Written and directed by Paul-Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love exposes the complexity and kitsch superficialities of masculine gender constructions. The following essay provides a summary of gender theory in order to uncover and better understand the film's post-patriarchal vision of masculinity.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 711-712, August 2012.

-/- Paperback -/- Price: $20.95/£17.99 ISBN: -/- Published: Dec 6, 2016 Copyright: 2015 Pages: 376 Size: 5.5 x 8.5 in. -/- ebook -/- Price: $20.95/£17.99 ISBN: -/- Published: Dec 6, 2016 Copyright: 2015 Pages: 376 Size: 5.5 x 8.5 in. -/- Buy This -/- Common Reading Selection Download Cover -/- Overview Author(s) Praise -/- Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about (...) public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren’t problems for us—not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past. -/- Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda’s selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. -/- How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere. (shrink)

The willows and the hazel copses greenShall now no more be seenFanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.[Milton, Lycidas, Ll. 42-44] It is my thesis that the reader is always making sense , and in the case of these lines the sense he makes will involve the assumption of a completed assertion after the word "seen," to wit, the death of Lycidas has so affected the willows and the hazel copses green that, in sympathy, they will wither and die (...) . In other words at the end of line 43 the reader will have hazarded an interpretation, or performed an act of perpetual closure, or made a decision as to what is being asserted. I do not mean that he has done four things, but that he has done one thing the description of which might take any one of four forms—making sense, interpreting, performing perpetual closure, deciding about what is intended. Whatever he has done he will undo it in the act of reading the next line; for here he discovers that his closure, or making of sense, was premature and that he must make a new one in which the relationship between man and nature is exactly the reverse of what was first assumed. The willows and the hazel copses green will in fact be seen, but they will not be seen by Lycidas. It is he who will be no more, while they go on as before, fanning their joyous leaves to someone else's soft lays . Nature is not sympathetic, but indifferent, and the notion of her sympathy is one of those "false surmises" that the poem is continually encouraging and then disallowing. Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" , "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" , "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" , and "One More Time" . See also: "Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum" by Douglas Bush in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Stanley Fish's 'Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?" by Steven Mailloux in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" by Stanley E. Fish in Vol. 3, No. 1. (shrink)

Stem-cell nomenclature is in a muddle! So-called stem cells may be self-renewing or emergent, oligopotent (uni- and multipotent) or pluri- and totipotent, cells with perpetual embryonic features or cells that have changed irreversibly. Ambiguity probably seeped into stem cells from common usage, flukes in biology's history beginning with Weismann's divide between germ and soma and Haeckel's biogenic law and ending with contemporary issues over the therapeutic efficacy of adult versus embryonic cells. Confusion centers on tissue dynamics, whether stem cells are (...) properly members of emerging or steady-state populations. Clarity might yet be achieved by codifying differences between cells in emergent populations, including embryonic stem and embryonic germ (ES and EG) cells in tissue culture as opposed to self-renewing (SR) cells in steady-state populations. BioEssays 28: 301–308, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Semantic theory has been used for many different philosophical purposes. This thesis investigates two such uses of semantic theory. The first is the use of semantic theory in providing a justification for a formal theory. The second is the use of semantic theory in yielding an account of understanding. ;The first paper is "Truth and Metatheory in Frege". In this paper, it is contended, against much recent work in Frege interpretation, that Frege should be credited with the first semi-rigourous formulation (...) of a semantic theory. In so doing, it attempts to show that many of the arguments which purport to establish that Frege could not have engaged in semantic theorizing suffer from two kinds of misconceptions. The first misconception involves the notion of truth which a philosopher must accept in order to engage in such theorizing. The second misconception involves the sort of justification which these arguments assume a semantic theory attempts to provide. ;The second paper is "Frege's Thesis". For each primitive expression in a language, two questions may be asked. The first is: what is it in virtue of which that expression has the semantic value it does? The second is: what is it in virtue of which a speaker counts as understanding that expression? Frege's Thesis states that one answer can be given to both of these questions: that the account of what it is in virtue of which a speaker understands an expression can also serve as the account of why that expression has the semantic value it does. In this paper, Frege's Thesis is defended. First, it is argued that some objections against it result from a confusion between semantics and metasemantics. Second, the Thesis is defended against traditional objections from Kripke and Putnam. ;The third paper is "Rigidity and Content". According to much recent philosophy of language, if two utterances differ in modal semantic value, then they must express different things. In this paper, it is argued that this view is false. In particular, it is argued that the notion of content which results from this consensus is incompatible with fundamental philosophical principles relating content to use. (shrink)

We first present a realistic framework for quantum probability theory based on the path integral formalism of quantum mechanics and illustrate this framework by constructing a model that describes a quantum particle evolving in a discrete space-time lattice. We then present a finite model for describing the internal dynamics of “elementary particles” and show that this model gives the standard particle classification scheme and successfully predicts particle masses.

Aremarkable revival of interest in Romanticism has taken place among some philosophers in recent years. Why should this be so? Romanticism has had a bad reputation among literary critics of a variety of persuasions throughout most of the twentieth century, when it was not even a topic for analytical philosophy in the English-speaking world. The philosophical movement most associated with Romanticism—German idealism—had been shunned by the curricula of a majority of the most prestigious British and American universities by the mid-twentieth (...) century. Literary modernism and then various strains of postmodernism had a self-image of having overcome Romantic illusions. (Of course, Romanticism and Romantic philosophy... (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Toward a Marxist Anthropology".

Alexandre Kojève, née Kojevnikov, was born in pre‐revolutionary Russia; his uncle was the painter Kandinsky, and Kojève planned originally to study art history. He was traveling in Italy when the Russian Revolution occurred, an event that caused him to change his plans and to devote himself to philosophy. He spent some years in Germany before emigrating to France, and was able to pursue the life of an independent scholar until the worldwide economic depression led to the loss of his family (...) income. Upon the invitation of Alexandre Koyré, Kojève began a series of lectures on Hegel in 1933 at the Ecole des Hautes Études. These lectures lasted until 1939; ostensibly devoted to Hegel's philosophy of religion, they in fact provided an exhaustive commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit. (shrink)

RésuméD. C. Matthew propose une critique originale et importante de l'intégration raciale. Son affirmation selon laquelle l'intégration aggravera la dévaluation phénotypique des traits typiquement noirs, menaçant l'estime de soi noire, est persuasive. Pourtant, son argument normatif le plus solide, selon lequel les Noirs devraient rejeter l'intégration puisque les dommages potentiels à leur estime de soi l'emportent sur ses prétendus avantages, est moins convaincant, car il s'appuie sur une analyse coût-bénéfice douteuse. En définitive, étant donné l'incertitude d'un processus aussi complexe qui (...) se déroule dans un avenir spéculatif, je soutiens que nous devrions, dans tous les cas, résister à la tentation d'offrir une analyse coût-bénéfice définitive de l'intégration raciale. (shrink)

Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville has often been read as a Rousseauian condemnation of modern civilization judged against the standard of pure Nature. A cursory reading of the Supplement does appear to present Tahiti as a natural utopia and Europe as a civilized prison. This essay rejects such a reading by demonstrating that the Supplement actually undermines any clear opposition between virtuous nature, represented by Tahiti, and corrupt civilization, represented by Europe. Although Diderot truly does offer a stinging (...) critique of modern Europe, he refuses to offer "nature" as a redemptive alternative. Instead, the Supplement offers an implicit critique of the politics of moralism. (shrink)

A discrete quantum mechanics is developed and used to construct models for discrete space-time and for the internal dynamics of elementary particles. This dynamics is given in terms of particles performing a quantum random walk on a multigraph.

We first define a class of processes which we call regular quantum Markov processes. We next prove some basic results concerning such processes. A method is given for constructing quantum Markov processes using transition amplitude kernels. Finally we show that the Feynman path integral formalism can be clarified by approximating it with a quantum stochastic process.

It is frequently argued that reality and locality are incompatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics. Various investigators have used this as evidence for the existence of hidden variables. However, Bell's inequalities seem to refute this possibility. Since the above arguments are made within the framework of conventional probability theory, we contend that an alternative solution can be found by an extension of this theory. Elaborating on some ideas of I. Pitowski, we show that within the framework of a generalized (...) probability theory, reality, locality, hidden variables, and the predictions of quantum mechanics can be maintained together. Although our principal model in this work is a spin system, there are indications that this program can be extended to more general systems. (shrink)

The Gospel of Luke contains important clues about how Christians should care for the poor, that is, what form our charity should take and in what sense such a charity is politics.