The 1830s and 1840s are the formative years of modern public health in Britain, when the poor law bureaucrat Edwin Chadwick conceived his vision of public health through public works and began the campaign for the construction of the kinds of water and sewerage works that ultimately became the standard components of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. This book first explores that vision and campaign against the backdrop of the great "condition-of-England" questions of the period, of what rights and (...) expectations working people could justifiably have in regard to political participation, food, shelter and conditions of work. It examines the ways Chadwick's sanitarianism fit the political needs of the much-hated Poor Law Commission and of Whig and Tory governments, each seeking some antidote to revolutionary Charitism. It then reviews the Chadwickians' efforts to solve the host of problems they met in trying to implement the sanitary idea: of what responsibilities central and local units of government, and private contractors, were to have; of how townspeople could be persuaded to embark on untried public technologies; of where the new public health experts were to come from; and of how elegant technical designs were to be fitted to the unique social, political and geographic circumstances of individual towns. Rejecting the view that Chadwick's program was a simple response to an obvious urban problem Professor Hamlin argues that at the time a "public health" focusing narrowly on sanitary public works represented a retreat of public medicine from involvement with the great social issues of the Industrial Revolution. In exploring the views of medical men who were critical of Chadwick, Hamlin suggests the parameters of a public health that might have been, in which concern for health and well-being becomes the foundation of a public medicine that is a principal guarantor of social justice. This book offers modern public heatlh professionals elements of a forgotten professional heritage that might be useful in responding to the bewildering range of health problems we now confront. (shrink)

This article proposes a framework for the analysis of experienced discrimination in home mortgages. It addresses the problem of home mortgage lending discrimination in one of the richest areas of northern Italy. Employees of a local hospital were interviewed to study their perception of discriminatory behavior related to home financing. The analysis follows two steps. The first evaluates self-selection and the second focuses on the likelihood that applications are accepted by the bank. Findings show that discrimination is likely to appear (...) when the applicant’s nationality is considered. In addition to its findings, the study provides an original econometric model on a two-step procedure to test perceived discrimination and suggests a method and approach that may constitute a point of reference for those willing to study perceived discrimination. (shrink)

we consider this merit, however, to have almost no value in comparison to one which we wish to acquire from the offended worshippers of galileo. we announce to them that after having identified and reordered the scattered writings which complete the sixth dialogue as far as percussion is concerned, we were also able to reintegrate the dialogue with regard to the use of a little chain to provide a rule for aiming artillery, without having to resort to laborious calculations.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Awful Patriotism: Richard Rorty and the Politics of KnowingDavid Palumbo-Liu* (bio)Richard Rorty. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.This essay addresses the current debates surrounding what some have labeled the Two Lefts: a “cultural left” and an activist left. 1 Debate over this “divide” has made many strange bedfellows, but perhaps none quite so unheimlich as “liberal leftist” Richard Rorty and cultural conservative (...) Harold Bloom. To be sure, Rorty has often alluded to Bloom’s work, especially Bloom’s notion of “strong poets,” but in his most recent book, Rorty has appropriated Bloom in a particularly telling manner. In 1994, Harold Bloom published his polemic The Western Canon. At once eloquent and pathetic, it pressed all the right buttons. Bloom succinctly (or shall we say, reductively?) deployed his version of the “aesthetic” against any other approach. Cultural conservatives were gratified that someone of Bloom’s stature had done them the service of voicing their interests in a highly visible and contestatory manner; more moderate sorts squirmed uncomfortably at Bloom’s unabashed elitism and the shrillness of his tone; theorists and cultural studies folks were outraged at Bloom’s absolute ignorance of their work and his resort to parody instead of anything vaguely resembling an engaged critique; and ethnic, minority, queer, and feminist critics had more than enough to be insulted by in his racist and sexist arrogance. So far out is Bloom’s jeremiad that it probably came close to realizing his worst nightmare—it may have driven students screaming into all those horrid cultural studies classes to find out what was so seductive, so powerful as to corner The Canon. So I didn’t worry too much about The Western Canon. That is, until I read Richard Rorty’s essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” and its companion pieces in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. What was Rorty, a self-proclaimed leftist, doing, calling to his aid the social and cultural archconservative Harold Bloom?In the first part of my essay I ponder this strange alliance, particularly as it joins forces against ethnic studies (to be sure, its common target is more generally “theory” of any stripe or color, but I want specifically to address the issue of ethnic literary study). Rorty adapts Bloom’s School of Resentment to characterize what he calls a certain, bad “knowingness,” against which he poses “hope” and “inspiration.” I want to examine more closely the nature and content of that destructive “knowledge,” for it becomes clear that [End Page 37] this knowledge is for Rorty the recognition of Otherness as a politically (as opposed to “merely” ontologically) functional identity. This knowledge is disturbing to Rorty and deeply informs his notions of “patriotism” and Americanism. For him, such knowledge impedes the formation of a leftist politics. It is precisely the disjunction between the “knowing” discourse of the cultural left obsessed with identity politics and an activist political left (modeled after the old reformist left) that troubles Rorty.My essay will be largely devoted to showing how Rorty’s recent work develops his earlier work on “ethnocentrism” into an “Americanism” that erodes precisely the liberal foundations of that earlier work and discloses the weakness of its claims. I understand this development as compelled by a certain impatience with identity politics that is shared by a number of liberal and leftist critics of American political society, an impatience fueled perhaps not so much by a conservative threat as by a perceived threat from “within” progressive politics. Basically, I ask, how and why are knowledge and recognition of “difference” taken to immobilize progressive politics? To frame that same question in a slightly different manner—what is the presumed content of that “progressive” politics, and what assumptions do we have to make in order to arrive at that point of view?Against the rather odd Bloom/Rorty pairing, set against “knowledge,” one would naturally seek out an enemies list for possible allies. Rorty in fact begins his essay by providing us with one in the figure of Fredric Jameson, an archpractitioner of theory whose “antiromantic” skepticism Rorty finds both debilitating and... (shrink)

In this collection of essays, leading cultural theorists consider the meaning and implications of world-scale humanist scholarship by engaging with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis. The renowned sociologist developed his influential critical framework to explain the historical and continuing exploitation of the rest of the world by the West. World-systems analysis reflects Wallerstein’s conviction that understanding global inequality requires thinking on a global scale. Humanists have often criticized his theory as insufficiently attentive to values and objects of knowledge such as culture, (...) agency, difference, subjectivity, and the local. The editors of this collection do not deny the validity of those criticisms; instead, they offer Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis as a well-developed vision of the world scale for humanists to think with and against. Scholars of comparative literature, gender, geography, history, law, race, and sociology consider what thinking on the world scale might mean for particular disciplinary practices, knowledge formations, and objects of study. Several essays offer broader reflections on what is at stake for the study of culture in decisions to adopt or reject world-scale thinking. In a brief essay, Immanuel Wallerstein situates world-systems analysis vis-à-vis the humanities. Contributors. Gopal Balakrishnan, Tani E. Barlow, Neil Brenner, Richard E. Lee, Franco Moretti, David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, Helen Stacy, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Kären Wigen. (shrink)

Through a mention to the Middle Platonists and a reference to a late antique text that presents a comparison between Plato and the Demiurge, I set out to show just one of those rhetorical strategies that have been used by the author Plato to give his writings the unity and consistency that make the corpus a kosmos, a living animal, like the universe. After having identified among the rhetorical strategies the one that uses examples and explained what such a strategy (...) means, I analyse the Platonic use of the example of the mirror identified with Socrates in two writings, the Apology of Socrates and the Alcibiades I. (shrink)

Why the social ontology uses the game as paradigmatic example of social object? Is social reality a game? In this short essay, shared characteristics and differences of ludic and social acts are explored to explode the myth of the normative structure of social reality. In order to explain and demonstrate their theories, major authors of our research sector as Searle and Smith appeal to ludic phenomenons as unmistakable evidences of regulated social activities. Nevertheless well valued theorists don’t recognize that there (...) are tens of different typologies of games, about which it should be appropriate to draw up a regional ontology, as much there are tons of rule types, not always prescriptive and not always descriptive. The instant article demonstrates that social reality is not explainable by appealing to regulated behaviors, opening in this way a research context that involves the Interactive Fiction of play. Therefore the ludic phenomenon rests the base of social reality, however disconnecting it from the concept of rule, which too much influenced the research on mind, language and culture. (shrink)

In questa relazione suggerisco di considerare almeno la possibilità che nel Simposio Platone ci offre non una mera spiegazione della natura dell’amore, ma una spiegazione filosofica della natura del linguaggio (sull’amore). Nel Simposio Eros è una maschera di Socrate e Socrate una maschera del linguaggio. La storia di Diotima sulla nascita di Eros, figlio di Poros e Penia conferma questo punto: il linguaggio, come l’amore, non può possedere il suo oggetto come qualcosa di presente ma solo sempre in una fragile (...) bilancia tra presenza e assenza, tra oblio e memoria, tra conoscenza e ignoranza. Il linguaggio, come l’amore, è il demone della comunicazione. In questa relazione presento qualche prova, tratta dal dialogo, atta a supportare tale interpretazione. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that language switching is costly, and that these costs are likely to persist even when speakers are given ample time to prepare. The aim of this study was to determine whether there are cognitive limitations to speakers’ ability to prepare for a switch, or whether a new language can be prepared in advance and any cost to switch language eliminated. To explore this, language switching costs were measured in a group of Dutch-English (L1-L2) bilinguals who named (...) pictures in their two languages while the preparation time was manipulated. The participants were given either no time to prepare (cue to stimulus interval, CSI: 0 ms), or some time to prepare, for the target language (CSI: 250, 500, and 800 ms). The results revealed that when speakers had no time to prepare, language switching was costly. However, when preparation time was provided, switching costs disappeared. This suggests that there might be no cognitive limitations to the ability to prepare for a language switch, and that, provided enough preparation time, the effort to switch language could be eliminated. This finding might also explain why normal code-switched conversations seem effortless, as speakers typically have ample time to prepare for the language switch. (shrink)

Cosa accade se filosofi del presente e del passato, personaggi di finzione e romanzieri di fantascienza si mettono a dialogare su alcuni dei temi fondamentali del mondo sociale? La discussione sulla natura della realtà documentale origina un caleidoscopico divertissement incentrato sulla disamina della supposta irrealtà degli oggetti videoludici.