The contributors explore the life, thought, and works of Aelred, 12th-century Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx Abbey, his sermons, spirituality, and histories and highlight their principal themes.

One of the most striking features of speculative theology (kalaam) as it developed within the Ash'arite tradition of Islam is its denial of causal power to creatures. Much like Malebranche in the seventeenth century, the Ash'arites saw this denial as a natural extension of monotheism and were led as a result to embrace an occasionalist account of causality. According to their analysis, causal power is identical with creative power, and since God is the sole and sovereign creator, God is the (...) only causal agent. To assert anything else is to compromise monotheism. This position, of course, was in direct opposition to the prevailing accounts of causality within the philosophical tradition of Islam at the time. The philosophers (falaasifa) had by and large taken over accounts of causality from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists and adapted them in accordance with their own set of concerns. In such accounts, while God stands as the first cause, secondary causationis unambiguously affirmed, even if variously understood. Thus, as they offered a sophisticated account of causal action in direct opposition to the occasionalist thesis, thefalaasifa posed something of challenge to the theologians. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a growing societal concern that often spills over into the workplace. However, employers are not recognizing the spillover of domestic violence as a workplace issue. This is problematic considering the serious financial, legal, and ethical consequences for organizations. We analyzed six cases involving domestic violence that were litigated under specific legal bases: Violence Against Women Act, discrimination laws including Title VII, Family and Medical Leave Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Social Security Disability, Occupational Safety and Health Act, (...) and associated state and municipal ordinances. We chose cases that illustrate the problems of companies meeting the legal standards but not necessarily reaching ethical expectations. Our approach is congruent with the perspective that both legal and ethical analyses should be used in organizational decision making. We suggest for future research the analysis of additional litigated cases, other ethical perspectives, and additional sources of data. In addition, we suggest that companies who are striving for corporate social responsibility should integrate the ethical treatment of domestic violence victims. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 224-238 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks A Hanging Judge Denis Dutton "CORNERING THE MARKET ON CHUTZPAH," blared the headline on one review, and in tone it wasn't alone. It's not often that a book by a public intellectual has received as much media attention—mostly vilification and scorn—as Richard A. Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press, $29.95). Three reasons for (...) this stand out. First, there's the sheer audacity of including a list of the top hundred public intellectuals, drawn from a larger list of 546 names. This invites endless dispute over how the list was generated, who is on it, who is left off, where each one stands, and why. Second, there is the fact that Posner has managed in the book to offend half of the public intellectuals you'd expect to be called on to review it—almost as though he made a list of potential reviewers and worked in a swipe at each. Finally, he has tapped into the deep antipathy humanist intellectuals have to seeing a beloved topic treated quantitatively, with statistics and applications of social and economic theory, replete with graphs and algebraic formulae. And after all, what topic is more beloved by the intellectuals than they themselves? That Posner would actually treat such important people as a demographic type, sorting them in terms of race, age, field, politics, sex—why, he even asks why so many are Jews. It's outrageous... and delicious.Definitions first. The idea of an intellectual, Posner says, should not be identified merely with having highbrow, cultivated tastes, being especially creative, or having high intelligence. All of these things are possible without being an intellectual, which Posner thinks ought to denote the application of the mind to "political matters in the broadest sense of that word, a sense that includes cultural matters when they are [End Page 224] viewed under the aspect of ideology, ethics, or politics (which may all be the same thing)." There is therefore a vague redundancy in the term "public intellectual," since the placing of ideas in a larger public context, acting as social critic, is what the intellectual most essentially does. In our age of vast communication media, it is also done con-spicuously in public, through op-eds, public radio interviews, and on TV clips with the regulation public-intellectual bookcase as a backdrop. This concern with larger moral issues means that for Posner paradigm individuals would therefore include the likes of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, and most powerfully in Posner's mind, George Orwell: people who write about literature, art, science, and so forth from a broadly political or ideological perspective. For example, when Allan Bloom writes about rock and roll, he is not doing so as a music critic but as a philosopher who sees it as a symptom and source of social degradation. That's echte public intellectual work (and rather bad work in this particular case, Posner believes). That it is done for a broader public is also a crux for Posner, who leaves omits John Rawls from his list, because as influential as Rawls is as a philosopher, he does not address a larger public in the way that Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum do.The decline referred to in Posner's title is a decline in the actual worth of public intellectuals' work, not in their media celebrity, which has grown roughly inversely to the value of what they do. This invidious situation has followed, in Posner's view, the proliferation of academics in the ranks of public intellectuals. From the nineteenth century, with such names as Thoreau, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Tocqueville, to well into the twentieth, with the likes of Max Eastman, Edmund Wilson, H. G. Wells, and Dwight Macdonald, the great tradition of public intellectuals had its life outside of universities. Although there remain nonacademic public intellectuals today—Susan Sontag, Roger Kimball, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal—they are a severely diminished species. Universities, which have expanded... (shrink)

Most accounts of the Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935) emphasize its negative aspect, namely, that in particular situations, processing of an irrelevant stimulus dimension interferes with participants' performance of the instructed task. In contrast, this paper emphasizes the fact that, even with that interference, participants actually can (and usually do) exert enough control to perform the instructed task. An Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational (ACT–R) model of the Stroop task interprets this as a kind of learned strategic control. Specifically, the concept of (...) utility is applied to the two processes that compete in the Stroop task, and a utility‐learning mechanism serves to update the corresponding utility values according to experience and hence influence the competition. This model both accounts for various extant Stroop results and makes novel predictions about when people can reduce their susceptibility to Stroop interference. These predictions are tested in three experiments that involve a double‐response variant of the Stroop task. (shrink)

The key to understanding the moral identity of modern nursing and the distinctiveness of nursing ethics resides in a deeper examination of the extensive nursing ethics literature and history from the late 1800s to the mid 1960s, that is, prior to the “bioethics revolution”. There is a distinctive nursing ethics, but one that falls outside both biomedical and bioethics and is larger than either. Were, there a greater corpus of research on nursing’s heritage ethics it would decidedly recondition the entire (...) argument about a distinctive nursing ethics. It would also provide a thicker account of nursing ethics than has been afforded thus far. Such research is dependent upon identifying, locating, accessing and, more importantly, sharing these resources. A number of important heritage ethics sources are identified so that researchers might better locate them. In addition, a bibliography of heritage ethics textbooks and a transcript of the earliest known journal article on nursing ethics in the US are provided. (shrink)

Much has changed in maternal-fetal medicine since the early 2000s, when the previous ethical frameworks for fetal therapy trials were established. We applaud Hendriks and colleagues for taking on t...

Drawing on constructionist theory, this study examines how the media portrayed five public reporting events initiated by the Fair Labor Association (FLA), considering whether the coverage encourages or discourages companies from undertaking a reporting initiative as part of their ethical management. Media coverage was limited but generally favorable across all five events. Coverage frequently included claims made by FLA spokespersons and provided basic facts about the organization and its activities. Extensive detail about labor violations found by monitors was often included. (...) Additional media coverage centered around themes of public reporting and transparency, an assessment of the FLA’s work, brand accountability and responsibility of corporations with regard to working conditions and labor standards, and specifics about the factory monitoring and partnering with factories and NGOs that is necessary to achieve change. Counter-claims brought question to the FLA’s efforts. Explanations about why the social condition exists were fairly limited, and thus, provided little insight into how the problems might be resolved. We discuss managerial implications regarding public reporting initiatives and media coverage, particularly regarding the countering effects of positive coverage and diminishing news stories. (shrink)

The central ideas of early object relations theory are heavily inflected with Christian anti-Judaism, particularly as found in the work of Ian Dishart Suttie, now credited as the founder of this tradition. The critique of Freud launched by Suttie repudiates Freudian theory as a “disease” inextricably connected to Freud being a Jew. Suttie’s portrayal of Judaism both conforms to and replicates those theological commitments that privilege a triumphalist, supersessionist Christianity that breaks with Judaism, understood as devoid of love, ethics, and (...) social justice interests. The paper argues that the elements organizing the central concepts that structure Suttie’s Christian prejudice constitute distorting ideological interests that circulate and shape important strands of contemporary object relations theory. Central to the authors discussed is a repudiation of Freud’s theory of unconscious drives on the basis of privileging love and intersubjectivity as the motivators of human psychological development made possible by Jesus and Christianity. The paper demonstrates that contemporary object relations theory remains heavily indebted to Suttie while remaining oblivious to his explicit anti-Judaism. (shrink)

Ayn Rand argued that “selfish” is the correct designation for a person living according to the Objectivist ethics and that selfishness is a virtue. The accuracy of this claim is examined along with the meaning of “selfish,” the wider implications for the Objectivist ethics, and ethics in general. Alternatives to the term are suggested.

The target articles in this “Roe v. Wade” special issue of AJOB rightly point to multiple ethical harms of an imminent end to full federal protection for legal abortion in the United States, p...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and the Last ScholasticsBlake D. DuttonRoger Ariew. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 230. Cloth, $42.50.The attempt to understand Descartes vis-à-vis the scholastic tradition dates back to the studies of Etienne Gilson early in this century. Though Descartes saw himself as a revolutionary who would overthrow the Aristotelianism entrenched in the universities, Gilson was able to demonstrate his reliance upon (...) a variety of scholastic sources for important terminology, distinctions, and arguments which permeate his writings. Unfortunately, this line of investigation was largely ignored among Anglo-American scholars who were generally hostile to Scholasticism and uninterested in contextualizing Descartes's thought. However, since the mid-eighties there has been a distinct shift in attitude as scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the place of Scholasticism within Descartes's intellectual environment. Among these, Roger Ariew has to be counted as one of the most sophisticated, and his new book, Descartes and the Late Scholastics, marks an important contribution to the growing literature on the topic.Ariew's book is actually a collection of essays published over the last decade, including two which he co-authored with Marjorie Grene. Many of these have been substantially expanded to include fresh material and reworked so as to give the whole a greater sense of continuity. After a marvelous opening chapter in which he lays out his overall account of Descartes's attitude towards Scholasticism, Ariew presents the remaining essays in two large groups: those dealing with the immediate context of Descartes's thought and those dealing with its reception through the early part of the eighteenth century.Among the more interesting results of the first group of studies is Ariew's claim that the scholastic climate in and around Paris during Descartes's lifetime was predominately Scotistic rather than Thomistic. He shows this by looking at positions taken by a number of Parisian schoolmen on important issues which typically divided Scotists and Thomists. Ariew goes on to argue that not only was the Parisian environment Scotistic, but that Descartes aligned himself with the Scotists on many key issues in both physics (e.g., that time is independent of motion) and metaphysics (e.g., that the principle of individuation is a form). This is certainly an intriguing claim since most studies of this type have viewed Descartes in relation to Aquinas and those Jesuit thinkers who were broadly Thomistic in outlook. In bringing to light this Scotistic background, Ariew has opened up an important new line of inquiry.Other topics included in this first section are the literary and philosophical background [End Page 275] to the "new way of ideas" of which Descartes is a founder, the place of Descartes's doctrine of matter and form in seventeenth century debates over hylomorphism, and the reaction of Scholastics to the observational results of the new astronomy. What emerges in these essays is not only a highly nuanced view of Descartes's relation to Scholasticism, but an important corrective to still prevalent views of the Scholastics as reactionary and blindly opposed to developments within the new science. This last point is made with particular force in the fifth essay entitled "Scholastics and the New Astronomy." There Ariew argues that the astronomical observations of Galileo et alia were not in themselves decisive for overthrowing the Aristotelian cosmology as it had been articulated in the seventeenth century. This is because scholastic astronomers were generally accepting of such findings (e.g., sunspots) and were able to accommodate them within their own systems by making relatively minor adjustments. Although these systems ultimately proved themselves inadequate, Ariew makes a strong case that the Aristotelianism of the seventeenth century was sufficiently fluid to accommodate most of what the astronomers offered up. Thus the necessity for a radical overhaul of basic philosophical and scientific assumptions was by no means as evident as standard histories of this period would have us believe.The second section of the book is dedicated to debates over Cartesianism and its fate in the generations immediately following Descartes's death. Here Ariew provides a wealth of detail about various condemnations of Cartesianism, a comparative study of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 130-131 [Access article in PDF] Steven Nadler. Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 225. Cloth, $35.00. Steven Nadler's Spinoza's Heresy opens with the following declaration: "It is a splendid mystery" (1). The mystery, of course, is how a gifted son of the Jewish community of Amsterdam, a young man (...) whom one might have expected to grow naturally into the role of a respected rabbi, came to be expelled from that community. What Nadler finds so mysterious is not the simple fact of Spinoza's expulsion—itself a common form of discipline among the Jews of Amsterdam—but the vehemence and finality with which he was expelled. The writ of expulsion accuses Spinoza of "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds" and goes on to heap layer after layer of curse upon him. It is, in Nadler's judgment, the harshest writ ever to be pronounced against a member of that community. What, then, were the views so abominable and the deeds so monstrous that account for this? What had Spinoza said and done to raise such ire among his fellow Jews? That is the mystery Nadler's book attempts to solve.Needless to say, Nadler is not the first to take up this challenge. The question of what lay behind Spinoza's expulsion has been of perennial interest to scholars, and what keeps it alive, in part, is its resistance to definitive resolution. Most importantly, Spinoza had not yet begun to write at the time of his expulsion, and his surviving correspondence is silent on the matter. Nevertheless, it is tempting to look to his Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise for clues. But if we are to do so, as Nadler encourages us to, we must not only determine which of the views they contain can be attributed to the young Spinoza, but show how his holding of them explains the events that transpired.Nadler begins with the documentary evidence. Although sparse, the sources point to three views at the root of Spinoza's troubles: that God exists only philosophically; that the Law is not true; and that the soul is not immortal. Acknowledging that each of these may have played a role in the expulsion, Nadler singles out the last for special scrutiny and concludes that it was decisive. His reasons for doing so emerge in the last chapter of the book. Despite broad latitude within the Jewish tradition as a whole, the Jews of Amsterdam were particularly sensitive on the issue of immortality and did not take kindly those who denied it. Indeed, they had a history of confrontation with "heretics" on this issue. This was partly a function of a general concern not to arouse unwanted attention from the politically powerful Calvinists within Dutch society. But it also stemmed from an intense interest in the afterlife among the Sephardim, who, being of Marrano heritage, were naturally concerned about the postmortem fate of Jewish converts to Catholicism. Though the community was divided on what that fate would be, the entire debate on the question was carried out on the shared assumption of personal immortality. This, together with a deep commitment to immortality on the part of each of its leading rabbis, conspired to make Jewish Amsterdam an inhospitable place for anyone holding views like those Spinoza was to express. In Nadler's words, immortality "was simply the wrong issue to pick on in Jewish Amsterdam in the 1650's" (156).Nadler's thesis is intriguing, and the light that he throws on the Spinoza affair in the course of developing it is considerable. However, a question remains. Although Nadler does an impressive job of clarifying why Spinoza's views on the afterlife would have been so volatile within the Amsterdam community, we might still wonder why the other two theses he is reported to have held do not merit equal consideration. This is particularly true of his denial of the authority of the Law. Whatever... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Heavy TrafficDenis DuttonIt was the Reverend Sidney Smith who said, “I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.” Thirty years ago that remark was still a joke. These days, it’s a downright plausible idea, one with a distinctly postmodern ring. If the objects of experience are nothing but constructions, inventions of our cultures and mind-sets, that must go as well for all the books (...) we read—including those books which urge this fact on us. To read them is to construct them, to write them for yourself. But wait—that can’t be a fact, because facts are just prejudices too. Takes your breath away to realize how far scholarship has come.These thoughts drifted through my mind reading The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, edited by George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (University of California Press, $48.00 cloth, $17.95 paper). It comprises a long introduction plus eleven chapters which “explore the boundaries and affinities between art, anthropology, representation, and culture, casting a critical, ethnographic light on the art worlds of the contemporary West and the ways they give value to cultural form—in short, a “‘traffic’ in culture.” It is not easy to make out a consistent thread in the essays themselves. Carol Vance offers a fine discussion in the form of four small essays on censorship, the NEA, Jesse Helms, and so forth. There is no discernible connection with anthropology, and I cannot see why these pieces are included. Nancy Sullivan, described as a Ph.D. candidate in Fred R. Myers’s NYU anthropology department, struggles with her cumbersome account of the artworld in the last generation. Again, I can detect no hint of how anthropology has helped her understand the artworld. Hal Foster makes a cameo appearance of only a few pages, a kind of postmodern arabesque with lots of big words. Christopher B. Steiner revisits material [End Page 283] presented in his book, African Art in Transit, which is squarely in the field, and Steven Feld agonizes about appropriation of world music into commercial music business while telling some interesting tales about a radio program he produced of music from Papua New Guinea. The feminist Judith L. Goldstein does a late-capitalist, “late-postmodernist” job on women’s makeup, with much reliance on Fredric Jameson but no anthropology I can discern, despite the fact that she gave a version of it at an American Anthropological Association conference. If we really have reached “late-postmodernism” we can only be thankful. Molly H. Mullin’s account of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century enthusiasm for American Indian artifacts, on the other hand, may begin with clichés about “élite responses to the rise of consumer capitalism,” but it soon settles down to a solid account of the people and problems of trying to achieve recognition of Indian handicrafts as art. This was made possible, we learn, by much devoted work from people who were multiculturalists before the word existed, white Americans whose actions were based on a love of Indian cultures and arts, rather than postcolonial theory and the school of resentment. All the issues of art vs. craft, the relation of tourism to artistic development, authenticity, and so on, were raised in the 1920s and 30s, with sophistication not often seen today.But to figure out how it all is supposed to tie together, we have to turn to the book’s explanatory introduction. This is so turgidly vague that when I was done I felt like invoicing the authors for my time. These pages are peppered with half-assertions I’d half want to dispute if their meaning were plainer, and a few that are plain enough to be flat-out wrong. Among many examples: “Ironically, the very category of ‘art’—as opposed to ‘the arts’—goes unexamined in its own hierarchies of sense, so that various forms of popular performance, in which disinterested contemplation does not necessarily reign supreme, are excluded.” Excluded? Notice that irritating passive voice: who, I’d like to know, has left popular performance unexamined and excluded? What are “hierarchies of sense”? The sentence carries no reference. In... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article critiques Google’s conversion of knowledge into information from the perspective of linguistic performance. It claims that the political effects of signification are resistant to discrete or fixed translations, where instead the incalculable dimensions of knowledge emerge between languages—that is, in-translation. To do so, the article reads Barbara Cassin’s extensive work on sophistics, untranslatability theory, and Google itself to argue that the unfinishability of performance, translation, and the dimensions of meaning are the openings to political life. Cassin’s insight, (...) that “we never stop (not) translating,” emphasizes the value of performance, one foreclosed by Google’s squaring of doxa. The article analyzes the historical transmission and scholarly impact of knowledge to argue that understanding comes from an uncertain staging of knowledge between languages—languages, that is, always among others. (shrink)

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward (...) Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. (shrink)

The design of Web browsers has resulted in a transfer of power to Web users and developers who often lack an ethical framework in which to act. For example, the technology makes it simple to copy and use other people’s Web page formatting without their permission. The author argues that we need to educate more people about ethical Web practices, and the author asks for “rules of the road” which amateurs and professionals can understand and follow. This article discusses four (...) areas of concern about Web development: the browser wars, information storage and retrieval, access for the handicapped, and cookies. For teachers, there are suggestions on how to use browsers to help students learn about Web ethics. (shrink)

Business people repeatedly asked Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) to recommend a policy to deal with email and voicemail. After many such requests to our organization, we attempted to construct guidelines that we could endorse. This paper outlines the guidelines that we proposed and the public reaction to them. The paper discusses the tensions inherent in a business environment, and the means of identifying ethical behavior for both companies and their employees.

Several standard conditions of adequacy for confirmation are considered and a conclusion of B. Skyrms regarding the converse-consequence condition is shown to be mistaken. Widely accepted conditions such as the entailment condition and the special consequence condition are shown to be open to counterexample, and confusion about these conditions is traced to confusion about the difference between two kinds of confirmation concepts--concepts of firmness and concepts of increase in firmness. The importance of concepts of the latter sort is stressed. Finally, (...) some suggestions are offered relating to the notion of selective confirmation. (shrink)

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS It is my lot, if not my duty, in presenting these opening remarks at our conference, to take the title of our meeting seriously. ...

External World Skepticism: The Deception of the Senses.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 485-494 [Access article in PDF] Art of the Piano Denis Dutton CHARLES ROSEN is so familiar to readers as an acute music theorist and historian of European ideas and literature that it is easy to forget that he is one of most stimulating and compelling pianists of the last fifty years. In Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (Free Press, $25.00), he (...) combines his intellectual and musical gifts to take stock of his profession as concert pianist. The result is engaging, insightful, and for lovers of piano artistry, not a little disturbing.The piano, in case no one has noticed, is in steep, serious decline. My piano tuner, Adam Linning, began his career in Glasgow. He worked for the largest piano retailer in the city: it had seventeen tuners on the road in 1954, the year Glaswegians first got television. By 1959, when he left for New Zealand, there were three other tuners working with him. Adam explains the decline in terms of Glasgow apartment space. The piano and the TV had to share the living room, and so long as the room flickered with gray-blue light, the piano had to remain silent.People used to gather around and sing together at the piano—in my childhood experience, any group of a dozen middle-class adults would contain at least one competent sight-reader who could play, if not Beethoven, then Christmas carols, reductions of Your Hit Parade songs, or scraps of boogie-woogie. This meant that there was abroad in the land a critical mass of amateur pianists who knew enough about music literature, notation, and performance to constitute a core audience for the piano masters of the day—Horowitz, Rubinstein, Arrau, Cherkassky, and the like—and who also had an appreciation of jazz greats such as Art Tatum.The decline in the number of amateur pianists, people with knowledgeable admiration of piano playing, has tracked the decline of the [End Page 485] piano virtuoso as classical star. Recording too has played a role in these changes. I doubt that there was a greater love of classical music fifty years ago than now. But attendance at live performances of anything is no longer required in order to attain familiarity with repertoire. Recording, particularly from the LP era on, enormously enlarged general knowledge of the musical literature: people who a hundred years earlier would have been lucky to hear three Haydn symphonies or two Handel operas in a lifetime can now, no matter where they live, listen to them all. Recording did to music something like what the Roman alphabet and moveable type did for news and literature: it enabled the universal dispersal of all of music's products, the worst to the best. For years professional musicians tended not to appreciate this. While it is true that there are fewer people about who can actually play Scarlatti sonatas, that has to be balanced against the agreeable fact that knowledge of these small masterpieces is no longer limited to the fifty or sixty included in early editions, from which was derived the same two dozen that we would hear from pianists over and over. Now we can hear all 550+, and learn about them for ourselves (Arts & Letters Daily even links to a website where you can find any Scarlatti sonata in seconds, click on it, and listen.)This is a big change. Keyboard virtuosity goes back a long time, even before Bach, although it was Liszt, as inspired by Paganini, who gave the piano its first real idol. Enter Edison a few decades later, and with his appearance it became possible for people to joke, "The only instrument I play is the phonograph." If there are fewer pianists able to make a living performing the classical repertoire today, it is because a world of mostly non-pianists that is oversupplied with CDs just doesn't need them all, either to hear the playing or enjoy the music.A notable aspect of Charles Rosen's regard for piano playing is that he conveys no dewy-eyed nostalgia about... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) iii-iv [Access article in PDF] Editorial War of the Worldviews With this issue, PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE enters its second quarter century. For many of the past twenty-five years it has enjoyed the sponsorship of Whitman College and the extraordinarily capable coeditorship of Patrick Henry. Bard College now assumes sponsorship, and the journal will be edited jointly by us, with Pat Henry ascending to the (...) empyrean to look down upon us as Editor Emeritus.From its first issue (a mere 124-page wisp of a journal, but with robust essays by Hazel Barnes, Monroe Beardsley, and a smart young thinker named Martha Nussbaum), PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE has provided a home for anyone convinced by the initially counterintuitive notion that a close study of fiction can play an irreplaceable role in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, and even metaphysics. Philosophy is about life from the broadest possible human perspective, and so is literature. But how different the perspectives! Plato saw fiction, poetry, drama, and passion dug in on one side of the battle lines, with science, philosophy, and reason on the other. Not for the first time, nor the last, he was right. At this journal, we're on no peace mission, and we don't relish vapid compromises. Both sides in Plato's War of the Worldviews will be discomfited and annoyed to learn that they have features in common. Would-be peacemakers will be disappointed to see fresh hostilities breaking out just when they thought differences were being at last reconciled. We're interested more in the facts, arguments, and the healthy entertainment of battle than we are in making anybody comfortable. And let's admit it: the kinds of scholarly disputes we encourage in this journal can be exciting and fun.Watch these pages, therefore, not only for fresh news of ancient disputes, but also for exciting studies that break old boundaries, exploring the myriad linkages between traditional aesthetics and such empirical disciplines as psychology, anthropology, and biology. The [End Page iii] symposium on jazz in this issue marks as well our intention to publish engaging work on the arts and culture in general, not limiting ourselves to the areas named in our title. All the articles in PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE are, as always, offered in the spirit of expanding the reach and depth of humanistic scholarship. But one thing will stay the same around here: our constant concern to offer prose that is characterized by exactitude, insight, refinement, rigor, and above all, clarity.Heartfelt thanks to the many individual readers and writers who have brought PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE to this stage of its evolution. We welcome your suggestions about future directions. And so we roll up our sleeves and plunge into the next twenty-five years. Denis Dutton University of Canterbury Garry Hagberg Bard College... (shrink)

In this article I consider the field of HIV treatment and prevention in light of poststructural feminist critiques of the self-evidence of matter. Both HIV and poststructural feminist theory are viewed in relation to the current state of HIV scientific research of which it has been said: ‘much remains left to the imagination’ (McCune, 2001, emphasis added). Importantly, it is in the absence of ‘real’ knowledge of bodily matter and virus, that imagination is presumed by science as a fall back. (...) Paradoxically, recent debate within feminist theory provides an almost perverse counter to this way of characterizing the struggle against HIV. Rather than considering imagination as something outside or external to the ‘real’, there is now substantial argument suggesting that imagination is always already present and inherent to the ‘real’. In the course of this paper, these differing positions of science and feminist theory are used to challenge and extend each other. The empirical matter of HIV medical science is shown as evidence of matter beyond the normative insistence of (human) language. On this basis, a theory of performativity - devised by Judith Butler and extended by Karen Barad - is argued as grounds for a methodologically expanded science. (shrink)

Muriel Wheldale, a distinguished graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, was a member of William Bateson's school of genetics at Cambridge University from 1903. Her investigation of flower color inheritance in snapdragons (Antirrhinum), a topic of particular interest to botanists, contributed to establishing Mendelism as a powerful new tool in studying heredity. Her understanding of the genetics of pigment formation led her to do cutting-edge work in biochemistry, culminating in the publication of her landmark work, The Anthocyanin Pigments of Plants (1916). (...) In 1915, she joined Frederick Gowland Hopkin's Department of Biochemistry as assistant and in 1926 became one of the first women to be appointed university lecturer. In 1919 she married the biochemist Huia Onslow, with whom she collaborated until his death in 1922. This paper examines Wheldale's work in genetics and especially focuses on the early linkage of Mendelian methdology with new techniques in biochemistry that eventually led to the founding of biochemical genetics. It highlights significant issues in the early history of women in genetics, including the critical role of mentors, funding opportunities, and career strategies. (shrink)

The need to create art is found in every human society, manifest in many different ways across many different cultures. Is this universal need rooted in our evolutionary past? The Art Instinct reveals that it is, combining evolutionary psychology with aesthetics to shed new light on fascinating questions about the nature of art.

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, (...) the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies. (shrink)

As clinical-psychological scientists and practitioners increasingly work with diverse populations of traumatized people, it becomes increasingly important to attend to cultural models that influence the ways in which people understand and describe their responses to trauma. This paper focuses on potential uses of the concept of cultural script in this domain. Originally described by cognitive psychologists in the 1980s, scripts refer to specific behavioral and experiential sequences of elements such as thoughts, memories, attention patterns, bodily sensations, sleep abnormalities, emotions and (...) affective expressions, motivation, coping attempts and ritualized behaviors that are relevant to posttraumatic adjustment. We differentiate between experiences of traumatic stress that are scripted (e.g., cultural explanations are available) versus unscripted. Further characteristics such as script tracks, the effect of script interruptions, and contextual fit of scripts with other cultural models are also described. We consider examples of traumatic stress associated with war and organized, sexualized violence from ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ world regions. The concluding part of this review describes a number of possibilities for methodological approaches to assessment of cultural scripts. Capturing central elements of the script(s) of trauma would aid psychological researchers and clinicians in understanding the experiences of trauma in cultural context, which could ultimately lead to better clinical service opportunities worldwide. (shrink)

DO SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY STAND with the sciences or with the humanities? Most attempts to settle this question involve comparing these disciplines with the natural sciences on the one hand and with history on the other. If we take history as paradigmatic of the various forms of humanistic inquiry, we will certainly find many illuminating comparisons to be drawn between it and the social sciences, but history is not the only humanistic inquiry. In fact, there exists another whole realm of (...) the humanities that has been almost universally neglected as an area which might provide revealing comparisons with sociology and anthropology: that is aesthetic criticism. In the discussion which follows, I want to begin to remedy some of that neglect. (shrink)