One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

A vision of the city as a web of interactive, informational networks that turn our world into a prison-house of illusory transcendence. “Where does the city without gates begin? Perhaps inside that fugitive anxiety, that shudder that seizes the minds of those who, just returning from a long vacation, contemplate the imminent encounter with mounds of unwanted mail or with a house that's been broken into and emptied of its contents. It begins with the urge to flee and escape for (...) a second from an oppressive technological environment, to regain one's senses and one's sense of self.” —from Lost Dimension Originally written in French in 1983, Lost Dimension remains a cornerstone book in the work of Paul Virilio: the one most closely tied to his background as an urban planner and architect, and the one that most clearly anticipates the technologically wired urban space we live in today: a city of permanent transit and internalized borders, where time has overtaken space, and where telecommunications has replaced both our living and our working environments. We are living in the realm of the lost dimension, where the three-dimensional public square of our urban past has collapsed into the two-dimensional interface of the various screens that function as gateways to home, office, and public spaces, be they the flat-screen televisions on our walls, the computer screens on our desktops, or the smartphones in our pockets. In this multidisciplinary tapestry of contemporary physics, architecture, aesthetic theory, and sociology, Virilio describes the effects of today's hyperreality on our understanding of space. Having long since passed the opposition of city and country, and city and suburb, the speed-ridden city and space of today are an opposition between the nomadic and the sedentary: a web of interactive, informational networks that turn our world into a prison-house of illusory transcendence. (shrink)

The Coates–Coogler expansion of the Wakandan afterlife in name, membership, and deed toward West African and transatlantic African diasporic ideas, concerns, and sentiments puts Erik Killmonger's last words in Black Panther into a different light. There are different metaphysical problems confronting Killmonger's postmortem existence in the Wakandan afterlife. Killmonger would have sought out theoretical alternatives less destabilizing to the prospect of continuing his existence postmortem. Wiredu's theory, quasi‐physicalism, would have alleviated some of Killmonger's substance abuse problems. Killmonger in Coates's comics (...) would recognize ori‐inu in part from when he defeated Bast, an orisha, at Orisha Gate, home of Wakanda's pantheon. Cast in Yoruba philosophical terms, the subjectivity that Killmonger wants to persist after death takes on new unconventional meaning. Killmonger chose "death over bondage." He apparently wants to join the ancestors. The very least a man called "Killmonger" would demand from such philosophy is that it help him fight for his destiny. (shrink)

During World War I, Bertrand Russell's outspoken pacifism resulted in his being committed to jail. When he entered the prison, he was met by the warden who showed himself to be quite ecumenical in his religious beliefs, as indicated by this anecdote: ‘I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particluars about me. He asked my religion and I replied “agnostic”. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: (...) “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God”. This remark kept me cheerful about a week.’. (shrink)

Christ recreates all creation that follows Him. Personally embracing His Salvation is the transcendent and central Christian duty, realized as a certain act of taking responsibility. This embracement turns the fact of suffering into a weapon against the devil and the appearance that natural biological death is a misfortune into the insight that it is the opening of the Gate of the Kingdom. This paper outlines the Holy and Living Tradition’s essential message on the topic at hand: The message about (...) the fact that suffering is, in itself, neither good nor bad and about the way in which the Cross of Christ offers the rectifying Justification of the human being and, through man, of the whole of the fallen creation. Consequently, rather than a philological approach, it offers a synthetic dogmatical insight into this, based on the premise that the Holy Tradition is alive since the first centuries and until the more recent Saint Theologians of the One Church. (shrink)

The Internet has recently enjoyed its thirtieth birthday. In 1969, a computer at the University of California sent a message down a wire to another in a research centre at Stanford. The message was just two letters, *LO’.1 Since then the development of the Internet—of the physical infrastructure of computers and the material or broadcast links between them, along with the digital protocols that enable it to function—has been largely an academic achievement. Up until six years ago, the world’s richest (...) entrepreneur, Bill Gates himself, was still unconvinced of its immense importance and economic potential.2 For the World Wide Web (WWW), the most popular and elaborate application on the Net, is itself only about six years old. It is its stunning exponential growth that makes it seem to some of us as if it has been with us forever. (shrink)

This article tries to shed light on the multiple, but underrated pleasures of the heist film – a genre that has attracted numerous major directors from Jean-Pierre Melville and Stanley Kubrick to Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh, but has received limited scholarly attention. I approach the genre from a, broadly, philosophical perspective and draw on thinkers such as Peter Sloterdijk, Georg Simmel, Paul Souriau and Bruno Latour to argue that their emphasis on (1) skillful action and kinaesthetic empathy, (2) (...) smooth transgression of boundaries and (3) well-functioning social collaboration and we-connection, the genre's best exemplars satisfy, in fictional and quasi-utopian form, a number of real-life desires. (shrink)

Agrarianism in America assumes manyforms, in part because of the varied sources ofruralistic values, some evolving from times beforenationhood. Views expressed are sometimes anti-city,other times pro-rural. The Jeffersonian perspective isrevealed in three forms, two by historians, one by aphilosopher. They agree that Jefferson was animportant figure in America's land system, but theydiffer markedly in their uses of Jeffersonian valuesabout agriculture, land, and rural life. The essayconcludes with a basis for “new agrarianism” basedmore on land than agriculture as enterprise.

This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it easier (...) for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

The historical emphasis of medical ethics, based on substantive frameworks and principles derived from them, is no longer seen as sufficiently sensitive to the moral pluralism characteristic of our current era. We argue that moral decision-making in clinical situations is more properly derived from a process of dialogic consensus. This process entails an inclusive, noncoercive, and self-reflective dialogue within the community affected. In order to justify this approach, we make two claims—the first epistemic, and the second normative. The epistemic claim (...) follows from Habermas’ “ways” of knowing. We argue that the dialogue emanating from this episteme focuses on the relevant facts about the patient, as well as on the values attached to these facts, thus allowing facts and their meanings to serve as the basis for reflective action appropriate to the circumstances. The normative claim follows from Habermas’ discourse theory of morality and communicative action. It determines that clinical decision-making should be approached from the perspective of the actual reality of people in their situation of illness, set in their socio-cultural background, and hence be grounded in the second-person perspective. Relocating ethical decision-making from a monological space into one characterized by dialogue is especially appropriate to the clinical encounter. (shrink)

Prologue 1. To begin with, the first principle from Whom all illumination descends as from the Father of Light, by Whom are given all the best and perfect gifts, the eternal Father do I call upon through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that by the intercession of the most holy Virgin Mary, mother of God Himself and of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and of the blessed Francis, our father and leader, He may enlighten the eyes of our mind to (...) guide our feet into the way of that peace "which surpasses all understanding", which peace our Lord Jesus Christ has announced and given to us; which lesson our father Francis always taught, in all of whose preaching was the annunciation of peace both in the beginning and in the end, wishing for peace in every greeting, yearning for ecstatic peace in every moment of contemplation, as a citizen of that Jerusalem of which that man of peace said, with those that hated peace he was peaceable, "Pray ye for the things that are for the peace of Jerusalem". For he knew that the throne of Solomon was nowise save in peace, since it is written, "His place is in peace and His abode in Sion". 2. Since, then, following the example of the most blessed father Francis, I breathlessly sought this peace, I, a sinner, who have succeeded to the place of that most blessed father after his death, the seventh Minister General of the brothers, though in all ways unworthy--it happened that by the divine will in the thirty-third year after the death of that blessed man I ascended to Mount Alverna as to a quiet place, with the desire of seeking spiritual peace; and staying there, while I meditated on the ascent of the mind to God, amongst other things there occurred that miracle which happened in the same place to the blessed Francis himself, the vision namely of the winged Seraph in the likeness of the Crucified. While looking upon this vision, I immediately saw that it signified the suspension of our father himself in contemplation and the way by which he came to it. 3. For by those six wings are rightly to be understood the six stages of illumination by which the soul, as if by steps or progressive movements, was disposed to pass into peace by ecstatic elevations of Christian wisdom. The way, however, is only through the most burning love of the Crucified, Who so transformed Paul, "caught up into the third heaven", into Christ, that he said, "With Christ I am nailed to the cross, yet I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me" ; who therefore so absorbed the mind of Francis that his soul was manifest in his flesh and he bore the most holy stigmata of the Passion in his body for two years before his death. Therefore the symbol of the six-winged Seraph signifies the six stages of illumination, which begin with God's creatures and lead up to God, to Whom no one can enter properly save through the Crucified. For he who does not enter by the door but otherwise, he is a thief and a robber. But if anyone does enter by this door, he shall go in and go out and shall find pastures. Because of this John says in his Apocalypse, "Blessed are they that wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb, that they may have a right to the Tree of Life and may enter in by the gates into the City"; as if he were to say that one cannot enter into the heavenly Jerusalem through contemplation unless one enter through the blood of the Lamb as through a gate. (shrink)

Fischer’s approach for structure elucidation of linear aldohexoses is still the most widespread alternative in textbooks for carbohydrates. However, in post-Fischer era, a series of remarkable discoveries and inventions were made in different laboratories, and by their use a more comprehensive and coherent strategy for structure elucidation of linear isomeric aldohexoses can be elaborated. Fischer used the exceptional properties of d-mannose for the knowledge of configuration of C-2 and called it the key of the gate to stereochemistry. We bring the (...) evidence that Fischer had an alternative to this monosaccharide, d-idose. Fischer discovered the correct structure of the enantiomers of tartaric acid by pure intuition but Bijvoet proved it experimentally by means of X-rays. Hybridization, a concept taken by L. Pauling from biology, reconciled physics and chemistry concerning the valence of carbon atom and explained the stereochemical picture that had been empirically elaborated by Van’t Hoff and Le Bel. Other chemical transformations of monosaccharides, useful in the elucidation of their structure, have been also discovered or invented in post-Fischer era. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 327 conceptual impositions and consider nirvana in the light of its own "intentional infrastructure." Interpreted as doctrine, nirvana is a wooden category; as a path, subtle and paradoxical, a factor celebrated in the later Mahayana texts (samsara is nirvana; nirvana is samsara). In pleading for sensitivity to context, Welbon maintains that the Buddha was not a philosopher, much less a nineteenth-century one, but a saint and a (...) "genius as a soteriological tactician": Depending on the context and in particular the needs of the individual(s) to whom he spoke, his emphasis varied. To those full of self, his message was expressed negatively. To those full of fear, the message expressed confidence. To those full of suffering, the message expressed hope. (p. 300) Nirvana's "meanings," then, are many, and include "both annihilation and bliss, negation and affirmation, nonexistence and existence" (p. 302). Yet the author's primary concern is not simply to advance one more theory of nirvana, lined up beside the rest; it is rather to elucidate the role of theory in its relation to intercultural and history of religions data. Interpretations are themselves phenomena whose intentionality, context, or history must be clarified. The differences between the scholars surveyed in this book stem not so much from varying conclusions about given data as from differences of premise and method; they are differences of questions rather than answers. Nirvana, a religious ultimate without the conception of deity, has indeed been a classic stumbling block to Western theories. The encounter, Welbon suggests, documents not only a history of methodological shortcomings, but "the fragile and inadequate nature of our understanding of what religion itself may be" (p. 301). WILLIAM E. PADEN University of Vermont Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia, A Translation and Commentary. By James C. O'Flaherty. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Pp. xv+229. $7.50) Johann Georg Hamann, Philosophy and Faith. By W. M. Alexander. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. xii+212. Gld. 28.25) America continues to contribute more than a fair share to the study of Hamann ---even though the Hamann News-Letter, edited by James C. O'Flaherty, had to stop appearing in 1963. It is now the same O'Flaherty who opens wide the gates for the study of Hamann in the English-speaking world by translating the Socratic Memorabilia and providing an introduction and explanatory notes. The Memorabilia without doubt offer the best first approach to Hamann. t But so great is the obscurity of Hamann that it is by no means sure that the Memorabilia have now become an exotericum. Before reviewing O'Flaherty's book I shall therefore present the content of the Memorabilia. If only we had simple blow-by-blow accounts of all of his writings before we embark on a wholesale interpretation! a For decades they were available in Reclams Universalbibliothek (in c. 1914 at a price of about three cents) and have now (August, 1968) been republished (together with Hamann's Aesthetica in nuce) with excellent notes and a commentary by Sven-Aage Jorgensen (present price: about twenty cents). In 1959 F. Blanke published another amply annotated edition with an extensive thorough commentary. 328 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The purpose of the Memorabilia is to "convert" two friends of Hamann, Kant and Berens, from Enlightenment to Christianity (the two tried to do the opposite to Hamann) and to defend himself and his Christianity from their criticisms. To do so, Hamann decides to use philosophic rather than religious language. In so doing he will present himself as another Socrates, because, as Hamann sees it, it was the mission of Socrates to lead the Athenians to the unknown God, thus prefiguring the mission of St. Paul, and because Socrates opposed the then "enlighteners," viz., the Sophists. In so doing he furthermore compares some of his own character traits (for which he was blamed by Kant and Berens) and some events in his life with Socratic ones. But as he compares (equates) Socrates with the prophets and with Jesus, he by the same token compares (equates) himself with them. Of course, Hamann knows that the Enlightenment also admired Socrates. But it did so for entirely wrong reasons: they praised... (shrink)

In Out of Eden, Paul W. Kahn offers a philosophical meditation on the problem of evil. He uses the Genesis story of the Fall as the starting point for a profound articulation of the human condition.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 419 Paul Amar Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family inWolf Warrior 2 This essay offers a new paradigm of “deimperial queer analysis” that reveals the tension between the People’s Republic of China’s extractive expansionism in Africa and its claim to solidarity with Africans against white supremacy and Northern imperialism. (...) China has been labeled an “anti-imperial empire” that forcefully challenges previous Euro-American imperial legacies—all while it verges on reenacting them.1 A critical way it resolves this geopolitical tension is through the articulation of a mission for global China, and since 2017, the heroic filmic fictional figure of the “Wolf Warrior” anchors such an approach. The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates—all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Extending a hugely popular film series, the release in 2017 of the blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 (abbreviated below as Wolf 2) unleashed a worldwide social media frenzy as well as a revolution in diplomatic tone and protocol for China. In these ways, Wolf Warrior 2 came to mark the debut of the global PRC as a hegemonic structure 1. David Armitage, “The Anti-Imperial Empire?” Times Literary Supplement, no. 6018, August 3, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-anti-imperialempire -american. 420 Paul Amar of feeling with an attendant popular cultural logic, launching a cast of military characters, humanitarian imaginaries, and gendered rebranding initiatives. These fused into a global cultural megaproject with the PRC presenting itself as a leader in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Global South—a time the PRC has officially branded as its “Rejuvenation Era” of “Stepping Out into the World.” This essay shows how exactly this Wolf Warrior imagination has legitimized a new global regime, but I also reveal how, paradoxically, the Wolf Warrior regime has offered a distinct, more subversive worlding project. I argue here that the utopia immanent in this project can be revealed by interpretively turning this Wolf universe inside out through a deimperial queer analysis that honors and combines a Third World feminist lens and the “Asia as Method” approach with Danmei/BL and Slash queer-feminist fanfiction hacks. Danmei is a Chinese (originally mainly Tawainese) fanfiction genre that subverts mainstream heteronormative narratives by erotically aestheticizing and renarrating male-male intimacies within mainstream plotlines from feminist perspectives. BL (short for “boylove ”) is a similar Japanese fanfiction genre, and Slash is the term used in English for the queer/feminist hacking and excavation of sublimated and particularly utopian gender and sexuality plots from within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts. The everted or inside-out epistemology given expression here uses a set of non-phallogocentric lenses and decolonial feminist decoding practices. At stake is the urgency of not repeating the epistemic violence of conventional “anti-imperial” arguments, which tend to be heteronormative, statist, macho, and monolithic. Instead, the form of critique elaborated here brings questions of gender, race, and sexuality to the fore through a three-part approach. First, I identify the homoerotic register of the techno-infrastructural elements in the film. I generate close readings that detail the visual and genre codes of battle scenes, thug subjects, and piracy plots that forge a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality and that act as a metaphor for China’s techno -infrastructural rule. Second, this essay explores the gendered hauntings of supremacist humanism. I deploy a decolonial feminist lens to map the configuration of African women, female doctors, Maoist women insurgents, and feminized “flowerboys” as a rebel protectorate overseen by China’s phallic prerogative that is itself haunted by the specters of Euro-American humanist betrayal and white supremacy. Third, Paul Amar 421 I trace queer kinship utopias. I demonstrate that Wolf Warrior 2 rejuvenates a non-Western, queer, globalist kinship structure that triangulates Asian, white, and Black through adoption dramas and bromance bonds. Through these intimacies, an... (shrink)

In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consent order to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The order decreed the AICPA to lessen its longstanding ethics code which had until then banned the receipts of commissions, referral fees and contingent fees. The FTC alleged that the AICPA banned receipt of the fees as an attempt to restrain trade (FTC, 1990).In the present study, we sought to determine if CPAs'' preference for bans on commissions, referral fees and (...) contingent fees is related to their moral reasoning whereby CPAs perceive the bans to serve as a means of resolving ethical issues. While determining this matter cannot prove whether the bans did or did not actually result in restrained trade, it can offer insight into the perceived ethical importance to CPAs of the overturned rules. Based on a random sample of AICPA members and using Rest''s Defining Issues Test (DIT) to measure moral reasoning, we did not find a CPA''s moral reasoning to be related to his/her preference for ethics rules which ban commissions, referral fees or contingent fees. However, our results did indicate that most CPAs prefer banning commissions, referral fees and contingent fees, with those CPAs holding a higher financial stake in public accounting, namely partners, favoring banning referral fees and contingent fees significantly less than CPAs with a lesser stake. Further, we noted a significant negative relationship between financial stake and moral reasoning. These results seem to suggest that self-interest among CPAs may influence their moral reasoning.Further study is needed to examine the relationship between self-interest of CPAs and their moral reasoning. If self-interest clouds moral judgments made by CPAs, capital markets are in danger. Rendering an independent audit opinion must exclude self-interest. (shrink)

Research Articles Paul A. Rahe, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

The ‘universal cell reaction’ (UCR), a coordinated biphasic response to external (noxious and other) stimuli observed in all living cells, was described by Nasonov and his colleagues in the mid‐20th century. This work has received no attention from cell biologists in the West, but the UCR merits serious consideration. Although it is non‐specific, it is likely to be underpinned by precise mechanisms and, if these mechanisms were characterized and their relationship to the UCR elucidated, then our understanding of the integration (...) of cellular function could be improved. As a step towards identifying such mechanisms, I review some recent advances in understanding cell mechanics and the stress response and I suggest potentially testable hypotheses. There is a particular need for time‐course studies of cellular responses to different stimulus doses or intensities. I also suggest a correspondence with hormesis; re‐investigation of the UCR using modern biophysical and molecular‐biological techniques might throw light on this much‐discussed phenomenon. BioEssays 29:324–333, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Each chapter in this volume seeks to explore, critique, and emphasize the continuing relevance of the vast contributions of Buchanan to our understanding of political economy and social philosophy.

Johnson and Stricker published an opinion piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics presenting their perspective on the 2008 agreement between the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the Connecticut Attorney General with regard to the 2006 IDSA treatment guideline for Lyme disease. Their writings indicate that these authors hold unconventional views of a relatively common tick-transmitted bacterial infection caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that their opinions would clash with the IDSA's (...) evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Their allegations of conflict of interest against the IDSA resemble those made against the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000, which were found to be baseless. It is the responsibility of all physicians and medical scientists to stand up to antiscientific, baseless and unethical attacks on those who support an evidence-based approach to caring for patients. (shrink)

This article offers three reflections on the nature of the metaphysical ‘wall’ erected between the ‘Included’ and the ‘Excluded/Other’ by the concept of private property and its implementation in a state’s legal apparatus. The first reflection explores the reality of the concept of private property, using Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology, in order to demonstrate that the liberal conception of private property masks power operating on two levels: the formal, repressive state apparatus, and the deeper, the personal, the real, the (...) actual level, which allows the Included to act upon ego in ways that negatively affect the Excluded/Other found in the ideological state apparatus. The second argues that the masked power that is private property permits war to be waged by the Included as against the Excluded/Other at two levels: intra-state and inter-state. This reveals a paradox in the distinction between Included and Excluded/Other: while the distinction demonstrates the allocation of power over resources, the reality is that every individual on earth is both Included and Excluded/Other. The final reflection briefly considers what could replace private property as a means of allocating goods and resources within a society. (shrink)

Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits—whether "stories" or "accounts"—during the narrative conference, I am more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom and indifference—ours as well as that of other people. (...) Those nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or gratifying entertainment and to replace indifference by the social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres, tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence—a desire which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment, motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy? Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1974, given by Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher.

In 1894 the anthropologist Otis Tufton Mason called for research in an area he dubbed ‘technogeography’, and he lauded the potential benefits of the knowledge to be acquired under this heading: The...

The Essential Herman Kahn offers the public for the first time an anthology consisting of the best of Herman Kahn's work. It brings together, out of the several thousands of pages published in his life, the "essential Kahn"—the most relevant, consequential, and interesting themes, ideas, and arguments of his work in areas such as international relations, public policy, environmentalism, strategic thinking, and futurology.

Things do not begin to live except in the middle.--Gilles Deleuze, DialoguesA Land of UnlikenessThe English novel The Go-Between begins a tale of memory and loss with two sentences a historian could love: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." The novel's narrator should know: he is a librarian, someone who, as the memory ghost of his twelve-year-old self will remind him, spends his days cataloguing the relics of the book-past. And many who now live with (...) the past for a living might nod in recognition: the metaphor slips on comfortably, like a well-worn shoe. The past can feel like a place as much as it does a time -- a foreign place, outside the doors of the familiar, beyond the gate and the gatekeepers of the now.Especially beyond the pale is the Middle Ages, definitional whipping boy for generations of citizens of the present who have needed an "all-purpose alternative" against which to define themselves. The difference of medieval doing is embedded already in the names we still give the time: the "Middle Ages" makes parenthetical death of the interval between Classical life and its humanist "rebirth." "Premodern" gives life only in anticipation of the modern, directing the period toward a telos of recognizability in the now that the premodern, as such, will always fail to satisfy.The Middle Ages were invented to be a foreign country. The indigenous peoples are dead, and they didn't even know they were medieval -- they thought they were living in modern times. They thought it was now: "There is no other age than ours," Raymond de l'Aire of Tignac told the inquisitors nosing for heresy in his town around 1320.But this is "now," and there are elements about the "Middle Ages" that feel foreign -- foreign in this modern, postmodern, or maybe even post-postmodern land we still call "now." Everyone who has ever read a medieval book cold or taught one to cold undergraduates has felt this foreignness intimately in his or her suddenly awkward flesh. All those quotations, all that Catholicism, all those arguments and counterarguments; not to mention those old words, weird verb forms, erratic spelling, and all that damn Latin.There's no question that the Middle Ages is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace, as the etymology indicates, beyond our own doors . What are we doing when we go there? What happens to "here" and "there" when we go? The question isn't whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what we as putative nonmedievals are going to do with the difference. What stories do we tell ourselves about it? What do they do to and for us?When medievalists talk about medieval otherness, it can feel like a slap in the face; it can feel like a come-on; it can of course be both at once. Take, for example, Paul Zumthor's monumental Essai de poétique médiévale. Published in 1972, the Essai set medieval poetry in dialogue with what was then high literary theory. The dialogue made the foreignness of medieval poetry accessible to a mid-1980s graduate student like me; it taught me that medieval texts could be active participants in the theoretical discussions I was learning to have with friends, professors, and texts. Returning to the Essai now with the theory-midwifed births of "New Philology" and "New Medievalism" in the past, I was surprised to find that this text that I thought bridged temporal gaps begins by blowing up more bridges than it builds. "We are cut off from the Middle Ages by a divide that we should not attempt to ignore, but that we should rather see as an impassible abyss," Zumthor announces in his second paragraph. Why, then, even write the book, students I once read this with wanted to know, and it's a good question.. (shrink)

It has been disputed whether an externalist conception of the individuation of intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, is compatible with self-knowledge, that is, the claim that one's judgments about one's intentional states are non-evidential, non-inferential, and authoritative. I want to argue that these theses are indeed incompatible, notwithstanding an important objection to this incompatibility claim. The worry has been raised that if externalism is true, then for a subject to know, say, that he or she believes that p, (...) the subject would need to know, on the basis of some evidence, the external conditions which determine the belief's content. Thus, externalism would be incompatible with self-knowledge. But many philosophers have accepted an objection suggesting that this worry is mistaken because in order to have a belief one need not know the metaphysical conditions determining its content, even if they are externalist. And thus, the subject's reflexive judgment about the belief would not need to rest on evidence about those external conditions. But this objection rests on a crucial assumption according to which mental content is reflexively transparent in the sense that a subject could not judge that she or he has an intentional state and be mistaken about the content of her or his state, even if the content is externally determined. My main purpose is not reflexively transparent on the assumption of externalism and, thus, self-knowledge and externalism are incompatible. (shrink)

This book deals with the aftermath of the enlightenment and its legacy in the political, social, and racial context. It discusses the incomplete project of modernity in terms of social contract theory, racial justice issues, and political theology in the postcolonial context. Hermeneutical realism and cultural linguistic inquiry become substantial features in elaborating postcolonial political theology and its ethical stance against the colonization of lifeworld and its pathologies. A study of critical theory and political theology is of a reconstructive character (...) in seeking to relocate critical theory and political ethics in the context of alternative modernities at the level of postcolonial theory. (shrink)