The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak to the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

Newman’s explicit presentation of the ideal type, “the gentleman,” appears first and foremost in his Oratory papers of 1847 and 1848, and appears only secondarily, and then but partially, four and five years later in his Dublin Discourses of 1852. This essay traces lines of similarity and of difference between these successive portraits and distinguishes both from the attractive, better-known sketch Newman presents as Lord Shaftesbury’s, the “beau ideal” of the man of the world.

After considering the meaning of “wisdom” in the Hellenic and Semitic Traditions, this essay examines Newman’s views about “worldly wisdom” in both a practical and a philosophical sense and then considers “holy wisdom” as contemplative and transcendent.

Ciudad Cayalá in Guatemala brands itself as the country’s first private city. I turn to Hannah Arendt to show how and why Cayalá does not and cannot provide the space of appearance she argues is needed to support the possibility of political action. I show how Arendt provides two apparently distinct phenomenological accounts in The Human Condition—one historically-oriented and the other politically-oriented—that articulate how Cayalá fails in its aspiration to privatize the political. Yet the apparent divergence between her accounts raises (...) concern about her relevance for liberatory feminist projects. To demonstrate how and why Arendt’s political phenomenology is aligned with certain feminist aims, I also generate a Cayaláian reading of Arendt to demonstrate the coherence of her two phenomenological accounts through interpreting her thinking by way of Cayalá’s architecture. This article enacts a dialogue between Arendt and Cayalá, mediated by feminist and architectural theory, concerning why efforts toward the privatization of cities will fail. (shrink)

Newman’s dramatic poem, “The Dream of Gerontius”, was set to music by Edward Elgar in 1900. This essay brings out the sympathy of mind and heart between poet and composer, and perhaps between them both and the listener of today, as well as the universality and depth of the human stake in some kind of personal and peopled life after death.

What is the significance of Newman’s Mediterranean Journey of 1832–1833? This essay provides a triple-framed response: historically, Newman’s journey was a postlude to his removal as a tutor of Oriel College and a prelude to the Oxford Movement; existentially, his journey was a “realization” of geographical learnings and philosophical ideas that had previously been “notional”; analogically, his journey hadfascinating parallels with the Oxonian classical “types” of Homer’s Odysseus and Virgil’s Aeneas.

Between 1944 and 1954, Heidegger wrote five dialogues – or conversations – that stage philosophical discussions. I argue these texts develop a yet unacknowledged Heideggerian pedagogy of conversation. From the characters he conjures to the topics of their discussions, Heidegger underscores the importance of teaching and learning differently in each conversation and shapes his own pedagogical sensibility. Each text uniquely elaborates a particular element of his pedagogy, including the importance of attending to attunement, making mistakes, coming together in community, poetic (...) interpretation, and the dangers of conversational language itself. Only in reading the conversations together does Heidegger’s conversational pedagogy emerge. Above all, the teacher must resist assuming an authoritative role with her students; the Heideggerian teacher must learn to silently gesture toward the locale of the question-worthy by preserving its alterity. (shrink)

In the 1920s and 30s, Heidegger developed three explicit readings of Plato’s Phaedrus. These readings emphasize different dimensions of Plato’s dialogue and, at times, seem even to contradict one another. Though Heidegger pursues quite different interpretations of the dialogue, he remains steadfast in praising this Platonic dialogue above all others. I argue that these explicit readings provide fertile ground for reconsidering Heidegger’s engagement with Plato and not just with Platonism. I further develop an argument that a fourth, implicit reading of (...) Phaedrus can be found in Heidegger’s own dialogical text from the late 1940s, “das abendländische Gespräch”. I suggest that it is in this conversational text, where Plato’s name is never once mentioned, that Heidegger manages his most authentic engagement with the Platonic dialogue and with Plato himself. (shrink)

On the eve of the presidential inauguration, the U.S. health system faces rising costs of care, growing numbers of uninsured, wide variations in quality of care, and mounting public dissatisfaction. Despite spending more on health care than any other country, a recent Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health Care System National Scorecard reports that the United States is lagging far behind other major industrialized countries — all of which provide universal health insurance — in five key domains: healthy (...) lives, access, quality, equity, and efficiency. U.S. national performance is well below benchmarks of top performance set by other countries or high performing states, hospitals, or health plans within the United States, with broad disparities in experience depending on geographic location, income, race/ethnicity, and insurance coverage. National leadership is required to manage the growing health care crisis in the United States and improve care for all Americans. (shrink)

This article explores how the intellectual and spiritual sensibilities of the French Catholic literary critic, Charles Du Bos (1882-1939), provide an insight into the construction of a particular "third-way" Catholic intellectual form of engagement during the interwar period. It is argued that the intellectual disposition underpinning Du Bos's third way rests fundamentally upon an accommodation of the "tragic." The evolving concept of tragedy in Du Bos's life and thought, before his conversion to Catholicism and beyond, facilitates his embrace of an (...) "ethic of responsibility," which is deployed in his third-way politico-ethical position on the Munich crisis of 1938. (shrink)

Dialogue, as a philosophical form, enables the exploration of the conditions, limits, and consequences of understanding arguments. Two philosophers who undertook to write dialogues—Plato and Heidegger—feature moments in philosophical conversation in which understanding, on its own, fails to convince an interlocutor of an argument. In this article, I examine the philosophical stakes of the collisions which unfold in Plato’s Gorgias, between Socrates and Callicles, and in Heidegger’s “Triadic Conversation,” between the Guide and the Scientist. Plato’s Socrates is ostensibly unsuccessful in (...) persuading Callicles to adopt his position while Heidegger’s Guide is able to support the Scientist in learning a new way of thinking. I argue that it is Heidegger’s attention to feeling as a philosophically significant phenomenon which can overcome trans-rational resistance which may persist even after truth has been determined. (shrink)

Offers the first comprehensive study of Martin Heidegger's five conversational texts.

For the first time, the English-speaking world will have full access to the seminal writings of one of the most important sources of contemporary continental thought, Wilhelm Dilthey. This is the ground-laying first of six projected volumes which will allow Dilthey's influential writings on the philosophical understanding of history and culture to be more fully recognized, reexamined, and appropriated by those who are interested in the nineteenth-century roots of phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and critical theory.

Many are calling for concrete mechanisms of oversight for health research involving artificial intelligence (AI). In response, institutional review boards (IRBs) are being turned to as a familiar model of governance. Here, we examine the IRB model as a form of ethics oversight for health research that uses AI. We consider the model's origins, analyze the challenges IRBs are facing in the contexts of both industry and academia, and offer concrete recommendations for how these committees might be adapted in order (...) to provide an effective mechanism of oversight for health‐related AI research. (shrink)

The Bible has influenced contemporary culture both positively and negatively. The present volume is a collection of papers that were discussed at an international colloquium on the use of the Bible in Ethics in the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield in April 1995. Participants came from many parts of the world and from different backgrounds, and the papers reflect their varied interests and the contexts in which they work. The contributors, in addition to the three editors, (...) are John Barton, Bruce Birch, Mark Brett, Mark Chapman, David Clines, Philip Davies, Cheryl Exum, Stephen Fowl, Norman Gottwald, John Haldane, Walter Houston, Sharon Ringe, Chrisopher Rowland, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Gerald West. (shrink)

Katherine Sarah Moody and Steven Shakespeare begin this collection of essays, produced from the inaugural conference of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion (Liverpool Hope University, 2009), by reflecting on life’s ‘haunting’ of philosophy. Life’s dynamism—constantly shifting, fluctuating, hesitating and pushing forward, stretching between birth and death in anything but a safely predictable manner—has always been problematic for philosophy, resisting categorisation and explanation. They present life as an ongoing hermeneutical negotiation, wherein ‘lies the possibility of affirmation’ (p. 1). (...) However, from which standpoint should we affirm life? Immanence or transcendence? Or, with Derrida, should we foster a notion of survival that confounds this dualistic separation (p. 2)?Starting with Kant and Hegel, the editors provide a contextual background and discuss the problems of separating organic life from inorganic nature and the organic human body from unifying super. (shrink)

Chapman et al. (2025) call for updating the Common Rule to extend individual-based research protections (especially IN data-centric genomic research) to selected social communities. They provide an...

This, the twenty-seventh volume in the annual series of publications by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, features a number of distinguised contributors addressing the topic of criminal justice. Part I considers "The Moral and Metaphysical Sources of the Criminal Law," with contributions by Michael S. Moore, Lawrence Rosen, and Martin Shapiro. The four chapters in Part II all relate, more or less directly, to the issue of retribution, with papers by Hugo Adam Bedau, Michael Davis, Jeffrie (...) G. Murphy, and R. B. Brandt. In the following part, Dennis F. Thompson, Christopher D. Stone, and Susan Wolf deal with the special problem of criminal responsibility in government-one of great importance in modern society. The fourth and final part, echoing the topic of NOMOS XXIV, Ethics, Economics, and the Law , addresses the economic theory of crime. The section includes contributions by Alvin K. Klevorick, Richard A. Posner, Jules L. Coleman, and Stephen J. Schulhofer. A valuable bibiography on criminal justice by Andrew C. Blanar concludes this volume of NOMOS. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

"A major transformation in thought took place during the Southern Sung (1127-1279). A new version of Confucian teaching, Tao-hsueh Confucianism (what modern scholars sometimes refer to as Neo-Confucianism), became state orthodoxy, a privileged status which it retained until the twentieth century." "Existing studies of the new Confucianism generally depict a single line of development to and from Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the greatest theoretician of the tradition. In this study of unprecedented scope, however, Hoyt Cleveland Tillman offers an integrated intellectual (...) history of the development of Tao-hsueh Confucianism which for the first time places Chu Hsi within the context of his contemporaries. Tillman's methodological strategy allows a rich, complex picture of the Tao-hsueh movement to emerge - one that is sure to transform the field of Sung Confucianism." "To reconstruct the evolution of the Tao-hsueh group, Tillman studies a number of Confucians from four distinct periods, reflecting the basic diversity that existed among them. His discussion is deeply grounded in political and philosophical history and in research on the social networks that joined the members of the Tao-hsueh group. Within this framework, he provides a vivid account of the changing scope of the movement, tracing its development into a "fellowship" and at times a political faction and demonstrating its movement from diversity to gradually increasing exclusiveness, particularly under the influence of Chu Hsi. Close attention is given to confrontational writings and debates within the group, which covered such issues as humaneness, the function of the mind, uses of the Book of Changes, social welfare programs, teaching methods, expediency, and the grounds for knowledge and authority." "A superbly erudite work, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy is an invaluable contribution to the study of the history of Confucian thought in China."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Isocrates and Civic EducationRobert G. SullivanIsocrates and Civic Education. Edited by Takis Poulakis and David Depew. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Pp. x + 277. $50.00, hardcover.Henry Burrowes Lathrop, in his magisterial Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman, adopted a distinctly apologetic tone for having included in that book a lengthy gloss of Isocrates' writings. He felt constrained to do so, noting, (...) "This fairly long exposition has been necessary, since Isocrates is little read nowadays." Well, of course, "nowadays" Isocrates is read a great deal, and he is generally considered to be one of the more important figures in the classical rhetorical tradition. There are a variety of reasons for the revival of Isocrates' fortunes; he has always been accepted as an exemplar of style, and has exerted strong influences in a number of historical eras, but he is seen increasingly as an original and significant rhetorical theorist. However, the strongest attraction to scholars of our era is the connection by Isocrates of two concepts, rhetorical discourse and civic education, in what he called hê tôn logôn padieia. At the nexus of these ideas is not merely a historically interesting aspect of classical rhetorical theory but an important link between rhetorical theory and political practice, of heightened importance to a democratic culture.The volume under consideration gathers some of the best informed contemporary scholars to address this confluence. The ten essays include work by classicists, philosophers, and rhetoricians, all of whom are working in an explicitly interdisciplinary posture. The volume is divided into five thematic sections, with two essays contributed on each of the themes, each pair addressing different aspects of Isocrates' notion of civic education.The first section addresses the shape and purpose of the Isocratean program of civic education. The central question addressed by these essays is fundamental. If we grant the generality that Isocrates has a program of civic education, what are the particular goals of his pedagogy? Simply put, what civic virtues can one expect to acquire from an education in the Isocratean system? For Josiah Ober the route to the answering of this question is a careful and extraordinarily interesting reading of Isocrates great apologia, Antidosis. Ober sees Isocrates attempting to develop in his students a "complex and integral identity" (39) that will allow them to remain both true to themselves and useful to the city, a careful blending of soul-craft and state-craft. Takis Poulakos focuses on the epistemological foundation of Isocratean practice by making a careful account of Isocrates' use of the term doxa. Poulakos does an excellent [End Page 174] job of cutting through the thicket of Isocratean nuance and correctly identifies the theoretically charged notion of doxa as being both the process and product of informed conjecture.The next six essays are, in essence, comparative, laying Isocratean concepts of civic virtue and pedagogy against those of the sophists, Aristotle, and Plato. John Poulakos deftly separates Isocrates' purposes and pedagaogy from the sophists Protagoras and Gorgias. Particularly striking is the distinction Poulakos draws between how Isocrates and the sophists conceived of the power of language. The sophists, having a "dynastic" conception of language, imagine that mastering rhetoric gives one direct access to tyranical power over the individual psyche. Isocrates, less sure of (or perhaps ethically nervous about) language's capacity for political witchcraft, adapts a "hegemonic" notion of logos as acivilizing force, a means of leadership toward good ends. Ekaterina Haskins contrasts the "playful iconoclasm" of Gorgias with the "political responsibility" of Isocrates (85) in the varying ways they make use of the mythopoetic tradition. Davis Konstans contributes an extremely interesting examination of important matters upon which Isocrates and Plato find themselves in agreement, notably the deficiencies of Athenian democracy and the preferred role of the intellectual in society. Konstans' position is very stimulating, if at first glance counterintuitive, as the greater part of modern scholarship has aimed to force these two figures into opposing camps. Kathryn Morgan also begins her essay by focusing on those things Plato and Isocrates agreed upon, noting that both were deeply dissatisfied with conventional civic education in Athens. From this, Morgan turns to... (shrink)

The consensus is that musical works and other ‘multiple’ artworks are abstract objects of some sort. According to the standard objections to musical materialism, multiple artworks cannot be identified with any concrete manifestation since concrete manifestations are many, and one thing cannot be identical to many. Multiple artworks are particularly good, while particular concrete manifestations are particularly bad, at surviving the destruction of particular concrete manifestations. Finally, multiple artworks cannot be identified with a particular sum of concrete manifestations since sums (...) and works differ modally. This paper aims to show that by appealing to recent work on the metaphysics of material objects, musical materialists avoid the standard objections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:GOD, EMOTION, AND CORPOREALITY: A THOMIST PERSPECTIVE 1 MARCEL SAROT University of Utrecht Utrecht, The Netherlands I. Introduction WHEN WE TAKE" impassibility" to mean" immutbility with regard to one's feelings or the quality of ne's inner life," 2 the number of adherents to the doctrine of divine impassibility has continuously decreased during the present century. Slowly but surely the concept of an immutable and impassible God has given way (...) to the concept of a sensitive, emotional, passionate God. Before the Second World War this tendency was restricted to British theology,3 but since then it has spread to the rest of Europe, notably to France and Ger1 A first draft of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Aquinas Research Group of the Catholic Theological University of Utrecht (The Netherlands ) in May, 1990. I would like to thank the other participants for their useful comments. The paper also profited from the valuable comments of Prof. Dr. Vincent Brummer and Dr. Christoph Schwi:ibel. The writing of this paper forms part of a research project on divine passibility, supported by the Dutch Research Foundation for Theology and Religious Studies (STEGON), and funded by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Research (NWO). 2 I have argued for this definition in my article " Patripassianism, Theopaschitism and the Suffering of God: Some Historical and Systematic Considerations," Religious Studies 26 (1990) : 363-375. a See A. van Egmond, De Lijdende God in de Britse Theologie van de Negentiende Eeuw: De Bijdrage van Newman, Maurice, McLeod Campbell en Gore aan de Christelijke Theopaschitische Traditie (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1986); J. Kenneth Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), pp. 127-166; Doctrine in the Church of England: The Report of the Commission o·n Christian Doctrine Appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1922 (London: SPCK, 1938), pp. 55-56. 61 62 MARCEL SAROT many, to the United States and to Asia.4 By now most of the theologians who explicitly state their views on divine impassibility hold that this doctrine is to a greater or lesser degree false, and Ronald Goetz rightly asserts "that the rejection of the ancient doctrine of divine impassibility has become a theological commonplace." 5 Nevertheless the debate on this issue is not yet closed. Recently Richard Creel published a thorough study in defense of divine impassibility,6 which, I expect, will prove quite influential. Other theologians who defend the doctrine can be cited as well.7 To a large extent, the arguments which these theologians put forward in favor of divine impassibility are taken from the classic Christian theological texts. Among these, the writings of Aquinas are not the least important and no one will be surprised to hear that he is frequently cited in this connection. However, what has surprised me in my study of the debate on the issue of divine impassibility is that one of the most important arguments Aquinas 4 On passibilist tendencies in modern theology, see Richard Bauckham, " ' Only the Suffering God Can Help ' : Divine Passibility in Modern Theology," Themelios 9 (1984) : 6-12; Warren McWilliams, The Passio1i of God: Divine Swffering in Contemporary Protestant Theology (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985); Van Egmond, De Lijdende God, pp. 28-31, and "Theopaschitische Tendenzen in de Na-Oorlogse Protestantse Theologie," Gereformeerd Theologisch Tijdschrift 79 (1979): 161-177; Marcel Sarot, "De Passibilitas Dei in de Hedendaagse Westerse Theologie: Een Literatuuroverzicht," Kerk en Theologie 40-3 (1989) : 196-206. 5 Ronald Goetz, "The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy," The Christian Century 103 (1986): 385. Also see the literature cited in the preceding note. 6 Richard E. Creel, Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 7 See, for instance, Brian Davies, Thinking about God (London: Chapman, 1985), pp. 155-158; William J. Hill, "Does Divine Love Entail Suffering in God?," in: B. L. Clarke & E. T. Long, eds., God and Temporality (New York: Paragon House, 1984), pp. 55-71 ; id., " The Doctrine of God after Vatican II," The Thomist 51 (1987); pp. 412-414; Herbert McCabe, "The Involvement of God," New Blackfriars 66 (1985) : 464-476, reprinted in Herbert McCabe... (shrink)

It is plausible that the universe exists: a thing such that absolutely everything is a part of it. It is also plausible that singular, structured propositions exist: propositions that literally have individuals as parts. Furthermore, it is plausible that for each thing, there is a singular, structured proposition that has it as a part. Finally, it is plausible that parthood is a partial ordering: reflexive, transitive, and anti-symmetric. These plausible claims cannot all be correct. We canvass some costs of denying (...) each claim and conclude that parthood is not a partial ordering. Provided that the relevant entities exist, parthood is not anti-symmetric and proper parthood is neither asymmetric nor transitive. (shrink)

Unconsented pelvic exams under anesthesia are assaults cloaked in defense of healthcare education. Preemptive linguistic qualifiers “presumed” or “implied” attempt to justify such violations with flippancy toward their oxymoronic implications: to suggest a priori that consent can be assumed undermines its otherwise standalone social, ethical, and medico-legal reverence. In this paper I conceptualize “medical sexual assault” and argue that presumed consent for intimate exams exemplifies its definition. By bluntly describing pelvic exams as “penetration,” this work aims to reify the intimate (...) reality of the clinical label “pelvic exam” and to call attention to cisheteronormative and androcentric assumptions involved in its practice. Additionally, this scholarship seeks to create a foundation toward broader work in conceptualizing clinical rape culture. Given recent national survey data indicating a surprising frequency of unconsented intimate exams, detailed language as to their problematics is necessary for ongoing legal and ethical efforts. Explicit consent for intimate exams must be the standard of care for conscious and unconscious patients. (shrink)

Some hold that musical works are fusions of, or coincide with, their performances. But if performances contain wrong notes, won't works inherit that property? We say ‘no’.

Johnson and Hudecki argue that Bernard Suits fails to refute Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ view of games because Suits’s account of how games begin, how they are played, and the ends they involve, fails to match basic facts of player experience. In reply, the current paper describes three keys to interpreting The Grasshopper: (1) distinguishing the four perspectives from which Suits describes games, (2) recognizing Suits' dispositional view of rule following, and (3) understanding the geometrical metaphor Suits uses to describe rules. (...) In light of these, this paper argues that Johnson and Hudecki’s critiques are either mistaken or are actually affirmations of Suits' position. (shrink)