La publication de 49 balles de fronde inscrites, provenant de la coll. Froehner, entrée au Cabinet des Médailles de Paris, utilise les remarques et les lectures de Froehner. 14 balles sont attribuables à des chefs rhodiens, 12 à des Athéniens, 2 sont supposées béotiennes, 3 corcyréennes ; 6 se rapportent aux campagnes des princes macédoniens ou de leurs successeurs ; les autres sont d'origine diverse ou indéterminée.

In reply to Geach's objection against expressivism, some have claimed that there is a plurality of truth predicates. I raise a difficulty for this claim: valid inferences can involve sentences assessable by any truth predicate, corresponding to 'lightweight' truth as well as to 'heavyweight' truth. To account for this, some unique truth predicate must apply to all sentences that can appear in inferences. Mixed inferences remind us of a central platitude about truth: truth is what is preserved in valid inferences. (...) The question is why we should postulate truth predicates that do not satisfy this platitude. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

War and Border Crossings brings together renowned scholars to address some of the most pressing problems in public policy, international affairs, and the intercultural issues of our day. Contributors from widely varying disciplines discuss cross-cultural ethical issues and international topics ranging from American international policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq to domestic topics such as immigration, the war on drugs, cross-cultural bioethics and ethical issues involving American Indian tribes. The culture clashes discussed in these essays raise serious questions (...) about what principles ought to inform the negotiating of conflicts in order to achieve, or at least approach, outcomes that are fundamentally just, fair, responsible, and ethical. (shrink)

Dr. Henry Beecher, a renowned Harvard Medical School anesthesiologist, sent shock waves through the medical research community and the lay press when he described 22 examples of “unethical or questionably ethical studies” by reputable researchers at major institutions in his now well-known 1966 New England Journal of Medicine article. Beecher concluded this exposé by noting: “The ethical approach to experimentation in man has several components: two are more important than the others, the first being informed consent.... Secondly, there is the (...) more reliable safeguard provided by the presence of an intelligent, informed, conscientious, compassionate, responsible investigator”. Beecher’s... (shrink)

Concussion is a form of traumatic brain injury that has been defined as a “trauma-induced alteration in mental status that may or may not involve loss of consciousness.” Terms such as getting a “ding” or getting your “bell rung” are sometimes used as colloquialisms for concussion, but inappropriately downplay the seriousness of the injury. It is estimated that between 1.6 and 3.8 million concussions occur annually in the United States as a result of participation in sports or recreational activities. To (...) date, there are no objective, biological markers for concussion; rather, the current diagnosis of concussion is dependent upon symptom reporting by the athlete. In the acute phase, concussions can result in a broad spectrum of symptoms that can be transient or last for days, weeks, or even months. Symptom prolongation is generally referred to as post-concussion syndrome. (shrink)

Indigenous communities have always cultivated social studies learning that is interactive, dynamic, and integrated with traditional knowledges. To confront the assimilative and deculturalizing education that accompanied European settlement of the Americas, Montana has adopted Indian Education for All (IEFA). This case study evaluates the Digital Storywork Partnership (DSP), which strives to advance the goals of IEFA within and beyond the social studies classroom through community-centered research and filmmaking. Results demonstrate the potential for DSP projects to advance culturally revitalizing education, community (...) connectedness, and identity-development. The DSP offers a model for social studies education that is not only culturally affirming and revitalizing for Indigenous communities, but also holds potential for use in all communities. We conclude with recommendations for educators, scholars, and community members engaged in similar efforts. (shrink)

A well-trod debate at the nexus of cognitive science and linguistics, the so-called past tense debate, has examined how rules and exceptions are individually acquired. However, this debate focuses primarily on individual mechanisms in learning, saying little about how rules and exceptions function from a sociolinguistic perspective. To remedy this, we use agent-based models to examine how rules and exceptions function across populations. We expand on earlier work by considering how repeated interaction and cultural transmission across speakers affects the dynamics (...) of rules and exceptions in language, measuring linguistic outcomes within a social system rather than focusing individual learning outcomes. We consider how population turnover and growth effect linguistic rule dynamics in large and small populations, showing that this method has considerable potential particularly in probing the mechanisms underlying the linguistic niche hypothesis. (shrink)

Identifying sporting talent remains a difficult task due to the complex nature of sport. Technical skill assessments are used throughout the talent pathway to monitor athletes in an attempt to more effectively predict future performance. These assessments however, largely focus on the isolated execution of key skills devoid of any game context. When assessments are representative of match-play and applied in a setting where all four components of competition (i.e., technical, tactical, physiological and psychological) are assessed within an integrated approach, (...) prediction of talent is more likely to be successful. This article explores the current talent identification technical skill assessments, with a particular focus on Australian Football, and proposes a 5-level performance assessment model for athlete assessment. The model separates technical game skill on a continuum from Level-1 (i.e., laboratory analysis) to Level-5 (i.e., match-play). These levels, using the assumptions of the expert performance model and representative learning design theory, incorporate a step-wise progression of performance demands to more closely represent match-play conditions. The proposed model will provide researchers and practitioners with a structured framework to consider when assessing, or developing, new assessments of technical game-based skill. (shrink)

The integrative memory model formalizes a new conceptualization of memory in which interactions between representations and cognitive operations within large-scale cerebral networks generate subjective memory feelings. Such interactions allow to explain the complexity of memory expressions, such as the existence of multiples sources for familiarity and recollection feelings and the fact that expectations determine how one recognizes previously encountered information.

We understand metahistory as an approach that studies how histories within a particular discipline have been written and focus on insider scientists’ reconstructions of twin research. Using the concept of ethical-political affordances we suggest that such histories are based on a management of resources that prove to be beneficial for representing one’s own research traditions in a positive light. Instead of discussing information on the context and intellectual life of pioneers of the twin method, which include high-caliber eugenicists and Nazi (...) ideologues, and on how the twin method has been used and abused, insider scientists’ accounts present twin research as neutral, objective and void of any kind of political connotations. We show how important leaders of German twin research have been historically managed, and how their contributions have been distorted and omitted. Reasons for historical revisionism by omission and for selectively revised accounts of the past are discussed. Suggestions for writing accounts of the twin method are included and focus on the necessity of self-reflection, considerations regarding one’s own ethical-political inclinations, and review of the existing historical literature. In analyzing these connections, we attempt to understand how science, politics and history interact. (shrink)

Political philosophers are divided on the question of whether society should guide individuals in their projects and goals in light of the competing, yet overlapping, values of moral independence and human well-being. The lively neutralism-perfectionism debate appears to be significantly muted, however, when it comes to children who, all parties assume, should be guided by adults in their plans of life. Thus, in their stimulating new book, Family Values: the Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, liberals Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift affirm (...) the role of the family in directing and enabling children’s flourishing. My paper challenges this distinction between parents and children in the liberal position to argue that the idea that it is appropriate to direct children to enable them to flourish, entails in fact, a commitment to policies that promote and enable the flourishing of all. (shrink)

Da das Gehirn naturkausal determiniert ist, ist der Mensch in seinen Handlungen nicht frei. Das ist der populärste und umstrittenste Schluss der modernen Hirnforschung. Mit naturwissenschaftlichen Methoden soll so eine philosophische Grundfrage beantwortet sein. Das vorliegende Buch zeigt mit klaren Argumenten, dass die Prämisse vom naturkausal bestimmten Gehirn zwar richtig, aber der Schluss auf die menschliche Unfreiheit unzulässig ist. Christine Zunke lässt die Argumente von Hirnforschern an deren inneren Widersprüchen scheitern. Mit großer Sachkenntnis auf dem Gebiet der Neurophysiologie und (...) auf einem soliden philosophischen Fundament, das sich vor allem auf Kant und Hegel stützt, wird die Ursache dieser Widersprüche deutlich: Jede Erkenntnis hat die Freiheit zur notwendigen Bedingung; ein Denken, das seine Freiheit leugnen will, entzieht sich darum sein eigenes Fundament. Hierbei wird der ideologische und gesellschaftspolitische Gehalt der modernen Hirnforschung sichtbar gemacht. Indem die Hirnforschung empirische Phänomene menschlicher Unfreiheit naturalisiert, produziert sie Blindheit angesichts der wahren Ursachen von Unfreiheit und Unterdrückung. Mit dieser Kritik entwickelt die Autorin zugleich eine klare Darstellung des Verhältnisses zwischen menschlicher Natur und Freiheit. (shrink)

Ubiquitous computing is a new kind of computing where devices enhance everyday artefacts and open up previously inaccessible situations for data capture. ‘Technology paternalism’ has been suggested by Spiekermann and Pallas (Poiesis & Praxis: Int J Technol Assess Ethics Sci 4(1):6–18, 2006) as a concept to gauge the social and ethical impact of these new technologies. In this article we explore this concept in the specific setting of UK road maintenance and construction. Drawing on examples from our qualitative fieldwork we (...) suggest that cultural logics such as those reflected in paternalistic health and safety discourse are central in legitimising the introduction of ubiquitous computing technologies. As such, there is little doubt that paternalism plays an essential role in people’s reasoning about ubiquitous computing in this setting. We argue, however, that since discourses such as health and safety are used by everyone (including both managers and workers) in the organisation to further their own aims, technologies transcend purely paternalistic conceptualisations and instead become a focal point for ongoing struggles for control between those deploying and using them. This means that the benefits and costs of such new technologies become harder to define from an ethical and social perspective. (shrink)

Mercier & Sperber (M&S) claim that the phenomenon of belief bias provides fundamental support for their argumentative theory and its basis in intuitive judgement. We propose that chronometric evidence necessitates a more nuanced account of belief bias that is not readily captured by argumentative theory.

Valerie Steele, conservatrice du musée du Fashion Institute of Technology de New York et rédactrice en chef d'une revue de grande qualité, Fashion Theory : the journal of Dress, Body and Culture, est une référence très importante dans le domaine de l'histoire de la mode. Ce livre (traduit de l'américain) ne répond que très imparfaitement à son titre ambitieux ­ « se vêtir » ­, qui est aussi celui d'une collection (deux ouvrages déjà parus, l'un sur le Moyen Âge et (...) l'autre sur le XVIIIe... (shrink)

I strongly support Barzykowski and Moulin in their proposal that common retrieval mechanisms can lead to distinct phenomenological memory experiences. I emphasize the importance of one of these mechanisms, namely the attribution system. Neuropsychological studies should help clarifying the role of these retrieval mechanisms, notably in cases of medial temporal-lobe lesions and cases of dementia.

This chapter demonstrates that the intellectual development of Beauvoir and Sartre unfolds as a complex dialogue in which mutual influence is exerted, each taking from the other what allows them to flourish philosophically. The analysis focuses on some salient themes in Beauvoir's and Sartre's works, specifically, the ontological phenomenological views they shared about the human being and the world. This chapter also examines their methodological choices, taking into consideration their views on literature and its political role, and how these translate (...) into their own writing and use of different genres. The chapter also discusses points of divergence such as their differing understanding of embodiment, situation, freedom, ambiguity, authenticity, interpersonal relations, and sexuality, which serve as the occasion for each to revisit their own views and refine them. (shrink)

This article shows that Sartre's theatrical works offer a reflection on morality, in particular The Flies , The Devil and the Good Lord , and The Sequestered of Altona . The ethical reflections that we find in his plays fill a philosophical gap left after Being and Nothingness . The plays offer an exploration of freedom's rootedness in situation which complements the more theoretical notes of the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics . Additionally, I link Sartre's ethics and Nietzsche's (...) ethics showing that both thinkers rest their philosophies on a strict atheism. Further, their elaborations on morality follow a similar path by emphasizing individual freedom and thus subsequently the responsibility of the individual as the creator of values. French Cet article fait la démonstration que les œuvres théâtrales de Sartre, plus particulièrement Les Mouches , Le Diable et le bon dieu et Les Séquestrés d'Altona , tiennent lieu de réflexion morale chez Sartre. La réflexion éthique qu'on y retrouve comble un manque laissé par les écrits philosophiques suivant L'Être et le néant . Les pièces et leur exploration de l'ancrage de la liberté dans la situation offrent un complément aux notes plus théoriques des Cahiers pour une morale, publiés à titre posthume. En plus de faire cette démonstration, cet article explore les liens entre la morale des pièces sartriennes et la morale nietzschéenne. Il ressort de cet examen que ces deux morales s'appuient sur un athéisme pur et dur et s'élaborent de même façon en mettant l'emphase sur la liberté de l'individu et son rôle en tant que créateur de valeurs. (shrink)

Some have characterized the twentieth century as a Nietzschean century, while others, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, call this Le siècle de Sartre. Those who are interested in the works of Sartre and Nietzsche wish to know what these two authors, who have left a deep impression on the twentieth century, share in common. Others, myself included, dare to ask: "Was Sartre a Nietzschean?" Studies on this connection are few and, besides Jean-François Louette's book, Sartre contra Nietzsche, no major study exists. (...) What is the particular nature of the relations between their thoughts? Is there an influence of Nietzsche upon Sartre? Is there a philosophical kinship? I will begin by clarifying the question of Sartre's interest in Nietzsche. Then, I will demonstrate that they had the same philosophical starting point: nihilism. Finally, I will show that both give a similar answer to the problem opened by nihilism, the question of meaning. (shrink)

Arnold Gehlen is one of the most controversial figures of German intellectual history. Gehlen’s commitment to National Socialism (a commitment he never disavowed) is mostly seen in close connection with his theoretical focus on institutions. According to Gehlen, what mankind requires above all is order and thus the protection of institutions. And yet, by reducing Gehlen’s sociology to the necessity of order one misses the analytical scope of his writings. As this article aims to show, the strength of Gehlen’s sociology (...) lies less in its theory of institutionalization than in its attempt to comprehend change, i.e. the conceptual clarification of the interplay between radical innovation and institutionalization. In order to apprehend Gehlen’s understanding of change we have to look at his sociology of art as it is art which works as ‘a small symbol of society’. To approach Gehlen from this perspective is not to rehabilitate the controversial thinker. Instead, I am trying to show that Gehlen’s theoretical framework is as complex as modern culture itself and should therefore not prematurely be declared a reactionary testimony of the past. (shrink)

This article examines Chen Ziying, an American-trained Chinese biologist and his prewar efforts to bring his Woods Hole experience from the United States to China between 1930 and 1936. I argue that the Marine Biological Laboratory appears as a prominent American scientific institution in the twentieth century among visiting Chinese students and scholars who were drawn to the American approach of building world-class seaside laboratories to facilitate marine biological study while cultivating a collaborative culture via songs of biology. Chen was (...) one of the leading US-trained Chinese scientists who aspired to the international trend of developing coastal biology in the early twentieth century and was determined to modernize China’s discipline-building of biology with the construction of marine research facilities similar to the MBL. I show that Chen’s efforts of bringing the MBL practice to China took place at a time when science in China was overshadowed by the impulse of nationalism. Despite the nationalistic rhetoric, Chen was able to establish a Chinese connection with Woods Hole by introducing the MBL cultural practices of songs with biological significance. Lyrics from popular biological songs such as “It’s a Long Way from Amphioxus” and “Songs of Amoy” reflect not just Darwinian themes but also a transnational connection between American and Chinese biologists in Republican-era China––a period in modern Chinese history that is often characterized by soaring sentiments of nationalism. This paper sets out to reconsider the interplay of scientific nationalism and scientific internationalism in shaping marine science in modern China, as well as to reflect on the meanings of value-laden terms such as “nationalism” and “foreignness” and their conceptual impacts on writing the historiography of biology in twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Film studies has largely avoided the biocultural turn that has swept through other areas of the humanities. This resistance may be understood in terms of the field’s recent distaste for grand theory—and in terms of the loose, social-constructionist thinking that is one residue of that distaste. Fortunately, a biocultural approach to cinema can offer film studies a necessary and defensible set of assumptions. It can also offer interpretive tools and potential ways of conceptualizing perennial concerns like authorship and genre. This (...) essay demonstrates the last two points through an evolutionary reading of Howard Hawks’s musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and through proposals for new ways of approaching auteurism and pornography. (shrink)

Though it is often taken for granted that feminists necessarily must condemn the exclusion of women from the Roman Catholic priesthood, the author demonstrates that the "politics of difference," if pursued consistently, reopens this question. International feminist arguments for honoring gender differences, the teachings of John Paul II concerning women, and Catholic social justice teachings, taken jointly, suggest that the current Catholic exclusion of women from the priesthood is unjust not because the reservation of a social role to a single (...) sex is inherently unacceptable, but because of the asymmetry in power between the roles accorded men and women in the governance of the Catholic Church. To be just, sex-specific reservation of roles must meet the criteria of balance, proportion, power, and particularity. (shrink)