This essay provides a critical survey of key Irish theatre productions that present queer men with HIV or AIDS as a central theme while also seeking to situate several of these productions within the controversial discourse of ‘post-AIDS’ as it plays out in Irish cultural and social discourses. Through this survey, this essay finds and critically elaborates how a discourse of AIDS as punishment is a common denominator in all of these plays; whether that be as a central metaphor in (...) the drama or conversely as a trope that theatre makers seek to disrupt. Throughout, this essay simultaneously attends to the ways in which non-realist, non-linear dramatic structures have proved to be better positioned to present the realities of living with HIV or dying with AIDS in Ireland since the emergence of the first Irish AIDS epidemic in 1982. By approaching ‘post-AIDS’ discourses through the lens of HIV and AIDS in Irish theatre, this essay critically analyses the insidious ways in which ‘post-AIDS’ Irish culture is bound up with neoliberal discourses of homonormative assimilation and cultural respectability, especially the figuring of HIV/AIDS as punishment for non-assimilation. (shrink)

This dossier article contains four short and varied contributions from activists and other service and healthcare providers who have been agitating and working on the frontlines of HIV/AIDS in Ireland since the early 1980s. The dossier contains: (1) a history, by Bill Foley, of the early collective efforts of a group of gay men to provoke government action and healthcare under the umbrella of Gay Health Action (GHA) (2) a speech delivered by Dr. Erin Nugent to government officials on the (...) re-branding of HIV Ireland in 2015; (3) a brief history, recounted by Noel Donnellan, of ACT UP Dublin since it was revitalized in 2016 by a small cohort of dedicated activists from a dormant group into a vibrant collective that has achieved great legislative change with regards to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP); and (4) a polemic, written by Thomas Strong, on living with HIV as a queer man in Ireland that demonstrates the ways in which HIV stigma not only thrives in but molds and shapes twenty-first-century gay men’s communities, both in real life and online. (shrink)

A review of Patrick O’Connor’s Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned. O’Connor argues that McCarthy is a literary philosopher of tragic ontology. While acknowledging that tragic ontology is a powerful lens for analyzing McCarthy, whose characters are unwitting heirs of generations of human and a-human forces, the review also points to the problems with reading McCarthy as a philosopher of mitigated salvation or redemption, proposing that he is better understood as a pessimist who reveals the lie (...) of progress. (shrink)

: This article draws upon the Roman Catholic distinction between "ordinary" and "extraordinary" means of medical treatment to analyze the case of "Jodie" and "Mary," the Maltese conjoined twins whose surgical separation was ordered by the English courts over the objection of their Roman Catholic parents and Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. It attempts to shed light on the use of that distinction by surrogate decision makers with respect to incompetent patients. In addition, it critically (...) analyzes various components of the distinction by comparing the reasoning used by Catholic moralists in this case with the reasoning used in other cases that raise similar issues, including women facing crisis pregnancies who prefer abortion to adoption and the Indiana "Baby Doe" case. (shrink)

A fairly long (~15,000 word) overview of ancient theories of freedom and determinism. It covers the supposed threat of causal determinism to "free will," i.e., the sort of control we need to have in order to be rightly held responsible for our actions. But it also discusses fatalistic arguments that proceed from the Principle of Bivalence, what responsibility we have for our own characters, and god and fate. Philosophers discussed include Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, Carneades, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Plotinus. (...) Plato is mentioned in passing a few times in connection with other philosophers. (shrink)

Oliver Sacks MD, Clinical Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, talked with Anthony Freeman during his visit to London in January 1995 to publicize his recently published book An Anthropologist on Mars. The interview is preceded by an overview of the book.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Faulkner's Novels Past and PresentAndrew J. McKenna (bio)This article contains instances of the N-word. The Editor, Michigan State University Press, and Michigan State University do not condone the use of this word and only after careful consideration have we reprinted it. In this case, the word appears in the context of works by Faulkner.When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of some (...) of them as coloured people not niggers, … I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, and leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ([1929] 2019, 45)A black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.—W. E. B. Du Bois ([1940] 1992, 153)When William Faulkner memorably stated, "the past is not dead, it's not even past," he was not reaching out for a place in the world-historical pantheon of aphoristic wisdom; he wasn't thinking about culture and history in general. A person of his own time and place, he was thinking about his experience in his own homeland, the deep South of his native [End Page 39] Mississippi, with its cherished myth of a Lost Cause that ennobled the effort to tear our country apart over slavery, and that subsequently enabled Jim Crow legislation, spawned the KKK, and sanctioned a century of lynching and burning. There has been an uptick of attention to Faulkner owing to Carl Rollyson's recent two-volume biography (2020) and, especially for my purposes, Michael Gorra's The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (2020), which focuses on the centrality of that cataclysm in his creative imagination and his historical vision.On more than one occasion Faulkner himself was emphatic in his own ambivalence toward "his native land," as in this self-description: "He was born of it and his bones will sleep in it; loving it even while hating some of it … the intolerance and injustice; the lynching of negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black" (in Blotner 2005, 354). Gorra (2020) argues that this very ambivalence is a generative resource for the author's greatest achievements, quoting Yeats's notorious dictum, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (346). This can remind us of the notorious "crucible of doubt" out of which Dostoevsky allegedly forged his fiction. The Russian novelist is named (Blotner 2005, 718) as among seven of Faulkner's "masters" in the literary education of this omnivorous autodidact, with the others being Melville, Conrad, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Cervantes. With Dostoevsky especially he shares an admixture of horror and benign good humor. On occasion Faulkner was classed as an author of Southern Gothic, a label also applied to Flannery O'Connor, who, with Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, counts among his greatest literary progeny. A more capacious designation might rank him with masters of the grotesque, as Mikhail Bakhtin has explored this anomalous category in his writings on Rabelais and Dostoevsky.Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) begins and ends on a humorous note, as we follow the quest of the guileless Lena Grove for the father of her unborn child. She has concluded from her "endless care of other children" in her brother's household, "'I reckon that's why I got one so quick myself'" (3); the novel closes with her newborn infant in her arms in her now aimless trek, marveling, "My, my. A body does get around: here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee" (480).Lena's peregrinations bookend the story of Joe Christmas, so named because he was born on that day and who, we find later in the narrative, was snatched away by his religiously fanatical grandfather to be placed in an orphanage, then snatched away again to be placed... (shrink)

Many egalitarians believe that there is a pro tanto reason to remedy inequalities of opportunity in access to higher education. This consensus, I argue, masks practical disagreement among egalitarians: in many real-world choice contexts, egalitarians will disagree about which policies are to be endorsed, both from the point of view of equality and all things considered. I focus my discussion on a real-world case (the ‘big squeeze’ – so-called because the children of welloff families ‘squeeze out’ the children of less (...) well-off families from access to highly selective US universities) that has recently been discussed by Amy Gutmann. I argue that while (a) the ‘big squeeze’ is condemned by the ideal of equal opportunity, nevertheless (b) different egalitarians will favor different policies in response to the ‘big squeeze’, and (c) one intuitive, and apparently egalitarian, response lacks support from most plausible egalitarian views. (shrink)

James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight--and it is this which explains a good deal of its value.

In this paper I want to examine a claim made about the kind of immunity through misidentification relative to the first person (IEM) that attaches to action self-ascriptions. In particular, I want to consider whether we have reason to think a stronger kind of immunity attaches to action self-ascriptions, than attaches to self-ascriptions of bodily movement. I assume we have an awareness of our actions – agent’s awareness – and that agent’s awareness is not a form of perceptual bodily awareness. (...) The issue here is whether agents’ awareness grounds a kind of immunity to error that bodily awareness does not. However, perhaps more importantly, I want to argue that we only get a secure difference in immunity claims if have already decided whether a source of information is essentially first personal or not and made certain, not obviously warranted assumptions, about the transparency of content and about knowledge. If we hold that a subject’s knowledge of her actions is essentially first personal, in a way that a subject’s knowledge of her body through bodily awareness may not be, then we are better off arguing for that claim directly. Or so I will suggest. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching (...) for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

Sobre el libro: Isaiah Berlin ha sido, además de un original e intuitivo historiador de las ideas y autor de numerosos conceptos teórico-políticos, un reconocido teorizador de la libertad y defensor acérrimo del pluralismo. Rasgos que lo han convertido en un innegable referente intelectual en nuestra época. Sobre el editor: El Editor de la presente obra, Pablo Badillo O'Farrell, con motivo del centenario del nacimiento de Berlin, ha reunido un número de contribuciones de estudiosos italianos y españoles que ofrecen, desde (...) muy diferentes perspectivas, un amplio abanico de miradas diversas sobre la obra y el pensamiento del autor, que van desde el análisis y confrontación del pluralismo valorativo y la ética de la libertad, al de la interculturalidad o la identidad personal y el nacionalismo, pasando por la confrontación de historicismo, historia de las ideas y contra-corriente. (shrink)

Leading political theologian Oliver O'Donovan here takes a fresh look at some traditional moral arguments about war. Modern Christians differ widely on this issue. A few hold that absolute pacifism is the only viable Christian position, others subscribe in various ways to concepts of 'just war' developed out of a Western tradition that arose from the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas, while others still adopt more pragmatically realist postures. Professor O'Donovan re-examines questions of contemporary urgency including the use of biological (...) and nuclear weapons, military intervention, economic sanctions, war crimes trials and the roles of the Geneva Convention, international conventions and the UN. His enquiry opens with a challenging dedication to the new Archbishop of Canterbury and proceeds to shed new light on vital topics with which the Archbishop and others will be very directly engaged. It should be read by anyone concerned with the ethics of warfare. (shrink)

ジンメルからハイデガー、ドゥルーズ、寺山修司、コンドーム、中村うさぎまで―。気鋭の研究者六人による、脱・表「層」文化系論集。.

O mirosozert︠s︡anii sovremennogo buddizma na Dalʹnem Vostoke -- Problemy buddiĭskoĭ filosofii (p. [43]-[210]).

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O'Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover--and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism--O'Neill demonstrates that (...) Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between "civilized" societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing "savage" societies from their "civilized" counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The difficulty with this point of view and the reason why I characterize it as false do not spring from the mere fact that thought is abstract while experience is concrete. For, on the one hand, the abstract character of thought need not be interpreted negatively, as leaving out the rich variety and profusion of the concrete world in favor of some bare common denominator. Concreteness itself can be seen as a limitation which thought overcomes.ion then becomes an enriching process, (...) a process by which the mind, out of its own superior abundance, illumines and completes the data presented to it, so that from the welter and confusion of particular instances it is able to grasp the universal and valid-for-all, and from the fugitive contingency of the concrete to redeem the abidingly true. In this light, abstractiveness is not a vice but a virtue of thought and, far from weakening the intellectualist position, serves rather to reinforce it. (shrink)