Cresp, Mary Some months ago while driving I heard an interview with writer Alan Moore on the radio and was so captured by his comments about trends in modern society that I had to pull over to the side of the road and stop to concentrate on what he was saying. I ordered his book, No Straight Lines, and found he presents an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world, more able organisations and more vibrant and equitable economies relevant (...) to the world we live in today. His descriptions so correspond with my experience that, although the changes in Religious Life over the past fifty years are often seen as something that occurred only in church circles, I conclude that they are part of a world-wide search for ways to serve humanity better, to search for meaning in the work people do and to find viable alternatives for the ways that things were done in the past. Because my immediate experience of Religious Life is confined to the Sisters of St Joseph, my comments are framed around that experience. However, through interaction with members of other Congregations, I know their journey parallels that of Josephites in many respects. (shrink)

Joyce's review of _Humanism, Philosophical Essays: A Collection of Essays on Pragmatism_, by Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, was written at a critical moment in the development of Joyce's fiction (before "The Sisters", before the essay "A Portrait of the Artist," and during Joyce's writing of his aesthetic theory. The review was published in the _Dublin Express_ on November 12, 1903. The diary entries at the end of _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ hint at the fallibilism and (...) reality of experience at the bedrock of Peircean semiotics and the revolutionary style of Joyce. Unfortunately the mocking style of Joyce's review may be why it has not received attention and perhaps why the review has not been included in a recent collection of Joyce's non-fiction writings. Joyce mocks Schiller’s style and thought, which is "prone to stylistic violations such as: vulgarity ... excessively ornate language ... pomposity ... exaggeration ... and avoiding the issue" as Joseph Porrovecchio states in a dissertation on Schiller's rhetoric. Schiller not only provoked Joyce to mock him, he also provoked Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, to rename his philosophy "pragmaticism" adding an "ic" to it to differentiate it from Schiller’s use of the word. This essay shows Joyce knew about Charles Peirce, whose influence was extensive, continuing through Finnegans Wake, as discussed in Roy Benjamin’s The Triptych Vision: Joyce and Peirce. (shrink)

My note on McShane's “Implementation” article indicates what I have learned from it (a) about its author, (b) about Lonergan, and (c) about implementation of Lonergan’s transcendental method. My sheaf of quotations from the article may offer a focus – not distorting, I hope – different from the reader’s own.

Comme l’indique le sous-titre, ce livre n’est pas une biographie, mais une enquête sur la disparition dans la mémoire collective d’une grande résistante, une des six femmes Compagnons de la Libération, Laure Diebold-Mutschler. Engagée dès 1940 dans la Résistance, à l’âge de vingt-cinq ans, elle est notamment agent de liaison du réseau Mithridate avant d’entrer à Lyon dans les Forces Françaises libres et de devenir la secrétaire de Jean Moulin. Elle sera arrêtée le 24 septembre 1943 à Paris, a...

The visual attention (VA) span is defined as the amount of distinct visual elements which can be processed in parallel in a multi-element array. Both recent empirical data and theoretical accounts suggest that a VA span deficit might contribute to developmental dyslexia, independently of a phonological disorder. In this study, this hypothesis was assessed in two large samples of French and British dyslexic children whose performance was compared to that of chronological-age matched control children. Results of the French study show (...) that the VA span capacities account for a substantial amount of unique variance in reading, as do phonological skills. The British study replicates this finding and further reveals that the contribution of the VA span to reading performance remains even after controlling IQ, verbal fluency, vocabulary and single letter identification skills, in addition to phoneme awareness. In both studies, most dyslexic children exhibit a selective phonological or VA span disorder. Overall, these findings support a multi-factorial view of developmental dyslexia. In many cases, developmental reading disorders do not seem to be due to phonological disorders. We propose that a VA span deficit is a likely alternative underlying cognitive deficit in dyslexia. (shrink)