Although David Mitrany’s international thought is not usually associated with the concept of the international anarchy, I argue that his analysis actually compares two forms of anarchical order. The first form is the order associated with the relations between states, while the second is his functional alternative to this order. The functional approach is anarchical in the sense that it remains an order without an orderer. In first analysing the dynamics and failings of the inter-state order, and then suggesting pragmatic (...) process-orientated solutions to those failings, I argue that Mitrany follows a similar approach to his classical realist contemporaries. (shrink)

Before his death in 1989, Gilbert Simondon wrote two major books consisting of his principal and complementary theses, both defended in 1958. The complementary thesis on the mode of existence of technical objects was published in 1958, while it was only in 1964 that sections of his principal thesis on individuation were made available to the public (and even then only the chapters dedicated to the regimes of physical and vital individuation, excluding those dealing with psychic and collective individuation.) Over (...) the course of his career, Simondon produced other major texts, but only in the form of unpublished courses or conference presentations published in poorly distributed journals. Some of these texts have .. (shrink)

Locke's main semantic thesis is that words stand for, or signify, ideas. He says this over and over again, though the phraseology he employs varies. In Book III chapter 2 alone we find the following statements of the thesis: ‘ … Words … come to be made use of by Men, as the Signs of their Ideas’ [III.2.1; 405:10-11); The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and (...) immediate Signification’ [III.2.1; 405:15-17]; ‘Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them’ [III.2.2; 405:21-2]; That then which Words are the Marks of, are the Ideas of the Speaker’ [III.2.2; 405:27-8]; ‘ …. (shrink)

The political year of 1977 was essentially marked by the organizing of an anticipated parliamentary election and by the forming of a new government coalition. The aftermath of these elections and the reactions to the forming of the Tindemans Vcoalition cabinet were the main factors which conditioned the evolution of partie in the course of that year.

The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins--where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future--the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends--our own and (...) the ending of the world. I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose--for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending. (shrink)

Philosophy has been dominated by the view that emotions do a perfect job in producing knowledge about the inner and the outer world. Until recently this was the mark of standard naturalism but with the early Sartre and Merleau-Ponty it became central to contemporary phenomenology. In part because there is a persistent difficulty in understanding the relation between reasoning and feeling. In part because there is no scientific evidence for the ability to reason. There are many accounts of emotion (...) but few attempts to understand reasoning. My assumption is that emotions assist only with collecting data while reasoning is responsible for generating meaning about the inner and outer world. In order to understand that, we must approach reasoning without mixing ontology with metaphysics. Second, we must provide a compelling realistic model of reasoning. In this paper I sketch out a version of it. Overall, I argue that that we must find a way to re-integrate reasoning within the contemporary philosophical and scientific vocabulary if we wish to understand the conscious mind. (shrink)

RESUMO Analisar linhas delimitadoras de um certo desenvolvimento tecnológico é uma tarefa já empreendida por diversos autores. Este é um tipo de abordagem que se inspira em parte em ação semelhante empreendida em relação à ciência. Neste artigo pretendemos apresentar algumas linhas, a que chamamos tendências, que marcam as tecnologias móveis, como celulares, smartphones ou tablets. Estudamos alguns artefactos e funcionalidades que, não sendo exclusivos deste tipo de dispositivo, marcam direções e hegemonias. Para o efeito, desenvolvemos uma análise sociotécnica que (...) se centra em uma observação e utilização desse tipo de tecnologia. O resultado é uma tipologia que mostra cinco tendências: realismo; continuidade técnico-corporal; prioridade ao contexto; velocidade; e compatibilidade/multifuncionalidade. Essas diferentes formulações sociotécnicas permitem compreender como essas materialidades inscrevem-se no espaço social, ao mesmo tempo que exibem projetos que emergem de intenções sociais. O proliferar das tecnologias móveis faz com que a compreensão dessas dinâmicas seja de enorme relevância para questionarmos o futuro tecnológico que se instala. ABSTRACT The delimitation of defining lines of certain technological development is something that several authors already established. This kind of approach is inspired in similar task applied to science. In this work it is intended to present some lines, that we call tendencies, which mark mobile technologies development, like mobile phones, smartphones or tablets. This work makes an analysis of some artifacts and its features, which make some directions and hegemonic dominations, although they are not exclusive of these technologies. It is applied a sociotechnical analysis based on observation and on the use of this kind of technologies. The output is the identification of five tendencies: realism; techno-body continuity; priority to context; velocity; and compatibility/multi-functionality. This different sociotechnical forms allow the understanding of how these materialities are inscribed in social space, and how some projects are a result of social intentions. The proliferation of mobile technologies shows by itself the relevance of this approach in order to question technological future. (shrink)

The conference on Health, Law and Human Rights: Exploring the Connections held last fall in Philadelphia was a telling moment in the complex history of a movement — the “health and human rights movement” for want of a better term — inaugurated by the pioneering work of Jonathan Mann, whose memory the Conference honored. The François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights — founded by Mann and carrying on his legacy — was pleased to co-sponsor the conference. The (...) conference and this symposium issue containing the main papers provide an excellent opportunity to take stock of that movement by means of a commentary based on the papers. This commentary is made from a resolutely human rights perspective, with the aim of engaging the authors in a dialogue on whether and to what extent each article advances knowledge about the interconnectedness and mutually reinforcing character of health and human rights, which is the lasting legacy of Jonathan Mann. (shrink)

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: (...) because the attack set Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

Practical wisdom enables moral decision-making and action by aligning one’s apprehension of proximate goods with a distal, socially embedded interpretation of a more ultimate Good. A focus on purpose within the overall process mutually informs human moral psychology and moral AI development in their examinations of practical wisdom. AI practical wisdom could ground an AI system’s apprehension of reality in a sociotechnical moral process committed to orienting AI development and action in light of a pluralistic, diverse interpretation of that Good. (...) Defining AI purpose in terms of the human struggle to determine the moral “ought” (versus the way reality is) can overcome practical and normative limitations of principle-based approaches to AI ethics without requiring idiosyncratic moral reasoning or a premature commitment to a single ethical theory, which could hinder navigating the moral implications of future unknowns. Dividing practical wisdom into proximate, mediating, and distal processes enables each division to incorporate the moral dimensions of the situation, individual AI system, and sociotechnical community, respectively. Drawing upon externalist (4E) and ecological cognitive psychology theories to extend Xavier Zubiri’s sentient intelligence, proximate apprehension of what an object affords the perceiver includes affordances for practical and moral purposes. Those apprehensions are structured by moral and other social-cognitive schemas that mediate moral constructs, the apprehended situation, and individual commitments and other motivating identifications in a process Ignacio Ellacuria calls historical reality. Distally, Josiah Royce’s community of interpretation characterizes one way of organizing a sociotechnical process to synthesize diverse interpretations of the Good, orient AI moral practice, and align AI development with human and AI moral purpose. (shrink)

Because of the interest and the new light that historical-critical reconstruction ofZubiri’s thought provides, this article expounds one of the less well-known aspects of hisbiography: the modernist crisis in which the young Zubiri was immersed, a crisis thatdeeply marked deeply the Catholic Church in the 20thcentury. First some hypotheses aresketched about how Zubiri lived, suffered and weathered this crisis, and then the articleseeks to delimit specifically Zubiri’s early modernist positions. Then their theological evolution is framed among the fathers of Vatican (...) II, and allusion is made to the impact that thisearly crisis had on the author’s whole philosophical, theological and life trajectory. It endsby outlining the question of whether today we have, from a theological perspective, an authentic surmounting of the modernist crisis, and of the role that Zubiri’s theological positions and the theologies of the cross can play in it.Ante el interés y las nuevas luces que arroja la reconstrucción histórico-crítica del pensamiento zubiriano el artículo abunda en uno de los aspectos menos conocidos de su biografía: la crisis modernista en la que se vio sumido el Zubiri joven, una crisis que marcóprofundamente a la iglesia católica en el siglo XX. En primer lugar se bosquejan algunashipótesis sobre como Zubiri vivió, sufrió y atravesó esta crisis y se intenta acotar la especificidad de sus planteamientos modernistas juveniles. Después se enmarca su evoluciónteológica entre los padres del concilio vaticano II y se alude al impacto que tuvo esta crisisjuvenil en la entera trayectoria filosófica, teológica y vital del autor, para acabar planteandola cuestión de si hoy se da, desde una perspectiva teológica, una auténtica superación de lacrisis modernista y del papel que pueden jugar en ello, los planteamientos teológicos zubirianos y las teologías de la cruz. (shrink)

A focus on the ideological use of popular culture has been one of the major innovations in the study of the Cold War over the past years. Films played a central role in the popular culture of that period and the spy genre was a very important direction in the battle for winning domestic and global hearts and minds for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Cinematography had a critical importance because it met the demands of both entertainment (...) and ideological functions. Utilising extensive archival research in film production files, this article attempts to fill a gap in the literature by providing an overview of how the tensions between East and West were exploited into the Romanian films of the first two decades of the Cold War. Focusing on the cultural and political context in which films such as Viața învinge (Life Triumphs—Dinu Negreanu, 1951), Alarmă în munți (Alarm in the Mountains—Dinu Negreanu, 1955), Vultur 101 (Eagle 101—Andrei Călărașu, 1957), Secretul cifrului (The Secret Code—Lucian Bratu, 1960) and Pisica de mare (Stingray—Gheorghe Turcu, 1964) were produced, while analysing the evolution of the image of spies and secret agents in these cinematic productions, this paper reveals how the spy film genre emerged in communist Romania during the period when Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was in power, and how it contributed to the creation of images that marked the collective mind of the period for decades. (shrink)

My objective in this article is to consider the implications of Bernard Stiegler’s theory of the neganthropocene for the politics of knowledge and education. Stiegler sets out his theory of...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristophanes: ThesmophoriazusaeElizabeth W. ScharffenbergerColin Austin and S. Douglas Olson, eds. Aristophanes: Thesmophoriazusae. With intro. and comm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. cviii + 363 pp. 2 color plates. Cloth, $195.This long-awaited edition of Thesmophoriazusae is a welcome newcomer to the Oxford University Press series of commentaries on the comedies of Aristophanes. Colin Austin and S. Douglas Olson have collaborated to produce a generous work of scholarship that offers (...) a comprehensive perspective on this Aristophanic comedy, which playfully imagines the tragedian Euripides and his kinsman-by-marriage (the "Inlaw") fighting for their lives as they seek to allay the wrath of the matrons of Athens, who have been angered by Euripides' representations of female characters, during an annual women's festival (the Thesmophoria) honoring Demeter and Persephone. The volume offers a new and carefully edited text, which incorporates emendations that Austin has already proposed in separately published articles, and an informative apparatus criticus. On every page of the text there is a second apparatus (standard in Oxford University Press's recently published editions of Aristophanes) that indicates where words and verses are cited in the works of later authors (e.g., Philostratus, Lucian) and [End Page 140] in ancient and medieval lexica (e.g., Hesychius, the Suda). The introduction and meticulously detailed commentary supply extensive information about the comedy, the circumstances of its original production in 411 b.c.e., its relationship to other Aristophanic dramas, the history of its transmission, and a host of related topics. A bibliography, two indices (one for Greek words and one for general references), and two color plates of the Würzburg krater, representing the comedy's parody of Euripides' Telephus, complete the volume. Students and scholars with a variety of interests and needs will find this edition of Thesmophoriazusae most useful. Thanks to its editors' erudition and the thoughtfulness of their presentation, it is also a pleasure to read.In the introduction's summary of Thesmophoriazusae's manuscript tradition (lxxxix-xcviii), the survey of the most frequent errors in Ravennas 429 ("R," the tenth-century manuscript that is the only independent witness for its complete text) permits readers to get a sense of the kinds of emendations that have become common property in most of the editions published since the Renaissance. These conventional emendations aside, Thesmophoriazusae's text still leaves much room for editorial discretion, which Austin and Olson always exercise judiciously (even if one disagrees on occasion with their choices). Most importantly, a keen appreciation of Aristophanes' humor consistently informs their decisions concerning emendation, as is revealed by the interpretations of the jokes in 12 (defending the verse against deletion), 232 (retaining R's α), 242 (retaining R's and accepting Medaglia's restoration of ), 912 (retaining R's ), and 1094 (accepting Brunck's supplement ). They are also guided by the concern for making the text square with fifth-century Attic usage: see, e.g., the restoration of (for ) to 758-59 and the preferences for (over the transmitted v) in 173 and 478 and for (over the transmitted ) in 554.An unusual textual feature in this comedy—and an editorial challenge—is the pidgin-Greek spoken by the Scythian archer who guards the captured Inlaw in 1001-1225. Austin and Olson print his part without accents because, as they explain in the commentary's note on these verses (which also supplies a helpful list of the idiosyncrasies in his speech), "he must consistently have got [the accents] wrong" (308). Other editorial decisions (e.g., Austin's for R's unmetrical in 1088) bear out the editors' perception of the Scythian as a consistently bad speaker of Greek (325, n. on 1087-89).The comedy's lyric passages arguably present its thorniest set of editorial challenges. Most of the songs are marked by complexities in their rhythmic patterns; there is relatively little strophic responsion, and the two showcased parodies of tragic lyric (Agathon's song in 101-29 and the Inlaw's reworking of Andromeda's lament in 1015-55) feature elaborate polymetry that additionally complicates the tasks of interpreting and editing. Austin and Olson generally concur with the colometry and analysis of Thesmophoriazusae's songs that L. P... (shrink)

National decline is typically blamed on special interests from the demand side of politics corrupting a country's institutions. The usual demand-side suspects include crony capitalists, consumer activists, economic elites, and labor unions. Less attention is given to government insiders on the supply side of politics - rulers, elected officials, bureaucrats, and public employees. In autocracies and democracies, government insiders have the motive, means, and opportunity to co-opt political power for their benefit and at the expense of national well-being. Many storied (...) empires have succumbed to such inside jobs. Today, they imperil countries as different as China and the United States. Democracy - government by the people - does not ensure government for the people. Understanding how government insiders use their power to subvert the public interest - and how these negative consequences can be mitigated - is the topic of this book by Mark A. Zupan. (shrink)

The New York Times have praised Dave Chappelle as "an American folk hero" for his ability to communicate across lines of race, class, and culture at a time when Americans are more polarized than they have ever been. Dave Chappelle and Philosophy brings together twenty-five chapters by philosophers of diverse backgrounds and varying points of view, looking closely at the hilarious, annoying, exhilarating, upsetting, and thought-provoking aspects of Chappelle's wonderfully rich output. This volume of the Series serves as an invitation (...) to think about some of the most urgent moral and political questions of our time. (shrink)

It has been argued in the conservation literature that giving conservation absolute priority over competing interests would best protect the environment. Attributing infinite value to the environment or claiming it is ‘priceless’ are two ways of ensuring this priority (e.g. Hargrove 1989; Bulte and van Kooten 2000; Ackerman and Heinzerling 2002; McCauley 2006; Halsing and Moore 2008). But such proposals would paralyse conservation efforts. We describe the serious problems with these proposals and what they mean for practical applications, and we (...) diagnose and resolve some conceptual confusions permeating the literature on this topic. (shrink)

Self-representational theories of consciousness hold that a mental phenomenon is conscious if, and only if, it presents, among other things, itself. But in conscious perception one may lose oneself in the object perceived and not be aware of one’s perceiving. The paper develops a Brentano-inspired response to this objection. He follows Aristotle in holding that one is aware of one’s perceiving only ‘on the side’: when one perceives something one’s perception neither is nor can become observation of itself. I argue (...) that the arguments Brentano gave for this claim in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint are wanting. However, a promising argument emerges if one takes Brentano’s conception of noticing into account. (shrink)

Kevin Scharp argues that the concept of truth is defective, and is therefore unable to play its intended role in natural language truth-conditional semantics. As such, for this theoretical purpose, Scharp constructs two replacements: ascending truth and descending truth. Scharp applies the resultant theory, AD semantics, to the liar sentence, thereby obtaining a novel solution to the liar paradox. The aim of the present paper is fourfold. First, I show that, contrary to Scharp’s claims, AD semantics in fact yields an (...) inconsistency when applied to standard liar sentences. Second, I diagnose the problem: AD semantics mishandles negation. I propose an alternative treatment, resulting in what I call AD* semantics. Third, I show that AD* semantics gives Scharp the resources required to respond to an alleged revenge paradox that has been raised against his view. Finally, I argue that, these consequences notwithstanding, it remains unclear whether AD* semantics provides an adequate account of alethic paradoxes more generally. (shrink)

Provides an overview of Mark Sharlow's philosophical work with summaries of his positions. Includes references and links to his writings.

Cathy Mason (2020) argues – against my position in Phelan (2019) – that significant norm-manipulation is unnecessary for friendship. Instead, she holds that norm manipulation is a, perhaps omnipresent, causal result of the very feature I deny as necessary to friendship: mutual caring or love. Mason’s counter-examples allow for further explication of the norm-manipulation view of friendship. However, they do not constitute a compelling challenge to that view, because they do not seem to involve collaborative norm manipulation at all. Instead, (...) they are better described as cases in which people come to be subject to established cultural norms they were not previously subject to, because they voluntarily come to fall under a distinctive relationship relative to one another. (shrink)

Difference is one of the most influential critical concepts of recent decades. Mark Currie offers a comprehensive account of the history of the term and its place in some of the most influential schools of theory of the past four decades, including: * post-structuralism * deconstruction * new historicism * psychoanalysis * French feminism * postcolonialism. Employing literary case studies throughout, Difference provides an accessible introduction to a term at the heart of today's critical idiom.

Mark C. Taylor recounts a poignant love affair not with a person but with a place that, paradoxically, cannot be easily localized. For many years, Taylor has lived in the Berkshire Mountains, where he writes and creates land art and sculpture. In a world of mobile screens and virtual realities, where speed is the measure of success and place is disappearing, his work slows down thought and brings life back to earth to give readers time to ponder the importance (...) of place before it slips away. Taylor extends reflection beyond the page and returns with new insights about what is hiding in plain sight all around us. Weaving together words, objects, and images, his artful work enacts what it describes. Things long familiar suddenly appear strange, and the strange, unexpected, and unprogrammed unsettle readers in surprising ways. This timely meditation gives pause in the midst of harried lives and turns attention toward what we usually overlook: night, silence, touch, grace, ghosts, water, earth, stones, bones, idleness, infinity, slowness, and contentment. Recovering Place is a unique work that lingers long after the book is closed. (shrink)

Semiotics has been making progressively inroads into marketing research over the past thirty years. Despite the amply demonstrated conceptual appeal and empirical pertinence of semiotic perspectives in various marketing research streams, spanning consumer research, brand communications, branding and consumer cultural studies, there has been a marked deficit in terms of consolidating semiotic brand-related research under a coherent disciplinary umbrella with identifiable boundaries and research agenda. -/- The Handbook of Brand Semiotics furnishes a compass for the perplexed, a set of anchors (...) for the inquisitive and a solid corpus for scholars, while highlighting the conceptual richness and methodological diversity of semiotic perspectives. -/- Written by a team of expert scholars in various semiotics and branding related fields, such as John A. Bateman, David Machin, Xavier Ruiz Collantes, Kay L. O’Halloran, Dario Mangano, George Rossolatos, Merce Oliva, Per Ledin, Gianfranco Marrone, Francesco Mangiapane, Jennie Mazur, Carlos Scolari, Ilaria Ventura, and edited by George Rossolatos, Chief Editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics, the Handbook is intended as a point of reference for researchers who wish to enter the ‘House of Brand Semiotics’ and explore its marvels. -/- The Handbook of Brand Semiotics, actively geared towards an inter-disciplinary dialogue between perspectives from marketing and semiotics, features the state-of-the-art, but also offers directions for future research in key streams, such as: -/- · Analyzing and designing brand language across media · Brand image, brand symbols, brand icons vs. iconicity · The contribution of semiotics to transmedia storytelling · Narrativity and rhetorical approaches to branding · Semiotic roadmap for designing brand identity · Semiotic roadmap for designing logos and packaging · Sociosemiotic accounts of building brand identity online · Multimodality and Multimodal critical discourse analysis · Challenging the omnipotence of cognitivism in brand- related research · Semiotics and (inter)cultural branding · Brand equity semiotics Comparative readings of structuralist, Peircean and sociosemiotic approaches to brandcomms . (shrink)

Aristotle has rightly been called a 'universal genius'. Whilst his work in economics was not fundamental, it has nevertheless attracted an enormous literature. This is particularly true of some passages in his 'Politics' on the 'Natural' and 'Unnatural' modes of acquiring wealth and some pages in his 'Nicomachean Ethics' on the question of justice in exchange. Aristotle's views on the practice of usury and the doctrine of 'just price' have been heatedly debated from the Middle Ages to the present day.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The chief goal of this dissertation is to attain some clarity with respect to the interconnected issues which constitute the problem of personal identity. The logical and linguistic categories developed by Saul Kripke provide the tools through which these issues can be separated and put into perspective. In the first two chapters I examine the modal and other semantic features of rigid singular terms and such rigid predicates as natural kind terms. I defend both the transworld identity of named individuals (...) and the real essence of genuine natural kinds. ;In the third chapter this linguistic framework is used to explicate the distinction between the numerical identity of individuals and the qualitative identity of properties. I suggest that individual identity consists in a principle of uniqueness typically supplied through indexical identification and a principle of individuation through which a given individual can be tracked through qualitative change. Property identity is explicated as a form of qualitative similarity. ;In the final two chapters I consider personal identity as a form of individual identity and personal identity as a form of property identity. I reject the former interpretation on the grounds that 'person' fails to supply a principle of individuation for actual persons. I adopt the latter interpretation and suggest that person designates a necessary dispositional property of actual persons. I consider alternative theories of personal identity from the standpoint of a property identity theory of personal identity and I argue that the property identity theory provides a compelling account of a series of widely discussed problem cases. (shrink)

Coleridge, Mark Review of: Australian religious thought: Six explorations, by Wayne Hudson, Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2016, pp. 352, paperback, $39.95.

According to a broadly accepted interpretation, the doubt of the First Meditation gets stronger due to an increasing effectiveness of the reasons for said doubt. I defend a deflationary reading of the doubt of the Meditations insofar as the sceptical arguments used by René Descartes gradually lose power. This reading is obviously not without consequences, which will be mentioned in the conclusion, for the interpretation of the exercise of doubt and, more fundamentally, of the Cartesian doctrine of knowledge.

In this volume, Mark Douglas offers a new vision of the history of Christian pacifism within the context of a warming world. He narrates this story in a way that recognizes the complexities of the tradition and aligns it with a coherent theological vision, one that shapes the tradition to encompass the new causes and types of wars fought during the Anthropocene. Along the way, Douglas draws from research in historical climatology to recover the overlooked role that climate changes (...) have always played in shaping not only the Christian pacifist tradition but also the movement of traditions through western history. Scholars across a range of disciplines - peace studies, Christian theology and history, environmentalism, and environmental conflict studies - will benefit from this model of critical and charitable engagement with the complex history of Christian pacifism, the resources of which will be important for addressing wars in a warming world. (shrink)

Kenney, Mark Review(s) of: A source critical edition of the gospels of Matthew and Luke in Greek and English, 2 vols., Christopher J. Monaghan, C.P., Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 2010, pp.378, 45.00.

Kenney, Mark Review(s) of: Experiencing scripture: Intimacy with ancient text and modern faith, by Antony Campbell SJ, (Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2012), pp. xxv + 214, $34.95.

Kenney, Mark Review of: God's wisdom or the devil's envy: Death and creation deconstructing in the wisdom of Solomon, by Marie Turner,, pp. xii + 271, $36.95.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel by Caroline EdwardsMark SchmittCaroline Edwards. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 277 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9781108712392.The development of the novel as a literary form is closely linked to the representational mode of realism and how it can convey the human experience of time. That the novel distinguishes itself substantially from earlier forms of literature in how it (...) attempts to capture temporality through means of literary realism has been acknowledged ever since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). As such, the novel form underwent dramatic changes throughout the periods of modernity and postmodernity, with modernist and postmodernist techniques of representation mirroring shifts in the temporal experience. But how can the contemporary novel—a category itself loaded with implication and definitional problems—of the twenty-first century confront the particular representational challenges of its time? This is the question that Caroline Edwards addresses in her study Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Edwards is concerned with the wider repercussions of the post-postmodernist notion of the Fukuyaman thesis of the “end of history” and the profound challenges to this thesis in the face of the post-9/11 unfolding of the twenty-first century. The temporal experience of this century is marked by what Edwards calls “non-contemporaneity,” that is, a “political, and even ontological uncertainty” (9). In the context of contemporary literature, the resulting “temporal disjointedness that marks our experience in the twenty-first century” has “given rise to different expressions of the unevenness of the contemporary, at the level of novelistic structure, prose style, generic sampling and non-mimetic interventions into otherwise realist narratives and juxtaposed timescales” (9). The notion of non-contemporaneity is drawn from Ernst Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, which Edwards considers to be “productive to thinking about the complexity of [End Page 595] utopian times and the different kinds of pasts and futures that circulate within our own present moment of contemporaneity, which is inescapably non-contemporaneous with itself ” (30). Edwards considers this noncontemporaneity as a prevalent temporal register in contemporary British fiction that speak to the crises of temporality associated with a range of political, social, and economic events and processes that have marked the first decades of the twenty-first century. The seemingly natural unfolding of the “the linear progressive time of neoliberalism” (8), what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” has increasingly been put into question, not least due to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (158). Similarly, Edwards identifies the 2016 Brexit referendum as symptomatic of a nationalism that must, following Michael Gardiner, always appear to be “out of time” (8). Such crises are thus indicative of anachronistic unevenness and conflicting temporalities. Consequently, a literary fiction that wants to adequately represent these struggles with temporality cannot confine itself to the pitfalls of literary realism, but it would be equally ill-suited by resorting to postmodernist metafiction and irony. Rather, as Edwards contends, the twenty-first-century fictions that she discusses attempt to complicate realist modes by using disruptive and experimental narrative techniques that amount to “non-mimetic experiments with narrative voice and structure” and “delinearised” temporalities (4). With this approach, Edwards argues, these texts interrogate the present as unstable.The four main chapters of Edwards’s book proceed by first establishing the dominant philosophical and theoretical concepts underlying her hypothesis. Chapter 2 (“Reading Fictions of the Not Yet”) is a theoretical and methodological chapter and offers an in-depth engagement with theories of temporality and narratology. Edwards’s aim here is to advocate for an updating of conventional narratology to account for the multilayered narrative experiments with time since modernism and especially in contemporary fiction. Her approach to theorization and analysis is inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) in the decision to focus on close readings of a small number of primary texts and read them as texts or aesthetic artifacts that develop “theories of their own” (29). The chapter offers an in-depth engagement with Bloch’s philosophy of utopianism and his concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit.Another cornerstone for Edwards’s theory and method is the work of... (shrink)

"Religion," Mark C. Taylor maintains, "is most interesting where it is least obvious." From global financial networks to the casinos of Las Vegas, from images flickering on computer terminals to steel sculpture, material culture bears unexpected traces of the divine. In a world where the economies of faith are obscure, yet pervasive, Taylor shows that approaching religion directly is less instructive than thinking about it. Traveling from high culture to pop culture and back again, About Religion approaches cyberspace and (...) Las Vegas through Hegel and Kant and reads Melville's The Confidence-Man through the film Wall Street. As astonishing juxtapositions and associations proliferate, formerly uncharted territories of virtual culture disclose theological vestiges, showing that faith in contemporary culture is as unavoidable as it is elusive. The most accessible presentation of Taylor's revolutionary ideas to date, About Religion gives us a dazzling and disturbing vision of life at the end of the old and beginning of the new millennium. (shrink)