The review shows how Guha reinstates the sacred within Eliot studies in India. Through his efforts at reading Eliot; Guha effects a literary turn and rescues Eliot from purely materialist readings which Eliot himself would not have been able to recognise. Let the review speak for itself: -/- "We knew about Baudelaire and his flamboyant short life. But how many of us know of Baudelaire’s spirituality? Guha writes that Baudelaire had a profound understanding “of Original Sin” (92). It is another (...) matter that, as Guha points out, Eliot too shared this Baudelairian sense of Original Sin (92). Before reading this book, the reviewer was aware of Eliot’s self-confessed Christianity, but there exists no work where Baudelaire’s views on spirituality have been connected to Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Guha’s genius unearths for us a new Baudelaire and a new Eliot. Who would have thought before Guha researched Eliot that Baudelaire took a dim view of Victor Hugo being opaque to spirituality? In fact, Guha’s Baudelaire is not a picaresque avant garde, he is a young man searching for the numinous.". (shrink)

In Heidegger’s Being and Time certain concepts are discussed which are central to the ontological constitution of Dasein. This paper demonstrates the interesting manner in which some of these concepts can be used in a reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. A comparative analysis is performed, explicating the relevant Heideggerian terms and then relating them to Eliot’s poem. In this way strong parallels are revealed between the two men’s respective thoughts and distinct modernist (...) sensibilities. Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, and the world he inhabits illustrate poetically concepts such as authenticity, inauthenticity, the ‘they’, idle talk and angst, which Heidegger develops in Being and Time. (shrink)

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins (...) with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions. (shrink)

Abstract:This article recovers a submerged philosophical debate between Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Russell's concern with immediate experience ("acquaintance") underscores a dilemma troubling literary modernism generally and modernist abstraction in particular. In "Prufrock," acquaintance with reality marks an epistemic failure whose social form is the "etherization" gripping the city and everything in it. The conversation between Russell's philosophy and Eliot's poetry is grounded in but exceeds the men's (...) real-life acquaintance. Rather than influence, at stake is a circulation of ideas between philosophy and modernist poetry and the questions of knowledge raised by both. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prufrock's Question and Roquentin's AnswerWilliam IrwinThere could not be two more different literary figures than the right-wing, religious T. S. Eliot and the left-wing, atheistic Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet there are striking connections between their first major publications, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) and Nausea (1938). Eliot was aware of and critical of Sartre, especially in the commentary on No Exit in The Cocktail (...) Party, and, no doubt, Sartre became aware of Eliot.1 But as far as can be gleaned, Sartre did not read Eliot's Prufrock, prior to the publication of Nausea, despite his connection to Adrienne Monnier, the French translator of the poem. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir documents the couple's reading habits in some detail in The Prime of Life, including their admiration for Hemingway and Faulkner during that time, but there is no mention of Eliot or Prufrock.2Both the poem and the novel present us with subjective, mood-laden impressions of the internal melancholic lives of their protagonists. Like Prufrock, Roquentin admits "My passion was dead."3Nausea is presented as a diary intended to be read by no one, and Prufrock is presented as a self-confession that no one is to hear. As Guido da Montefeltro in the poem's epigram is willing to speak to Dante because he believes Dante will never return to share what he has heard with the living, so Prufrock is solipsistically introspecting. The "you" of "Let us go then, you and I" is likely Prufrock addressing himself. But if it is addressed to another person, it can only be a reader who is as hopeless as he is, with no chance of return or redemption—only such a reader would really understand what is said. The final line of the poem "Till human voices wake us, and we drown" takes us back to the "patient etherized upon a table." Like Roquentin, Prufrock has taken himself and the reader [End Page 184] by proxy on an inner journey, a dream-like state in which the real and surreal come together.In the opening stanza of the poem, Prufrock describes his internal cityscape as including "Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question... / Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'" The question is mentioned twice more, but it is never articulated. Obviously it is an issue of great existential import concerning the meaning of life. Though Prufrock does not verbalize it, the question must be essentially Roquentin's question to himself: "Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?" (p. 177).As we shall see, even though Sartre's philosophy as developed in Nausea and crystallized in Being and Nothingness comes later and likely with no knowledge of Prufrock, the philosophy can still shed light on the poem—and in a way that in turn elucidates the philosophy.4IMeaning for Sartre is found in existence itself, emerging through the coloring and conceptualization of consciousness.5 While this does not necessarily imply the stereotypical existential view that life is bleak, meaningless, and possibly not worth living, this does nevertheless seem to be the conclusion that Roquentin draws early in Nausea. Consider this dark concern: "My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?" (p. 86). Early in the novel Roquentin concludes "Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition" (p. 39). This life as Roquentin describes it sounds eerily like the humdrum pointless existence of Prufrock, who has measured out his life with coffee spoons and spit out the butt-ends of his days and ways amidst the monotony of women who come and go talking of Michelangelo—a great man he resembles not at all.Later in the novel Roquentin admits "And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put... (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the ontological significance of poetry in the thought of Martin Heidegger. It gives an account of both his earlier and later thinking. The central argument of the dissertation is that poetry, as conceptualised by Heidegger, is beneficial and necessary for the living of an authentic life. The poetry of T. S Eliot features as a sustaining voice throughout the dissertation to validate Heidegger's ideas and also to demonstrate some interesting similarities in their ideas. Chapter one demonstrates how (...) effectively certain concepts from Heidegger's 'Being and Time' can be applied in an analysis of T.S. Eliots celebrated poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The reading involves concepts such as angst, authenticity, inauthenticity, the they and idle talk as they appear in 'Being and Time' and then relates these to aspects of T.S Eliot's poem. Chapter two is an exegesis of Heideggers essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in order to understand the meaning of poetry as he describes it. The essay centres on the interpretation of a painting by Vincent van Gogh, and what the experience of the painting reveals to someone authentically engaging with the artwork. Heidegger attempts to establish what the essence of a thing is (the artwork as thing), for the 'origin' of the artwork resides in its 'thingliness'. He creates an important distinction between equipment and the artwork, as well as earth and the world in order to justify the unique, originary position that the artwork occupies. This leads Heidegger to create a new understanding of poetry (which is expanded to encompass all art forms) and to emphasise the importance of the human agent in both the creation and preservation of the artwork. Chapter three is an exploration of language in both the Heidegger of 'Being and Time' and the later Heidegger's thought. The aim is to explore the ontological effect that Heidegger's conception of language has for our existence. He places language within a primordial role arguing that it is not us who speak language, but language that speaks us. This conception has important consequences for our relationship with Being, and the way in which we understand our existence. The final chapter unifies the various themes of the dissertation into a cohesive argument. The chapter begins with a discussion on the meaning of our existence following the later Heidegger. This is nothing less than the guardianship of Being which can only be understood in its relation to our dwelling within the fourfold. In conclusion it is through the measure of the language of poetry that we can realise the possibility of authentic dwelling. (shrink)

Summary By means of examples drawn from everyday experience, the author investigates what conditions must be satisfied in order that behaviour may be called rational or irrational. Does the attribution of irrationality apply to means or to ends? Is it based on consideration of the total cost? Is heroism irrational? Cannot what is irrational for one person be rational for another? Finally, the author uses this approach to come to the problem of induction and to that of moral freedom.RésuméL'auteur examine, (...) à l'aide d'exemples divers tiréds de l'expérience quotidienne, quelles sont les conditions qui doivent ětre remplies pour qu'on puisse qualifier une conduite de rationnelle ou d'irrationnelle. L'imputation d'irrationalité concerne‐t‐elle les moyens ou les buts? Se fonde‐t‐elle sur une estimation globale des coǔts? L'héroïsme est‐il irrationnel? Ce qui est irrationnel pour l'un ne peut‐il pas ětre rationnel pour un autre? Enfin, il aborde par ce biais le problème de l'induction et celui de la liberté morale.ZusammenfassungDer Verfasser untersucht aufgrund verschiedener aus dem Alltag gezogenen Beispiele die Frage, welches die Bedingungen sind, die erfüllt sein müssen, damit man ein Verhalten als rational bezeichnen kann. Bezieht sich das Zuschreiben von Irrationalität auf Mittel oder auf Ziele? Ist es auf der Einschätzung des Aufwandes begründet? Ist Heldentum irrational? Kann das, was dem einen als irrational gilt, einem andern nicht als rational gelten? Schliesslich wird über das Induktionsproblem das Problem der moralischen Freiheit angegangen. (shrink)

This paper lays out the main contours of an objectivistic account of natural necessity that locates its source within natural substances themselves. The key claims are that what occurs by a necessity of nature constitutes the culmination of deterministic natural tendencies and that these tendencies are themselves rooted in the natures or essences of natural substances. The paper concludes by discussing the notion of a law of nature as it emerges on this account.

These original essays offer evidence that a growing number of Anglo-American philosophers are finding in the classical discussion of God's existence and nature fertile sources for critical reflection on issues in the philosophy of religion. Nelson Pike challenges Aquinas' claim that God is not responsible for evil and shows how the rejection of this claim bears on the problem of evil. Richard Swinburne defends the classical Christian understanding of heaven and hell, arguing that it is both philosophically plausible and compatible (...) with the Christian conception of God's goodness. Philip Quinn proposes a defensible version of the classical assertion that God's conserving a creature in existence is tantamount to his continuously creating that creature. Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso present an analysis of omnipotence which they claim to be both philosophically adequate and consonant with the orthodox Christian belief that God is both omnipotent and incapable of sinning. James Ross's main purpose is to dislodge the assumption that God's power is properly and adequately thought of as the power to cause (or bring about or actualize) states of affairs. Clement Dore reinterprets and defends Descartes' often maligned Fifth Meditation argument for God's existence. Finally, Mark Jordan explicates the metaphysical foundations of Aquinas' doctrine of divine names. (shrink)

These are bleak days for moral theory in mainstream professional philosophy. At the heart of the matter lies our inability, within contemporary liberal democracies, to come to a consensus on the deep issue of what we are as human beings and where our true good lies. Because of this, any moral theory built on a rich view of human nature and of the good for human beings is automatically viewed with suspicion. And, in fact, there are few such theories around. (...) Instead, the lack of agreement on the deep issue is typically taken as a sign that moral theory should proceed as if there were no philosophical anthropology that yields a true and detailed account of human nature and the good for human beings. The reasoning goes like this: Either there is no such account or, at the very least, no such account has the degree of certitude required for philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

The most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era offer an image of a dramatized "I" acting in a concrete setting. The variety and importance of the poems which fall under this description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," "Tintern Abbey," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ulysses," "My Last Duchess," "Dover Beach," "The Windhover," "The Darkling Thrush," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "The Love Song of J. (...) class='Hi'>Alfred Prufrock," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The power and beauty of such poems seems intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer to a "speaker" existing independent of the poet and to avoid the "intentional" and "biographical" fallacies which spuriously link the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple. All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is simple, definite, and logical. Ralph W. Rader is chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" . Professor Rader's influential studies include Tennyson's "Maud": The Biography Genesis, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-century Studies.". (shrink)

Each of the essays collected here presents one or more flashpoints or crises in a history of 20 th - and 21 st -century dwelling.

In the discourse of 18th-century British intellectuals the term 'luxury' held a well-recognized and much disputed place. Dispute arose chiefly around the problem of disentangling the economic, moral-theological and political strands of the term. The object of the present paper is to trace forward the history of debate over the concept along one develop ing line of specialization - that of 19th-century political economy. It will be seen how the term luxury (and related terms: necessity, decency, productive, unproductive, etc.) adjusted (...) meaning(s) as the economic, social and intellectual contexts in which it was embedded themselves mutated. In particular, it is argued, the changing significance attached to the term illustrates the extent to which a key 19th-century intellec tual elite managed to accommodate the implications of a transition from a society based on assumptions of scarcity and hierarchy to one that was beginning to contemplate the possibility of mass market abun dance. While the profession's leaders did develop a sharpened interest in aspiration to luxury consumption as a legitimate motor of economic growth, all registered their disapproval of certain forms of the aspira tion, revealing in the process a variety of class, gender and 'race' pre occupations - including (from J. S. Mill onwards) a particular distaste for positional or status-related consumption. (shrink)

Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Contains the only complete English-language text of The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Tarski made extensive corrections and revisions of the original translations for this edition, along with new historical remarks. It includes a new preface and a new analytical index for use by philosophers and linguists as well as by historians of mathematics and philosophy.

This 1982 book is a history of the great age of scholastism from Abelard to the rejection of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance, combining the highest standards of medieval scholarship with a respect for the interests and insights of contemporary philosophers, particularly those working in the analytic tradition. The volume follows on chronologically from The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, though it does not continue the histories of Greek and Islamic philosophy but concentrates on the Latin Christian (...) West. Unlike other histories of medieval philosophy that divide the subject matter by individual thinkers, it emphasises the parts of more historical and theological interest. This volume is organised by those topics in which recent philosophy has made the greatest progress. (shrink)

Alfred Loisy and Maude Petre, like others who were associated with the Modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church, shared hopes in a renewed Catholicism that would bring it into a positive relationship with modernity. With the Vatican condemnation of Modernism in 1907, Loisy abandoned all optimism for viable reform in the Church, and instead looked forward to a Religion of Humanity. While Petre found Loisy's ideal attractive, she retained a hope that the Church would undergo renewal at some (...) future point. Each of them had to come to terms with a dark side of modernity that emerged with the Great War. Loisy's Guerre et religion and Petre's Reflections of a Non-Combatant preserve a record of their struggles to preserve their faith in modernity and in humanity. (shrink)

This thesis explores, thematically and chronologically, the substantial concordance between the work of Martin Heidegger and T.S. Eliot. The introduction traces Eliot's ideas of the 'objective correlative' and 'situatedness' to a familiarity with German Idealism. Heidegger shared this familiarity, suggesting a reason for the similarity of their thought. Chapter one explores the 'authenticity' developed in Being and Time, as well as associated themes like temporality, the 'they' (Das Man), inauthenticity, idle talk and angst, and applies them to interpreting Eliot's poem, (...) 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Both texts depict a bleak Modernist view of the early twentieth-century Western human condition, characterized as a dispiriting nihilism and homelessness. Chapter two traces the chronological development of Ereignis in Heidegger's thinking, showing the term's two discernible but related meanings: first our nature as the 'site of the open' where Being can manifest, and second individual 'Events' of 'appropriation and revelation'. The world is always happening as 'event', but only through our appropriation by the Ereignis event can we become aware of this. Heidegger finds poetry, the essential example of language as the 'house of Being', to be the purest manifestation of Ereignis, taking as his examples Hölderlin and Rilke. A detailed analysis of Eliot's late work Four Quartets reveals how Ereignis, both as an ineluctable and an epiphanic condition of human existence, is central to his poetry, confirming, in Heidegger's words, 'what poets are for in a destitute time', namely to re-found and restore the wonder of the world and existence itself. This restoration results from what Eliot calls 'raid[s] on the inarticulate', the poet's continual striving to enact that openness to Being through which human language and the human world continually come to be. The final chapter shows how both Eliot and Heidegger value a genuine relationship with place as enabling human flourishing. Both distrust technological materialism, which destroys our sense of the world as dwelling place, and both are essentially committed to a genuinely authentic life, not the angstful authenticity of Being and Time, but a richer belonging which affirms our relationship with the earth, each other and our gods. (shrink)

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son of God is truly but only contingently a human being. But is it also the case that Christ’s individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person? The affirmative answer to this question, explicitly espoused by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, turns out to be philosophically untenable, while the negative answer, which is arguably implicit in St. Thomas Aquinas, explication of the Incarnation, has some surprising and significant (...) metaphysical consequences. (shrink)

Born in England and educated at Oxford, Ockham was the preeminent Franciscan thinker of the mid-fourteenth century. Because of his role in the bitter dispute between the Franciscans and Pope John XXII over evangelical poverty, he was excommunicated in 1328. After that he abandoned philosophy and theology proper, producing instead a series of political tracts on the ecclesiastical and secular power of the papacy.

After an exposition of some key concepts in scholastic ontology, this paper examines four arguments presented by Francisco Suarez for the thesis, commonly held by Christian Aristotelians, that God's causal contribution to effects occurring in the ordinary course of nature goes beyond His merely conserving created substances along with their active and passive causal powers. The postulation of a further causal contribution, known as God's general concurrence (or general concourse), can be viewed as an attempt to accommodate an element of (...) truth present in occasionalist accounts of divine causality. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that an agent S has the power to bring it about that a proposition p is or will be true at a moment t only if S has at the same time the power to bring it about that it has always been the case that p would be true at t. The author first constructs a prima facie compelling argument for logical determinism and then argues that whoever accepts an Ockhamistic response to that (...) argument should also accept the above thesis. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to take issue with two aspects of Marilyn Adams's monumental work William Ockham . Part I deals with Ockham's ontology, arguing (i) that Adams does not sufficiently appreciate the use Ockham makes of the prinicple of ontological parsimony in his attempt to refute the thesis that there are extramental universals or common natures and (ii) that she sets an implausibly high standard of success for Ockham's project of showing that the only singular entities are (...) substances and qualities. Part II argues that Adams fails to provide a convincing defense of Ockham's 'anti-secularist' answer to the question of how Christian thinkers should react to prima facie conflicts between the deliverances of faith and the deliverances of reason. (shrink)

This article investigates the use of favors by managers of BRIC firms to accomplish business goals, the ethicality of which should be determined by the moral reasoning in these countries rather than from a developed country perspective. We define a favor as an exchange of outcomes between individuals, typically utilizing one's connections, that is based on a commonly understood cultural tradition, with reciprocity by the receiver typically not being immediate, and its value being less than what would constitute bribery within (...) that cultural context. This exchange normally takes place between and among members of networks, and may involve a network outsider contacted by a network insider on behalf of another insider. We see the giver and receiver of the favor, as well as network insiders and outsiders, as stakeholders. Additionally, society could also be considered to be a stakeholder since the practice of using favors generally inhibits the development of legitimate, strong formal institutions, since the use of favors in emerging economies is rooted in cultural traditions that we view as informal institutions. Furthermore, we assert that the practice of using favors can lead to bribery which harms society as a stakeholder both morally and economically. We posit that BRIC-country managers' behaviors stem from informal, culturally based practices—jeito in Brazil, blat/sviazi in Russia, jaan-pehchaan in India, and guanxi in China. We utilize institutional theory to explain why favors are relied upon, and ISCT to support the argument that the use of favors in environments like the BRICs is generally considered ethical. (shrink)

"This is the only free-standing English translation of the entire Treatise on human nature, which includes St. Thomas's account of the metaphysical status of the human soul and its relation to the human organism ; the powers of the soul, especially the higher intellective powers that distinguish humans from other animals ; and, those questions on human origins, the creation of the first man and first woman, and their status as being created in the image of God."--Cover, p. 1.