This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the "mother tongue" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. (...) The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the "courtly" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. _The Idea of the Vernacular_ will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory. (shrink)

This collection examines the relationship between phenomenology, interpretation, and community, considering the issues from several viewpoints including German idealism, the discourses of the Frankfurt School, and post-structuralist thought.

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

In their scoping review of the literature on artificial womb technology (AWT), De Bie et al. report that “complete ectogenesis has been hailed as an alternative to abortion,” (De Bie et al. 2023, 7...

Introduction Most of the papers gathered here were contributions to a series of joint meetings of the Department of Social Administration and Social Work ...

Living organisms are the ultimate survivalists, having evolved phenotypes with unprecedented adaptability, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and versatility compared to human technology. To harness these properties, functional descriptions and design principles from all sources of biodiversity information must be collated − including the hundreds of thousands of possible survival features manifest in natural history museum collections, which represent 12% of total global biodiversity. This requires a consortium of expert biologists from a range of disciplines to convert the observations, data, and hypotheses into (...) the language of engineering. We hope to unite multidisciplinary biologists and natural history museum scientists to maximize the coverage of observations, descriptions, and hypotheses relating to adaptation and function across biodiversity, to make it technologically useful. This is to be achieved by developments in meta‐ taxonomic classification, phylogenetics, systematics, biological materials research, structure and morphological characterizations, and ecological data gathering from the collections − the aim being to identify and catalogue features essential for good biomimetic design. (shrink)

This paper connects celibacy to autonomy, which is derived from economic, emotional, and sexual self-determination. Although society attempts to control and define women's sexuality, the celibate woman who masturbates can retrieve her sexuality without the massive social rearrangements which are necessary for economic and emotional liberation. Because masturbation is accessible and singular, sexual autonomy is available to a woman who chooses celibacy, regardless of the other exigencies in her life, as illustrated in the example here from popular literature.

Transcript and English translation of La naissance de la paix -- Analysis of La naissance de la paix -- Did Descartes write La naissance de la paix? -- Descartes's doctrine of the will -- The power of the will -- Controlling bodily desires -- Willing the good -- The sources of willing -- Did Descartes read Corneille? -- Descartes's political philosophy -- Evidence and methods of construction -- The sovereign state -- Descartes's life and politics -- Discours de la methode (...) -- Constitution of a Swedish Academy -- Arts and sciences -- Les passions de l'âme. (shrink)

Compiling in one volume the basic writings of these three seminal thinkers of ancient China, each from a different philosophical school, this book reveals the richness and diversity of the ancient Chinese intellectual world.

Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of brilliant and highly influential essays on human action, examining such questions as: in what ways are we free and not free, rational and irrational, responsible or not for what we do? Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field.

The majority of U.S. abortion patients are poor women, and Black and Hispanic women. Therefore, this article encourages bioethicists and equity advocates to consider whether the need for abortion c...

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 1198-1203, September 2022.

Argues that the Holocaust has caused a mutation of the world. Our new world is Planet Auschwitz, an unworld with satellites separate and incommunicable. In this new world, the forces of nihilism are at work - e.g. terrorism, mass murder. Face-to-face with this destruction process, its administrators, and its survivors, we mutations must rewrite everything that has been projectively written about us in the old world. The tendency to repression keeps us from thinking, binding us to cynicism and nostalgia. The (...) response to this new world condition must be to remember the Holocaust - repression leads to indifference and destruction. (shrink)

In the subsequent pages, I want to develop a distinction between wanting and valuing which will enable the familiar view of freedom to make sense of the notion of an unfree action. The contention will be that, in the case of actions that are unfree, the agent is unable to get what he most wants, or values, and this inability is due to his own "motivational system." In this case the obstruction to the action that he most wants to do (...) is his own will. It is in this respect that the action is unfree: the agent is obstructed in and by the very performance of the action. (shrink)

Richard A. Watson - What is the History of Philosophy and Why is it Important? - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 525-528 Notes and Discussions What is the History of Philosophy and Why is it Important? The advent of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Journal of the History of Philosophy set me to thinking again about these old disputed questions. It seems obvious that what is unique to (...) the history of philosophy is that it is history. It is specifically history of philosophical positions, principles, and arguments with no restrictions concerning who held them where or when, or what they are. The history of philosophy as history, then, is a discipline in which the philosophical positions, principles, and arguments of philosophers are presented, analyzed, and explained in the historical contexts of their times. One way to proceed is to ask and answer questions such as the following: Given our best understanding of the intellectual milieu and vernacular of the times, what did the philosopher say? Given ditto, what did the philosopher mean to say? Did he say what he meant to say? Did he support his position adequately or inadequately? What might or could the philosopher have said in the context of his times, either to improve or alter his position, or to avoid errors? How did the philosopher's contemporaries respond? Who had the better arguments? What developed philosophically out of.. (shrink)

In this comprehensive tour of the long history and philosophy of expertise, from ancient Greece to the 20th century, Jamie Carlin Watson tackles the question of expertise and why we can be skeptical of what experts say, making a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophical debates on authority, testimony, disagreement and trust. His review sketches out the ancient origins of the concept, discussing its early association with cunning, skill and authority and covering the sort of training that ancient thinkers believed (...) was required for expertise. Watson looks at the evolution of the expert in the middle ages into a type of "genius" or "innate talent", moving to the role of psychological research in 16th-century Germany, the influence of Darwin, the impact of behaviorism and its interest to computer scientists, and its transformation into the largely cognitive concept psychologists study today. (shrink)

This is one of the most justly celebrated texts of the Chinese tradition - impressive for both its bold philosophical imagination and its striking literary style. Accepting the challenge of translating this captivating classic in its entirety, Burton Watson has expertly rendered into English both the profound thought and the literary brilliance of the text.

Richard A. Watson - Augustinian-Cartesian Index: Texts and Commentary - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.3 359-361 Zbigniew Janowski. Augustinian-Cartesian Index: Texts and Commentary. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 275. Cloth, $35.00. This is an English translation and substantial expansion of the French edition . Besides augmenting Augustinian citations, Janowski has added indices and commentaries for Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, and Montaigne. The (...) result is a crucial compilation and analysis of the major textual sources of Descartes's philosophy. Janowski demonstrates that Descartes's metaphysics is foundationally Augustinian, particularly in his dependence on the doctrine of God's creation of eternal truths: "the idea that God creates by an act of understanding" . This doctrine was, in fact, left out of the Meditations. Janowski argues that it logically belongs in the fourth Meditation but was deleted because it was almost universally denied by the.. (shrink)

Abstract:By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, we craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations embodied in normative conceptions of the economic social contract in the United States. We argue that there are distinct views of such a contract grounded in individualist and communitarian philosophical ideologies. We apply this framework to organizational downsizing, postulating that certain human resource practices, in combination with the respective ideological orientations, will affect perceptions of the justice of downsizing policies.

A dozen papers by internationally known scholars explore questions largely unthinkable without Richard Watson's classic Downfall of Cartesianism: Descartes in Holland, Descartes and Simon Foucher, and issues raised by Descartes for philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, translation and toleration.