they not only discover their own incapacity but also find themselves catapulted into the totally grace-dependent motivational dynamic described by Paul’s Christian freedom (Rom 3:12, 5, passim, 11:32; Gal 3:22; Jas 2:10).Evidently preoccupied by his quest for the normative, Barrera bypasses the historical priority of Paul and virtually ignores how his grace-responsive freedom pervades the later Gospels and Acts. (He relegates the Paul material to the tail end and accords it but a fraction of the space.)Freedom for Barrera is a social norm—freedom from oppression, slavery, poverty, hunger, and so forth (and he forcefully shows how this is a recurrent theme). But was not Paul, like Jesus before him, hounded and persecuted for his notorious freedom in the use of norms—even those of Mosaic law? Did not the Gospel reduce the normative to a minimum in favor of life-shaping, person-responsive love as the free gift or “fruit of the Spirit”? All of us—the rich and powerful, along with the poor and oppressed—discover our corporate brokenness exposed before God’s grace. Yet in our concomitant response to that same grace, we find our actions newly motivated and gradually reshaped—bonded into covenant community through his judgment of healing re-creation.Again, Barrera does well to stress Sabbath law’s normative force, as mandating times of rest. But one could wish to hear more on how the apostles parleyed this priestly provision into something new, in joyful direct response to a gracious Lord—a freely sabbatic, playfully creative ethic. [End Page 206]Raymond Kemp AndersonWilson CollegeCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions by Christopher M. BrownElizabeth C. Shaw and Staff*BROWN, Christopher M. Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xiii + 487 pp. Cloth, $75.00The contents of the book are straightforwardly announced by the title. Christopher Brown entertains four apparent problems about eternal life in (...) heaven considered by contemporary philosophers and theologians and offers solutions to them from the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The book consists of seventeen chapters together with an introduction and conclusion and is divided into four parts. In the first part Brown lays out the problems and the solutions to them proposed by contemporary philosophers and theologians. In the second part he explains St. Thomas's distinction between essential and accidental reward in heaven and goes on to treat of the former—which consists in the beatific vision, that is, our beholding of God—and its proper accidents—which are delight, joy, and charity. In the third part he then deals with the accidental reward, which has to do with the perfected condition of our glorified bodies, society with other persons, and so on. Finally, in the fourth part Brown, drawing on his expositions of St. Thomas's doctrine in the two previous parts, details Thomistic solutions to the four problems discussed in the first part and argues that these solutions are superior to those proposed by the contemporary philosophers and theologians he has engaged.So, what are the four problems that Brown addresses? Let's present them as questions. (1) Is heaven just a private communion between a human person and God, or is it a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures? (2) Is heaven just a spiritual affair, or are our resurrected bodies a part of it? (3) Is heaven a static or dynamic reality? (4) Is heaven boring?The answers are as follows. Ad primum: Heaven is a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures. Ad secundum: Heaven is a spiritual and physical affair that includes our souls and our resurrected bodies. Ad tertium: Heaven is a dynamic reality. Ad quartum: Heaven is not boring!I cannot cover here all of the specifics of the way Brown shows how St. Thomas arrives at these answers. People who know St. Thomas well, even if they have not reflected much on these problems before, probably will [End Page 135] not have great difficulty thinking through how he might get to the first and second answers, at least in general terms. But the third and fourth, I think, call for further comment. My comments will necessarily be brief.If I understand Brown correctly, he wants to say (and contends that St. Thomas holds) that heaven is dynamic insofar as in heaven we are in act. But we can be in act in two senses: We can be in act in an unchanging way or in a changing way. In heaven my capacities to know God and to love him are both fully perfected, that is, they are fully actualized and undergo no change. But in heaven we will enjoy our resurrected bodies as well, and our bodies will also be active and interacting with other bodies. This activity will entail change. So, either way we will be active in heaven and, therefore, heaven will be something dynamic.What, then, about the problem of boredom? Because we will be perfectly happy in heaven, argues Brown (interpreting St. Thomas), heaven won't be boring. But the matter doesn't end there. Brown points out that Brian Ribeiro, developing an idea of Bernard Williams, objects that a person who is perfectly happy in the way that we are supposed to be in heaven, cannot be personally identical with any person in this life because the conditions of the beatified person and the nonbeatified person are just too radically different for there to be continuity between the two. Brown replies that St. Thomas convincingly shows that God can, by grace, prepare persons in this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness by Jennifer McBrideGlen StassenThe Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness Jennifer McBride New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 310 pp. $74.00Jennifer McBride offers the brilliant proposal that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theme of repentance is the right ingredient for our pluralistic and democratic context, which needs a nontriumphal Christian witness. [End Page 199]My focus on confession (...) and repentance as a nontriumphal public witness is aimed... mostly at white Protestants who benefit in countless recognized and unrecognized ways from being part of the dominant culture, because this reflects my own social location and the churches and para-church groups in which I was raised. Bonhoeffer writes... from a position of social power and privilege and argues from that place that the acknowledgment of guilt is definitive for the church. My theology of public witness defines the church as the body called to repentance—as the body called, in the words of Bonhoeffer, to accept guilt or take responsibility for social sin.(9)McBride shows that “repentance” carries various connotations in Bonhoeffer’s writings. In Discipleship, he “links metanoia with the church’s conformation to the crucified Christ (a prevalent theme throughout his theology).” In Ethics, he links “repentance to the church’s this-worldly activity when he defines the church’s repentance as preparing this ‘penultimate’ world for its redemptive transformation.” In Letters and Papers from Prison, he defines metanoia as “living completely in” this world’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities, taking seriously the suffering of God in the world (14). “As the acceptance of divine judgment, repentance participates in the unfolding of redemption. Thus, it is... energized by hope for the world and humanity, animated by joyful expectation as much as lament, and oriented toward future transformation as much as past and present sin” (107). Interpreting repentance through the person of Christ directly challenges the common understanding that repentance primarily concerns one’s individual standing before God; instead, as participation in Christ, repentance constitutes existence for others. Her interpretation is far richer and more insightful than I can represent in a short review.McBride bases her argument on three dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s theology: Christology, this-worldliness, and ecclesiology (12). By “Christology,” she is pointing to “nothing other than the crucified Christ who accepts responsibility for sin” (139). By “this-worldliness,” we can also point to Christology, in Bonhoeffer’s incarnational theme of entering into the full dimensions of human life. McBride’s ecclesiology urges “that the church’s presence in public life be conformed to Christ’s mode of being in the world” (54).In his Ethics (134–45) Bonhoeffer wrote a profound confession of his own, the churches’ and nation’s guilt that was taken up by some churches and church groups after the war’s end, and then by President Richard von Weizsäcker and Chancellor Willy Brandt. This public repentance has been the key to healing within Germany and in its relation with other nations.McBride credits Larry Rasmussen and John de Gruchy for inspiring us to develop new implications of Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics for our different contexts. So she goes “beyond Bonhoeffer with Bonhoeffer.” [End Page 200]McBride appreciates the pioneering work of Christine Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty, for noticing that Bonhoeffer’s central concept of “acceptance of guilt has not been examined systematically by previous scholars.” She goes beyond Schliesser, emphasizing that as public witness, the church’s confession unto repentance consists of communal, more than individual, acceptance of guilt—“especially the myriad social/structural evils of our political, social, and economic systems.” She appreciates Stanley Hauerwas’s emphasis on ecclesiology but urges him to develop a theology of public witness that communicates that Christ and the church are for, not against, the world, with its pluralistic, not monolithic, culture. She appreciates Jim Wallis’s Call to Conversion, “a clear, detailed, and theologically sophisticated appeal for ecclesial conversion, especially in regard to poverty and war,” but criticizes God’s Politics for being insufficiently theological. She concludes with an ethnographic study of two emerging churches, Eleuthero in Maine... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:84 Reviews THE WAYS OF THE WITTGENSTEINS ACCORDING TO A WAUGH Richard Henry Schmitt U. of Chicago Chicago, il 60637, usa [email protected] AlexanderWaugh. TheHouseofWittgenstein:aFamilyatWar. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Pp. 366. isbn: 0-7475-9185-7. £20.00 (hb). New York: Doubleday, 2009. Pp. 333. isbn: 0-385-52060-3. us$28.95 (hb). Ezach family is happy and unhappy in its own ways. This is hardly surprising zgiven that the family lies at the crossroad of so much human (...) experience. It is the scene for playing out genetics and for working through the rearing and civilizing of children, both nature and nurture. In economic life it constitutes the primary unit, the household. Despite Tolstoy’s ideal, none can ever be com­ pletely happy for every member all the time. And, there is no reason to think that basically happy families are any more the same than unhappy ones. But then none can ever be completely unhappy; or rather, when a family is com­ pletely unhappy it is unlikely that it will remain one. One other factor, however, intrudes on this picture: we tend to be more interested in bad or scandalous news than good. Vicarious experience brings catharsis, possibly helpful in a way. Yet, as the German language recognizes with the word “Schadenfreudez”, we can experience joy at someone else’s sorrow, despite the questions it raises about our empathy. Alexander Waugh is himself the member of a famous family. He has written December 2, 2009 (5:28 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd Reviews 85 its “autobiography” in Fathers and Sons,1 where he is principally concerned with his father Auberon (“Bron”), his grandfather Evelyn, his great-uncle Alec, and his great-grandfather Arthur. Given the family documentation at his disposal and the span of generations, that book covers enough territory, in enough detail, to give us some sense of Waugh family character. You learn what it was like to grow up in the family, down to the odour of Uncle Auberon Herbert’s cologne, “smelling like Cleopatra in her barge on her way to meet Antony for the Wrst time” according to Bron (p. 370, paperback ed.), and the family suspicion that this uncle may have been the illegitimate son of Hilaire Belloc (p. 276). The fathers and sons, from Arthur down to Alexander, all wrote for a living, witty, stylish prose, and sometimes poetry. They especially liked writing about each other in letters, essays, and novels, often to each other in public letters and dedications; and as a consequence Alexander’s book is rich, amusing, intimate, and a bit indiscrete. Arthur’s turn-of-the-century avoidance of emotion in sentimentality grew outmoded, but it was replaced in the family business with newer models, with more Xash and cynicism. When it came to Alexander’s fa­ ther Bron, he was known for his talent at vituperation, and got into verbal and legal scrapes with C. P. Snow and Bertrand Russell among others (p. 407), which led to his getting sacked but only made his journalism more widely read and more valuable to publishers. In Alexander’s disclosure of his family history, there is a sureness of touch that comes from working within his ken. Waugh studied music, and worked as a music critic. In his easy, self-depreci­ ating way, he told an interviewer for The Wall Street Journalz that he got the idea to write this book because of “the most appalling boil on my right index Wnger”. This curtailed his routine enjoyment at the piano, “But then as I sat down and pressed a chord with my left hand I thought of Paul Wittgenstein. I knew about the concerto that Ravel composed for him and I knew that he was Ludwig’s brother. He was bound to have an interesting story.”2 With access to some Witt­ genstein family papers through one of Paul Wittgenstein’s daughters, he began. But a biography of the one-armed pianist soon turned into this “family history”, in part because of the author’s previous success with his own family, but also... (shrink)

The age-old adage "Give a man a fish; he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish he'll eat for the rest of his days", has truly manifested itself in Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child program. His organization seeks "To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning". While it is seemingly a noble humanitarian effort for the (...) enhancement of education, support for the "$100 laptop" has fallen short of its stated goal with only twenty-eight participating countries. The fact that only a limited number of countries are willing to enter the program demonstrates that it does not address the majority of problems faced by developing nations. Inadequate education is one of many pressing social concerns, but its necessity should not be placed above the immediate needs of developing nations. And for an organization devoted to a non-survival-essential cause to pursue such an ambitious objective brings its social significance and ethics under question. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Elizabethan Bacchae STEPHEN ORGEL Euripides’s Bacchae, with its antic hero and celebration of the joys of revenge, would seem to be especially relevant to Elizabethan drama, an ancestor of The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet. In fact, however, it seems to have been practically unknown to the Elizabethans. With the new ProQuest version of EEBO (Early English Books Online) it is now possible to search early English books for (...) specific references; so I paired the name Euripides with books printed in England before 1640 to see what came up. I got 474 hits. Many of these, of course, were duplicates, appearing in works that were issued in multiple editions—the actual figure, however, was still something over three hundred. Most of those, however, were cases in which Euripides’s name simply appears in a list of famous ancient authors. Citations which actually quoted Euripides for the most part indicated no knowledge of the work cited, but were only bits of wisdom that might have come from any of the multitude of collections of aphorisms and moral stories throughout the period. There was only one English edition of a play of Euripides in Greek, The Trojan Women, published by John Day in 1575— continental editions were, of course, easily obtainable, but it must be to the point that English publishers did not see a sufficient market to produce them domestically; and there were no subsequent editions of Day’s Trojan Women. As for The Bacchae, I found only a single case where I believe it is being cited, and in a context, moreover, that indicates some familiarity with the play. John Bishop’s Beautiful Blossoms, a collection of historical anecdotes published in 1577, recounting the history of Demetrius, king of Macedonia, says, “Then fled Demetrius unto Thebes, where one scoffingly applied vnto him that verse arion 28.3 winter 2021 64 the elizabethan bacchae of Euripides: he came vnto the Dyrcean springs, and Ismenus, his divine and goodly fourme and shape being chaunged in to a mortall.”1 This is a version of a bit of Dionysus’s opening speech, I am here at the springs of Dirce, the river Ismenos, Changing my shape from divine to mortal... There is no reason to assume that John Bishop (about whom I can learn nothing) knew the play, but he is certainly citing someone who did. The play, then, to the Elizabethans was either practically unknown or deliberately ignored. It was not translated into English until the 1780s, and then two translations were published within a year of each other—for the English, it was an enlightenment and romantic text. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (delivered 1806, published 1846) and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) were the works that established The Bacchae as the quintessential Greek tragedy, though for Nietzsche, ironically, the two destroyers of the Greek tragic sense, the two great cultural villains, were Euripides the ironist and Socrates the arch-rationalist. But Nietzsche sees Euripides, at the end of his life, having a major change of heart, realizing that Dionysus was simply too powerful to be expunged from art and society; and The Bacchae was thus the fullest expression of this tragic truth. The problems with this argument are manifold: Euripides the ironist is quite evident in The Bacchae, so it hardly represents a change of heart; and the claims of the irrational are fully present in his earlier plays, for example, in Hippolytus, where all the poetic energy is in expressing the uncontrollable violence of passion, and the virtues of morality and self-control are meagre indeed. The essay was soundly refuted in its own time, and Nietzsche withdrew and recanted it. Its celebrity is a modern phenomenon: whatever its historical defects, it speaks to the dangerous attractions of unreason. There is a perverse element in Nietzsche’s argument, too: Dionysus, as the embodiment of revelry, is surely as essential Stephen Orgel 65 to comedy as to tragedy; and one could press this further. At the end of The Symposium, Socrates tells Agathon and Aristophanes, tragic and comic dramatists, that their arts (or crafts: the word is techne) are essentially the same. Heavy weather has... (shrink)

"Some Pow'r did us the giftie grant/ To see oursels as others can't." With that play on Burns' famous line as a preface, Willard Van Orman Quine sets out to spin the yarn of his life so far. And it is a gift indeed to see one of the world's most famous philosophers as no one else has seen him before. To catch an intimate glimpse of his seminal and controversial theories of philosophy, logic, and language as they evolved, and (...) to hear his warm and often amusing comments on famous contemporary philosophers.From his beginnings in Akron, Ohio in the early 1900s, Quine takes us on a tour of over 100 countries over three-quarters of a century, including close observations of the Depression and two world wars. Far from a philosophical tract, it is an ebullient, folksy account of a richly varied and rounded life. When he does dip into philosophy, it is generally of the armchair sort, and laced with a gentle good humor: "There is that which one wants to do for the glory of having done it, and there is that which one wants to do for the joy of doing it. One can want to be a scientist because he wants to see himself as a Darwin or an Einstein, and one can want to be a scientist because he is curious about what makes things tick.... In normal cases the two kinds of motivation are in time brought to terms.... In me the glory motive lingered......In this book, Quine approaches the details of his life the way he has always approached them with a sharp sense of interest, adventure and fun. And he has a skill for picking a word that is just off-center enough to pull an ordinary event out of the humdrum of daily life and evoke its personal meaning. The result is a book of memories that is utterly mesmerizing.Willard Van Orman Quine is the author of numerous books, including Word and Object, published by The MIT Press in 1960.A Bradford Book. (shrink)

__Dante and the Blessed Virgin __is distinguished philosopher Ralph McInerny's eloquent reading of one of western literature's most famous works by a Catholic writer. The book provides Catholic readers new to Dante's _The Divine Comedy _ with a concise companion volume. McInerny argues that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the key to Dante. She is behind the scenes at the very beginning of the _Commedia_, and she is found at the end in the magnificent closing cantos of the _Paradiso_. McInerny (...) also discusses Dante's _Vita Nuova_, where Mary is present as the object of the young Beatrice's devotion. McInerny draws from a diverse group of writers throughout this book, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, and George Santayana, among others. It is St. Thomas, however, to whom McInerny most often turns, and this book also provides an accessible introduction to Thomistic moral philosophy focusing on the appetites, the ordering of goods, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders, the classification of capital vices and virtues, and the nature of the theological virtues. This engagingly written book will serve as a source of inspiration and devotion for anyone approaching Dante's work for the first time as well as those who value the work of Ralph McInerny. "Dante was a literary genius with a profound understanding of St. Thomas Aquinas and the _philosophia perennis_ that structured and permeated the _Divina Commedia_. Who better to help us get beyond the surface to the depths of Dante than the most literarily genial of Thomas' twentieth century disciples, the indefatigable Ralph McInerny? Dante needed guides, from Vergil to Beatrice, to reach the summit of _Paradiso_. Fortunately, we have Ralph McInerny to accompany us on the same journey." --_Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., Founder and Editor, Ignatius Press_ "Weaving together poetry, philosophy and theology, Ralph McInerny shows that 'the Blessed Virgin Mary is the key to Dante.' Starting with the _Vita Nuova _and the beginning of the _Divine Comedy_, this becomes ever more explicit throughout the great poem, till the magnificent closing cantos of the _Paradiso_. The book is beautifully written, making sense of every step, however complex at times, of the great journey to the gate of heaven described by Dante in the _Commedia_, drawing on Scripture, on Aquinas, on philosophers like Aristotle, on a medley of modern and contemporary writers, with immense learning, always worn lightly and made easily accessible. Dominant are themes that concern everyone, such as love or happiness, are treated with freshness and clarity so the reader is made to feel he or she is discovering them anew. The total effect is joy induced by the incredible wealth of content of this little book and by the light it sheds on so many vital issues." --_Thomas De Koninck, Laval University_. (shrink)