Passion and Action is an exploration of the role of the passions in seventeenth-century thought. Susan James offers fresh readings of a broad range of thinkers, including such canonical figures as Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke, and shows that a full understanding of their philosophies must take account of their interpretations of our affective life. This ground-breaking study throws new light upon the shaping of our ideas about the mind, knowledge, and action, and provides a historical context (...) for burgeoning current debates about the emotions. (shrink)

Catharine MacKinnon's investigation of the role of sexuality in the subordination of women is a logical culmination of radical feminist thought. If this is correct, the position of her work relative to radical feminism is analogous to the place Parmenides's work occupied in ancient Greek philosophy. Critics of MacKinnon's work have missed their target completely and must engage her work in a different way if feminist theory is to progress past its current stalemated malaise.

Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? In this wide-ranging and ambitious essay, Christoph Türcke offers a new answer to these timeworn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. Provocatively, he argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, (...) imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, Türcke argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. Türcke’s essay ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it. (shrink)

This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded (...) against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion. (shrink)

Toys to overcome time, distance, and gravity -- To fly like a bird, not float like a cloud -- Finding a place in the world -- A new continent -- A new age-old problem to solve -- The physics of miniature worlds -- Models of wings and models of the world -- A world made of facts.

Spontaneous play, important for forming the basis of friendships and peer relations, is a complex activity involving the management and production of talk-in-interaction. This article focuses on the intricacies of social interaction, emphasizing the link between alignment and affiliation, and the range and importance of verbal and nonverbal interactive devices available to children. Analysis of the way in which two girls, one of whom has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, engage in spontaneous activities demonstrates the potential for interactional difficulty due (...) to the unscripted nature of the interaction. The article argues for further research into how improvised, unscripted interactions are initiated within moment-by-moment talk, how they unfold, and how they are brought to a close in everyday contexts in order to understand how children create their social worlds. (shrink)

I examine Frege’s explanation of how Hilbert ought to have presented his proofs of the independence of the axioms of geometry: in terms of mappings between (what we would call) fully interpreted statements. This helps make sense of Frege’s objections to the notion of different interpretations, which many have found puzzling. (The paper is the text of a talk presented in October 1994.).

Mouse models of human genetic disorders provide a valuable resource for investigating the pathogenesis of genetic disease and for testing potential therapies. The high degree of resolution of linkage mapping in the mouse allows mutant phenotypes to be mapped precisely which, combined with the accurate definition of areas of homology between the mouse and human genomes, greatly facilitates the identification of mouse models. We describe here mouse models of human single gene disorders dividing them into three categories depending on the (...) information available; phenotypic similarities, comparative mapping and identification of the underlying genetic lesion. (shrink)

La traduction apparaît comme un domaine majeur de recherche dans les sciences humaines et sociales depuis deux ou trois décennies, suscitant une abondante production scientifique. A la fois technique linguistique et outil potentiellement puissant de médiation culturelle, elle constitue le type de transfert culturel par excellence, et à ce titre a attiré l’attention des chercheurs en études culturelles. Cet article passe en revue quelques-uns des travaux-clés dans ce domaine, leurs apports, et la manière dont ils ont sorti les études traductologiques (...) de leur tour d’ivoire linguistique et philologique pour en faire un objet d’étude pleinement en prise avec des questions sociétales plus larges de production et de circulation non seulement de textes mais d’idées, de discours et de modèles, dans lesquelles le traducteur est invité dorénavant à assumer sa responsabilité de « passeur » pas forcément neutre. Cette nouvelle interdisciplinarité a incontestablement apporté un dynamisme et des perspectives nouvelles à la traductologie (et vice-versa) ; cependant, elle soulève la question des compétences requises pour aborder ces thématiques, et celle des limites disciplinaires. Si l’ouverture de la traduction en tant qu’objet d’étude apparaît comme un enrichissement, l’apport de la notion de traduction comme méthode et comme modèle d’échanges culturels doit encore faire ses preuves, malgré l’existence de plusieurs tentatives stimulantes allant dans ce sens. (shrink)

Summary Scholars who study Roman prodigies and expiations have mostly ignored Cassius Dio’s imperial prodigy lists. This paper argues that these lists should be considered valid. If we accept them, we have a wealth of evidence for the continuation of prodigy reports and expiations in the early Roman Empire.

In his paper, ìRight Weakening and Right Contraction in LK î, Hirokawa investigates the properties of the structural rules of contraction and weak- ening as they appear in a certain sequent calculus formulation of Örst order classical logic. In what follows we explore the notion of correspondence, in particular with reference to the structural rules in the succedent, and in doing so critically examine the sensitivity of Hirokawaís results to the formulation of the calculus, both with respect to the formulations (...) of the rules governing the connectives present and to the choice of the connectives themselves. (shrink)