This commentary raises a number of questions in connection with Colin Koopman's paper “Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and Wittgenstein.” Specifically, this commentary asks about the precise relationship between concepts and practices in Koopman's account and the possibility of resisting certain practices of subjectivation.

Jeremy Bentham was an ardent secularist convinced that society could be sustained without the support of religious institutions or beliefs. This is writ large in the commonly neglected books on religion he wrote and published during the last twenty-five years of his life. However his earliest writings on the subject date from the 1770s, when as a young man he first embarked on his calling as a legal theorist and social reformer. From that time on, religion was never far from (...) the centre of his thoughts. In Secular Utilitarianism, James Crimmins illustrates the nature, extent, and depth of Jeremy Bentham's concern with religion, from his Oxford days of first doubts to the middle years of quiet unbelief, and finally, the zealous atheism and secularism of his later life. Dr Crimmins provides an interpretation of Bentham's thought in which his religious views, hitherto of little interest to Bentham scholars, are shown to be integral: on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, and on the other central to the development of his entirely secular view of society. (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its citizens. (...) But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

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Reviewed Works:Edwin W. Miller, On a Property of Families of Sets.Ben Dushnik, E. W. Miller, Partially Ordered Sets.P. Erdos, Some Set-theoretical Properties of Graphs.G. Fodor, Proof of a Conjecture of P. Erdos.P. Erdos, R. Rado, A Partition Calculus in Set Theory.P. Erdos, R. Rado, Intersection Theorems for Systems of Sets.A. Hajnal, Some Results and Problems on Set Theory.P. Erdos, A. Hajnal, On a Property of Families of Sets.A. Hajnal, Proof of a Conjecture of S. Ruziewicz.P. Erdos, A. Hajnal, R. Rado, (...) Partition Relations for Cardinal Numbers.P. Erdos, A. Hajnal, On a Problem of B. Jonsson.P. Erdos, A. Hajnal, On Chromatic Number of Graphs and Set-Systems. (shrink)

The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, ...

The essays are happily reprinted here in a systematic manner. The first eight, written with a minimal use of technical logic, develop Prior's views about three main philosophical problems of time: temporal succession, time and determinism, and existence and temporal identity. There follow five papers of considerably more formal character, in which Prior at once expands and renders more precise his philosophical views. The ultimate aim of the present study is to clarify certain points connected with the above problems about (...) time. But the immediate task is to provide a comprehensive discussion of some of Prior's most important methodological and doctrinal positions concerning these problems. (shrink)

The increased popularity of desktop documentary making among both teachers and students in history classrooms warrants an examination of its integrationinto classroom instruction. This multiple case study focused on two secondary students in an AP European History course during a unit that featured desktopdocumentary making. Employing Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a theoretical framework, this study revealed that the students constructedhistorical narratives with multiple web-based encounters that affected their composition over a span of time. Whenever students experienced tensions in (...) their narrative process, the students made historical judgments that furthered the narrative process. These judgments were, at times, based on evidence, and atother times devoid of evidence. These findings suggest that students may form baseless historical conclusions when given creative freedom in a desktopdocumentary making assignment. The challenge for history teachers and teacher educators who seek to integrate desktop documentary making into theirinstructional repertoire is to balance the need to provide students with creative freedom while creating an instructional setting that effectively and efficientlyaddresses students' historical understanding. (shrink)

This thesis argues for a reconsideration of the social theories of Max Horkheimer and C. Wright Mills in order to increase our understanding of the ideological forces at play in modern society. Despite clear similarities in their work in terms of both subject matter and perspective, the discipline of political science lacks a critical comparison of their writings. I demonstrate that a comprehensive and comparative reading of Horkheimer and Mills can offer a new way to address many issues that remain (...) at the heart of writings on ideology, the production of knowledge, and the culture industry. Instead of simply studying the concept of ideology as it appears in each theorist's writings, I propose to place their views in dialogue with one another. Taken together, Horkheimer and Mills provide an illuminating and dynamic perspective on the current, and often conflicting approaches to the theory of ideology. ;Much of the current literature on ideology reflects fixed positions with little room for compromise. The impasse in the study of ideology revolves around the conceptualization of ideology as either enabling or constraining critical consciousness. A combination of the writings of Horkheimer and Mills can guide social theorists beyond the present impasse towards a reflexive theory of ideology, one that considers its own social and ethical presuppositions and normative values. (shrink)