After all, ever since the abandonment of the classical curriculum in the mid-nineteenth century, the courses of studies in American colleges have been characterized by ever-increasing diversity, responses to highly particular social and individual demands, spin-offs from traditional disciplines, specializations breeding subspecializations, and the like. Stringent counterrevolutions, such as the one undertaken in the College of the University of Chicago some thirty years ago, have been infrequent and brief. What, then, is so special about the present seductive disarray in literary (...) studies. Chiefly, I think, the importance of this compartmentation lies in the way we are encouraged to think of literary works and to respond to them. If we persuade ourselves that novels and plays and poems are written by members of an identifiable subgroup—whether that group be defined in national, ethnic, sexual, class, or special interest terms—and can be properly understood, and appreciated only by those who know the code of the same subgroup, we should be prepared to accept the implications of the position we are espousing. If, to cite a specific example, what is called the Black Aesthetic points to a mode of artistic apprehension that is not available to non-Blacks, it casts the rest of us, however curious and interested, in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Here, as so often, our best writers anticipate and dramatize notions which become solemn critical propositions later on. In Saul Bellow's second novel, The Victim, published thirty years ago, the protagonist, Leventhal, recalls a party at which two of his friends, both Jewish, were singing spirituals and old ballads. They were being needled by a drunken New England WASP named Kirby Albee. "Why do you sing such songs?" he said. "You can't sing them.""Why not, I'd like to know?" said the girl."Oh, you, too," said Albee with his one cornered smile. "it isn't right for you to sing them. You have to be born to them, it's no use trying to sing them." Robert E. Streeter served for many years as Dean of the College and later as Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago where he is now Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor. He is one of the editors of Critical Inquiry. "WASPs and Other Endangered Species" was presented as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 5 April 1977. (shrink)

Principlism aims to provide a framework to help those working in medicine both to identify moral problems and to make decisions about what to do. For it to meet this aim, the principles included within it must express values that all morally serious people share (or ought to share), and there must be no other values that all morally serious people share (or ought to share). This paper challenges the latter of these claims. I will argue that as a descriptive (...) claim about what values morally serious people do in fact share, principlism is inadequate; more principles would be needed to make this claim true. Furthermore, I will argue that while, taken as a claim about what principles we ought to share, principlism could turn out to be correct, it is either unsupported or unable to meet its aims. The only way in which principlists can avoid these problems is to add to the current four principles. (shrink)

Byzantine Empire; economic and social conditions; history.

The great achievement of mankind was the appearance of a printed book that not only significantly expanded the circle of readers, but also in comparison with the handwritten book contributed to the unification of canonical texts, in particular, such as Scripture, church service books, works of the Church Fathers, polemical and other religious literature. Consideration of the words "Japanese typography as the basis for the preservation and transmission of sources of Christian literary culture requires a brief description of the essence (...) of printing, not only as a means of mechanical reproduction of the text, but also a remarkable cultural-historical phenomenon. (shrink)