Contains fourteen essays and an introduction addressing the main areas of scholarly interest for Richard W. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Washington University, St Louis Questions how individuals envision the public good in modern Britain and how, through religious and moral beliefs, coupled with wisdom and political savvy, they can improve the public good through the ever-changing nineteenth century political institutions Essays range from studies of local electoral politics and parliamentary reform campaign to national political party organization, high politics and (...) the role religion and empire played in the creation of national policy Examines the influence of individuals on the political process through their professional work in historical and philosophical writing, journalism and missionary work at home and abroad Provides new original research in the area of modern British political history together in Parliamentary History. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Religious Background of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy RICHARD H. POPKIN IT IS AN EXCEEDINGLY GREAT PLEASURE tO participate in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Journal of the Historyof Philosophy.The editor, Professor Makkreel, offered me the opportunity to discuss the rationale for my present research, which I hope has some relevance for future research in the history of philosophy. At a symposium at the American Philosophical Association meeting in (...) Washington in December x985, I argued for taking the historyof philosophy seriously, that is, understanding thinkers and ideas in their actual historical contexts, instead of detaching them into some ahistorical ethereal realm. I argued that one could not make sense of a philosopher's thought detached from his time and circumstances. His ideas could not be understood unless one took account of the language, the usages, the issues and the concerns of the thinker and his time. The all too frequent "reconstruction" of philosophers ' thoughts sees them instead as logical machines, simply moving from clearly stated premises to their logical consequences. As many of us have sought to show, this often grossly distorts what Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz and others might have actually thought, and misses much of what they were probably thinking about. I should like to carry this theme further by examining the need to take seriously the religious aspect of philosophizing. I will center on the intellectual scene of the seventeenth century, which I am currently working on though I believe many of the same points could be made about any period in the history of philosophy. Among historians of science there is an ongoing debate about whether the history of the subject should be studied internally or externally. The [:35] 36 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY internalists examine a set of ideas presented by scientist A, and trace their use or development by scientist B. The study that results is primarily the tracing of the course of a set of ideas through a time period. Background data about the scientists, their problems, and their place in society are regarded as of little relevance. The externalists insist that one cannot understand why various questions became important, why various individuals tried to solve them, why they used certain kinds of possible solutions instead of others, etc., unless one knows the external conditions of the time. This has spawned a lot of interesting research into the way scientific studies went on, who supported them, who did them, how they got accepted, and so on. The sociology and even anthropology of science is now a thriving research area, yielding many amazing studies about the scientific world and how it functioned. In so doing, scholars have not just examined the great successful scientists, the Keplers, Galileos, Harveys, and Newtons, but also the small fry, the mediocre, the poor scientists, and even the incompetent ones. They have examined why wrong-headed theories were supported, and accepted, while evidence supporting other theories was readily available. Their concern with the actual course of scientific development as an ongoing part of intellectual history is vital to understanding the scientific world of today, which plays such an overwhelming role in our society. So, some people study the education of the good, the mediocre, the bad scientists; their relative social statuses, incomes, and so on. The religious concerns are, of course, an obvious part of the story from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton to Darwin to Freud to Einstein. The scientists were involved in an ongoing religious world that influenced the role of science. The above named scientists had their religious or irreligious views that were involved with their scientific concerns. And, as we know too well, the impact of their work on religion has been of great importance to the broader intellectual world, and the impact of religion on the acceptance of their science has been and is part of the ongoing intellectual world. This interest amongst historians of science in the sociology, psychology, and anthropology of science has hardly rubbed off on the historians of philosophy. Most of the leading scholars of the last few decades in this work are hardly known and rarely cited in studies in the history of philosophy. We... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005Harry M. Bracken and Richard A. WatsonRichard H. Popkin, founding editor of the journal of the History of Philosophy, died on April 14, 2005. He was 81 years old and had continued his research and writing to the last moment before he entered the hospital on march 21st with extreme respiratory difficulties.Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) revolutionized the study (...) and understanding of early modern philosophy. Popkin entered the minds and world of thinkers from Erasmus to Descartes in a way few other scholars had done, and he showed how the development of philosophy and science was far from an easy series of steps from success to success. Instead, philosophers and scientists pursued a dozen lines from the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus through religious belief, atheism, numerology, astrology, alchemy, eschatology, magic, and millenarianism—a maelstrom of ideas out of which emerged the major figures and ideas of Modern philosophy and science. Dick once explained that actually he lived in the 17th century, and certainly he knew as many of those thinkers and their thoughts as did many people who actually lived at that time. Of course Popkin did not originate the notion of exploring the history of philosophy in the context of its times, but he made that approach central today. It led him not only through the Early Modern period, but also from medieval jewish philosophy to a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination.Popkin received his PhD at Columbia University, and in his career he taught at the universities of Connecticut, Iowa, California (San Diego and Los Angeles), Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvey Mudd College. He served as the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and as president of JHP, Inc. For many years, and was active in its operation for over four decades, having attended the annual meeting of the Board of Directors a little over a month before he died. After retirement, he lived in close association with the Clark Library in Los Angeles. He was well known to scholars and librarians throughout the world. Whatever library he visited, he was likely to find some obscure or hidden document that would either clear up some mystery, or give rise to a new problem. His memory was extraordinary. During his final years when he was virtually blind, he would sift through his mind, send assistants off to look for something that had to be in this or that library and write papers in his head for later dictation. Besides his memory, indispensable throughout his lifetime he had Julie, his co-worker and wife of 60 years, without whom, the Popkin we knew could not have existed.These few paragraphs are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him.Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

When my family and I were hiking in northern New York state we got lost. I waved down a passing car and inside I could just about, through the haze of purple cigarette smoke, make out a couple of very obese people in the car; they looked like mother and son. They very kindly agreed to take us to our car, several miles away, and during the journey I asked them what had brought them to this remote mountain road. “We (...) come here once a week to draw water from a mountain stream”, said the elderly woman. “Most people round here don't know how to keep healthy”, she and her son opined almost in unison. This experience, for me, captured many of the attitudes those of us in the West have towards health, health promotion, and disease prevention. This cameo shows how difficult …. (shrink)

The war on terrorism, say America's leaders, is a war of Good versus Evil. But in the minds of the perpetrators, the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington were presumably justified as ethically good acts against American evil. Is such polarization leading to a violent "clash of civilizations" or can differences between ethical systems be reconciled through rational dialogue? This book provides an extraordinary resource for thinking clearly about the diverse ways in which humans see good and (...) evil. In nine essays and responses, leading thinkers ask how ethical pluralism can be understood by classical liberalism, liberal-egalitarianism, critical theory, feminism, natural law, Confucianism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Each essay addresses five questions: Is the ideal society ethically uniform or diverse? Should the state protect, ban, or otherwise intervene in ethically based differences? How should disagreements on the rights and duties of citizens be dealt with? Should the state regulate life-and-death decisions such as euthanasia? To what extent should conflicting views on sexual relationships be accommodated? This book shows that contentious questions can be discussed with both incisiveness and civility. The editors provide the introduction and Donald Moon, the conclusion. The contributors are Brian Barry, Joseph Boyle, Simone Chambers, Joseph Chan, Christine Di Stefano, Dale F. Eickelman, Menachem Fisch, William Galston, John Haldane, Chandran Kukathas, David Little, Muhammad Khalid Masud, Carole Pateman, William F. Scheuerman, Adam B. Seligman, James W. Skillen, James Tully, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

The violence of the attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent war in Iraq have brought to the fore the issue of citizenship virtue. This paper challenges nearly a generation of citizenship theorists who, by privileging discourse over other virtues, have impaired the capacity for a balanced political response to this event. It is argued that the removal of the virtue of courage from the model of good citizenship has resulted in a politics that either cannot suffer (...) violence when it is needed, or one that knows no boundaries to violence when it is employed. From an interpretation of Plato’s Laches, a model of citizenship—which is here called the Hunter-Philosopher — is explored that situates courageous citizenship between the unmitigated and unrestrained violence of the warrior on the one hand, and the irresolute, divisive speech of the sophist on the other. (shrink)

Richard A. Watson - Descartes: A Biography - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 159-161 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Richard Watson Washington University Desmond M. Clarke. Descartes: A Biography. New York-Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 507. $40.00. This is an excellent critical and contextual presentation of the development of Descartes's thought in its historical context. No recent biographer has done as well in (...) providing names, dates, and outlines of the ideas and positions of thinkers contemporary with Descartes who influenced, criticized, and annoyed him. The persona that emerges from this study is that of an irascible, belligerent egotist of colossal proportions: a man who never admitted a mistake, who sometimes was almost clinically paranoid, who picked fights well beyond reasonable cause and need, who trashed two of the intellectual giants of his day , who tried to take credit for the conception of Pascal's experiment concerning the weight of the atmosphere (in fact, lots of people.. (shrink)

This book is an expanded catalogue of an exhibit of mid‐fifteenth‐ through seventeenth‐century drawings, woodcuts, engravings, and etchings emphasizing hands as objects of study, as teaching tools, and as reflections of the human being. In addition, it contains an extended introduction by the curator of the exhibit, Claire Richter Sherman, and four essays by other contributors on pertinent topics: the hand as an instrument of the intellect, manual reckoning, music, and chiromancy . These essays, which precede the catalogue itself, are (...) only loosely connected to the exhibit, but each deals with its subject clearly and crisply.In his composition on the hand as a means of expression, Martin Kemp traces the legacy of ancient thought as reflected in the various anatomical drawings from Leonardo through the detailed Bidloo prints. Kemp concludes that the hand remains “a prime mechanism for personal expression—for the manifestation of individual character and identity.” In the following essay Sachiko Kusukawa provides a succinct sketch of finger numeration, noting that a system alluded to by ancient authors was fully described by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century. Bede also wrote of a method of using the hand as a mnemonic aid in determining the proper date for Easter and other movable feasts. Finger counting remained popular throughout the Middle Ages but gradually fell into disuse in the West by the sixteenth century and was merely quaint by the eighteenth. Kusukawa does not, unfortunately, suggest a reason for the decline, but the spread of computation with Arabic numerals was surely a major factor.Next, Susan Forscher Weiss discusses the use of the hand in teaching music theory and scales. Although there are some indications of this practice in antiquity, variations on a system developed in the eleventh century by Guido of Arezzo were used to teach music through the sixteenth century. Finally, Brain P. Copenhaver discusses the history of the pseudoscience chiromancy . Already in existence in antiquity, palmistry, and other forms of divination, flourished despite the prohibitions of the church. Copenhaver concludes with a witty discussion of the hard times on which palmistry has fallen recently in California.As for the catalogue, it consists of eighty‐three monochrome illustrations, each with an extensive commentary about the artist, the subject, and the reason the item was included in the exhibit. These descriptions are frequently fascinating short essays in themselves, enticing the reader to investigate further. The organization is thematic rather than chronological, with six divisions : “Reading the Writing on Hands,” “Handiwork of the Creator,” “Messengers of the World,” “Knowledge on Hand,” “Whole World in the Hand,” and “Guiding Hands.” The faults are minor. Although the themes of the divisions themselves are clearly described in Sherman's introduction, several of the illustrations seem to have only a general association with the stated theme. A few are filled with details too small to be legible in the necessary reduction of plates to fit the book. Most of the illustrations, however, are excellent examples of the main subject of the exhibit and are fascinating studies in their own right.Generally, this volume is a valuable work for anyone interested in the history of the hand in science and the arts. The four prefatory essays are particularly instructive, and the prints are reproduced clearly, with elaborate descriptions of their historical context and their meaning. Accordingly, this book is much more than merely a catalogue; it is an important work in its own right. Throughout, the substantial references to other works indicate directions for further study. One only regrets that the exhibit itself was shown in only two venues. (shrink)

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. "A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—_Washington Post_ "An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality.... [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his handling of words (...) so seductive, that the act of reading becomes an encounter in the erogenous zone."—Jonah Raskin, _L.A. Weekly_. (shrink)

Rymarz, Richard The most striking feature of any study on vocations in the Catholic Church is the steep decline in many aspects of religious life in recent decades. No group in the world has done more high-quality empirical research on the question of religious life and vocations than the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, and all who work in this area are in their debt. Based at Georgetown in Washington, DC, CARA provides the figures detailed in (...) Table 1 for the United States of America. (shrink)

In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "A small masterwork... a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history.... It is best to read Cioran while sitting. The impact upon the intellect can be temporarily stunning, and motor systems may give way under the assault."—Joseph Patrick Kennedy, _Houston Chronicle_ "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds... writing today."—_New York Times_ "A sort of final (...) philosopher of the Western world. [Cioran's] statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—_Washington Post_ E. M. Cioran was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including _On the Heights of Despair_, also available from the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

The front page of the [New York] Times on July 16, 1951, serves to outline, quickly enough, the situation of the world into which The Catcher in the Rye made such a successful and relatively well-publicized entrance. The main action of the world, the chief events of its days were occurring within a framework of struggle between two systems of life, two different ways of organizing human being socially, politically, economically. The opposition between East and West, between socialist and capitalist, (...) was determining what happened in Kaesong, Budapest, Madrid, Teheran, Washington, New York. Name-calling the Administration, Republicans threw out the term "socialist," and the bid for millions to build schools in the five boroughs of New York would finally have to dovetail with allocations of taxes for defense. The review of The Catcher in the Rye in the back pages of the Times made no mention of any of this. The kind of reality reported on the front page belonged to one world; the new novel was about to be assimilated into another, into the world of culture, which was split from politics and society. And this separation repeated itself in other reviews: typically, they did not mention the framework of world history contemporary with the novel; they did not try to relate Catcher to that framework even to the extent of claiming that there was only a partial relationship or complaining, however simplistically, that there was none. Our concern from here on will be to try to sketch what reviewers and what academic critics after them did see in the novel and what they might have seen in it. We are interested in the conceptual frameworks, the alternatives to history, they used to respond to and interpret Catcher as they passed it on to its millions of lay readers. Carol Ohmann is currently working on a book about Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemic Preface" , appeared in the December 1974 issue. Richard Ohmann's most recent book is English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Both are professors in the department of English at Wesleyan University, and contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" to Critical Inquiry in the Summer 1977 issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hippota NestorRichard P. MartinDouglas Frame. Hippota Nestor. Hellenic Studies 37. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009. Dist. by Harvard University Press. x + 912 pp. 12 black-and-white plates, 6 maps. Paper, $34.95.This magisterial volume achieves a remarkable new synthesis of work on the deep roots of the Homeric poems in Indo-European antiquity with fine-grained historical analyses of the period when the text was crystallizing (eighth–fifth centuries (...) b.c.e.). Frame’s unmatched range of learning in specialized subjects from Vedic meter and Greek noun morphology to the tangled web of Ionian inter-state relations in the archaic era enables him to buttress a massive structure of argumentation arrayed with architectural artistry over five large parts (each the size of a small monograph and detailed with a mass of excellent notes). The result should change views not just of the underlying poetic structure of the Iliad and Odyssey but also of the place, date, and circumstances of their composition. Few Classics books containing 782 pages of text can be said to reward reading of every paragraph; this one does.The argument evolves in two extended narrative sequences: one about Nestor (parts 1 and 2, comprising chaps. 1–7), the other about the locales affecting the shape of Homeric poetry (parts 3–5, chaps. 8–14). It is the all-important figure of Nestor, along with the myth-historical evidence about his family the Neleids, that unites the two.The first sequence starts from the findings of Frame’s 1978 monograph The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic (New Haven), which has remained essential for its careful exposition of the deep mythopoetic structure of the Odyssey. Tracing the implications of etymology—the verbal root shared between the name Nestor and nostos (“return”)—led Frame three decades ago to profound conclusions about narrative, culture and its heroes, the “return to light and life” as related to the notion of “consciousness” (noos), and the epic role played by the cunning intelligence of Odysseus and Nestor. Here he expands the earlier analysis to take full account of the connection between Nestor and the cognate Nāsatyā, twin Vedic gods better known as the Aśvinā, the Dioscuric horsemen of the Indic pantheon. That the horseman (hippota) Nestor can be related to an Indo-European “twin myth” is held to be the key to the Pylian hero’s function in Homeric poetry.After a precise account of the semantics of the root *nes- as developed in Greek with specific reference to “safe return,” Frame tackles the even more complex Sanskrit linguistic and poetic evidence. The Nāsatyā are known for saving and healing, returning others to light—or even, in a cosmic context, dispelling [End Page 687] darkness to retrieve light itself. Beneath the usual treatment of the pair as indissociable are slender signs of distinction; in their paternity, for instance (Rig Veda 1.181), and in hints that one is associated with cattle, the other with horses. Frame follows these traces through later epic stories about Nakula and Sahadeva, sons of the Vedic twin gods who express more openly the paternal variations. Juxtaposing the rich evidence concerning Castor and Pollux in Greek tradition, he finds that it preserves an archaic situation whereby one (immortal) twin rescues another (mortal) from death. A rigorous linguistic and metrical analysis, bringing in the evidence of Iranian for a singular noun, enables him to conclude that the twin-name Nāsatyā actually represents the nominalization of an old syntagma (third-person singular + relative pronoun) *nasati ya “he who brings back to life.”The meaningfulness of this carefully sketched Indo-European background for Nestor emerges chiefly in Iliad 11.670–761, his autobiographical tale of youthful raiding. His brother Periclymenos had been killed when Heracles sacked Pylos; some time later Nestor must take on the characteristics of his dead “twin,” seize cattle from the Epeians of Elis, and then become a horseman in the ensuing battle for his city. Although Periclymenos is not technically a twin brother (he is one of eleven sons of Neleus besides Nestor, or one of two others, according to the Odyssey), this shape... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 117-131 [Access article in PDF] Conscience, Citizenship, and Global Responsibilities Richard Reilly St. Bonaventure University A version of this paper was presented at the Sixth International Conference of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies held at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, in August 2000.Upon discovering that Antigone had buried her brother, Polyneices, King Creon ascertains that she indeed had known of his decree (...) forbidding any honor to be shown to the dead traitor, and asks, "You still dared break this law?" Antigone responds: Yes, because I did not believe that Zeus was the one who had proclaimed it; neither did Justice, or the gods of the dead whom Justice lives among. The laws they have made for men are well marked out. I didn't suppose your decree had strength enough, or you, who are human, to violate the lawful traditions the Gods have not written merely, but made infallible. These laws are not for now or for yesterday, they are alive forever; and no one knows when they were shown to us first. 1Thus arises the dynamic confrontation between conscience and the state in the guise of two very solitary individuals: Antigone, committed to her brother out of love and religious duty, and Creon, striving to reestablish political order so necessary to the welfare of the community. We might say, in the idiom of Saint Augustine and Martin Luther King Jr., for Antigone, "an unjust law is no law at all," or at least not one that should bind one's conscience. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," King agonized over the lack of support, much less solidarity, of the Christian community in the effort to achieve racial justice in America. Antigone is provided no comrade (although her sister, Ismene, is sympathetic); no one of religious authority pleads Antigone's case or provides her with moral support. In this respect, Antigone's situation is mirrored in that of Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian Catholic beheaded for his refusal to be conscripted into the army in support of the Nazi's cause. [End Page 117]Surely, one owes much to one's state, especially if it is justly ordered, safeguards individuals' rights, and promotes the common good. Both out of gratitude and a sense of fair play, one should do one's "public duty"—including upholding the law, paying taxes, voting, and otherwise participating in the political life of the community, and so on. We might say, as Jesus said, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's." 2 What does not belong to Caesar is the nature, meaning, and destiny of one's life; or to put it otherwise, what does not belong to Caesar is the allegiance or fidelity of one's conscience. This paper has three aims: (1) to show that to be respectful of life entails "global responsibilities"; (2) to articulate a rational ground for the view that "life" and "conscience" do not belong to the state; and (3) to argue that religious communities should encourage and honor individuals of conscience and that the state should recognize as a fundamental human right a citizen's noncooperation with policies or behaviors that are life-destroying. That Buddhism and Christianity are "world religions" provides each with the opportunity and the responsibility to do whatever is possible to promote peace, prosperity, and well-being of all human beings. Buddhists and Christians would do well to join together to articulate "ethical responsibilities" in a culture-neutral way to underscore their independence from political structures and ideologies on the one hand and to emphasize their global applicability on the other. Respecting Life—a Global Precept Encountering spiritual traditions nourished in other cultures allows one to rethink one's cultural assumptions. The spread of Buddhism in the West is especially potent in this regard. One of the most fundamental of all moral laws is: "One ought not to kill." But what does this really mean? What does it require of each of us? Buddhism offers important insights in this regard. In what follows, I shall offer... (shrink)

In Spence v. Washington, the Supreme Court devised a two-part test for determining whether a nonverbal action is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. According to the Spence test, a nonverbal action is expressive if and only if: (1) it is intended to communicate a particularized message; and (2) in the circumstances in which the action is performed, the likelihood is great that the message will be understood by observers. -/- In subsequent cases, however, the Court has made (...) clear that the category of "expressive conduct" embraces a much wider variety of nonverbal behaviors than a literal reading of the Spence test would suggest. It includes, for example, such behaviors as composing instrumental music, creating nonrepresentational visual artworks, penning nonsense verse, and dancing in the nude for the entertainment of others. -/- Drawing on the work of Paul Grice, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers of language, this Comment develops a two-part expressive conduct test that captures the expressive character of this wider variety of behaviors. It shows that the Gricean test displays striking consistency with the Supreme Court's particularized judgments about which sorts of nonverbal conduct are expressive and which sorts are not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley HopkinsRichard D. LordThe Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Franco Marucci; 261 pp. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994, $44.95.Paging one day through Hopkins’s notebooks in the library at Campion Hall, I was startled to find the draft of “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” placed directly opposite (...) the tortuous grade computations for one of his classes. This book presents a similar contrast—insights into “The Wreck of the Deutschland” buried in the technical language of structuralism, semiotics, and rhetoric.In his preface, the author calls his book “a revised and updated translation of my I fogli della Sibilla. Retorica et medievalismo in Gerard Manley Hopkins” (p. ix). As the title indicates, it is divided into two parts, the former dealing with Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric viewed synchronically and the latter with his “textuality as a confluence of... cultural codes” (p. 89).In the chapter introducing part one, Marucci dismisses, with few exceptions, criticism from 1918 to the present as being of little use to one investigating “the function and functionality of Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric” (p. 3). The exemplifying portion of this chapter (“Amplification”) addresses “God’s Grandeur” and “The Wreck of the Deutschland” as judicial speech (persuasive), with the reader performing the judicial function. The analysis is useful in providing insights into the poet’s rhetorical planning as he guides the reader in this persuasive process.Moving from the “Deutschland” to the “terrible sonnets” as exemplifications of “autocommunication,” Marucci notes that here the interlocutor gradually disappears as the sender-receiver relationship fades. He believes that Hopkins became “no longer capable of finding in himself (or, more probably, of offering to a receiver who had proved cold and indifferent) the necessary stimuli” (p. 76) and names the editor of The Month, Bridges, and other correspondents as the probable receivers.In the second (and major) part of the book, the author sets out to examine the cultural codes influencing the poet’s textuality. The chapter introducing this section, “‘Integrated’ and ‘Apocalyptic’ Writers,” first looks at “the global syntagmatic model of the Victorian Age” (p. 98) and then divides its texts according to this model into three categories. The first two either reflect or modify the syntagmatic codes (“integrated” writers) while the third opposes these codes (“apocalyptic” writers). The author’s thesis is that Hopkins is not fully any one of these, but that his Victorianism is subsumed in various ways and ultimately subordinated to his medievalism. His position is that Victorian codes essentially ceased to affect the poet after his entrance into the Society of Jesus, when they were replaced by medieval codes. This is developed in some detail in the chapter entitled “Hopkins and Duns Scotus.”Although the book takes a narrow critical approach to Hopkins, it still might [End Page 149] well have been enriched by allowing for the ways in which the Ignatian method of meditation, with its emphasis on the “application of the senses,” so clearly drew Hopkins to find a kindred spirit in Scotus. This, together with the kind of seminary training in vogue in the Catholic Church until after Vatican II, certainly contributed to the medievalism that Marucci finds in the later Hopkins.This is a useful and provocative book for scholars, but many of the footnotes seem unnecessarily long and some chapters conclude too abruptly. The highly specialized language of structuralism and semiotics requires an expertise that probably eludes most undergraduate students.Richard D. LordWillamette UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Casting skepticism in a central role, this history of Western philosophy looks at the efforts of major thinkers seeking to overcome skeptical challenges. The role of skepticism in producing new theoretical positions is explicated, and the influence of contemporary skeptics examined. The relative merits of skeptical claims are also debated. Popkin taught philosophy at Washington University. Stroll teaches philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.