Although Norris, McQueen & Cutler have provided convincing evidence that there is no need for contributions from the lexicon to phonetic processing, their simplification of the communication between levels comes at a cost to the processes themselves. Although their arrangement may ultimately prove correct, its validity is not due to a successful application of Occam's razor.

Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Amo (1703–c. 1759 ce), philosopher and physician, was born at Axim, Ghana, and died at Fort Chama, Ghana. When he was four years old, the Dutch West Indies Company's preacher in Ghana sent him to Holland to be baptized and educated in the Bible for future service in Ghana. However, the Company headquarters, undesirous of any interference with its lucrative trade in slaves, turned little Amo over to the German Duke Anton Ulric‐Wolfenbuttel.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

It has frequently been suggested that science and religion are innately in conflict. One example from the history of medicine is the introduction of anaesthesia into obstetrics in 1847, which is commonly said to have stimulated massive religious opposition. Historians have almost unanimously averred that such opposition arose from the belief that obstetric anaesthesia interfered with the primeval curse— ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’ . Despite considerable opposition to obstetric anaesthesia upon medical, physiological, and general moral grounds, evidence (...) of genuine religious opposition in contemporary sources has proved to be virtually non-existent. On examination, this particular ‘conflict’ appears to be an artifact of historiography based upon a contemporary defence prepared against an attack which never materialized. (shrink)

It is widely asserted that we are now living in a post-truth society. What that means, this book argues, is that the contemporary global world is thoroughly infested not only with trickster figures but an entire and operational trickster logic; or, that we now live in a Trickster Land - an argument advanced by the claim that in modernity liminality has become permanent; or that modern life is patently absurd. The first part of the book presents a series of 'guides' (...) to this condition, in the form of key thinkers and writers who can help us understand and navigate our Trickster Land. Such guides include Hermann Broch, Lewis Hyde, Roberto Calasso, Michel Serres, Sándor Márai, Colin Thubron, and Albert Camus. The second part goes on to discuss five main regions of Trickster Land: art, thought, the economy, politics, and society. This last, central chapter of the book contrasts trickster logic with the basic, foundational logic of social life, presented as gift-giving by Marcel Mauss and as sociability by Georg Simmel, and which is expressed here, combining Heraclitus and Plato with the Gospel of John, by three basic terms of ancient Greek culture, as arkhé charis logos: meaningful social life originally and in its essence is animated by the power of kind benevolence. This volume will appeal to scholars of social theory, anthropology and sociology with interests in political thought and contemporary culture. (shrink)