Purpose This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations. Design/methodology/approach Using a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to (...) highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring. Findings The authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring. (shrink)

Originally published in German, Christoph Wulf’s _Anthropology_ sets its sights on a topic as ambitious as its title suggests: anthropology itself. Arguing for an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to anthropology that incorporates science, philosophy, history, and many other disciplines, Wulf examines—with breathtaking scope—all the ways that anthropology has been understood and practiced around the globe and through the years. Seeking a central way to understand anthropology in the midst of many different approaches to the discipline, Wulf concentrates on the human (...) body. An emblem of society, culture, and time, the body is also the result of many mimetic processes—the active acquisition of cultural knowledge. By examining the role of the body in the performance of rituals, gestures, language, and other forms of imagination, he offers a bold new look at how culture is produced, handed down, and transformed. Drawing such examinations into a comprehensive and sophisticated assessment of the discipline as a whole, _Anthropology_ looks squarely at the mystery of humankind and the ways we have attempted to understand it. (shrink)

This paper proposes a theory to explain the remarkable emotional power of our response to abstract music. It reviews and rejects metaphysical arguments derived from notions of a divine spiritual realm and from absolute forms of human reason. Its conclusion is that musical experience is always essentially inter-subjective and potentially empathetic, and arises from “action-metaphors,” through which we link musical performances, as forms of action, to subconscious, archetypal dimensions of our awareness of ourselves and of our feelings towards others. It (...) ends with a discussion of the implications of this theory for music education. (shrink)

Understanding how the professional ideals and values of partners influence lawyers' everyday life is a relatively unexplored area given the inherent difficulties of gaining access to lawyers. This case study sheds light on the professional ideals and ethical values of partners and lawyers in a mid-tier Sydney law firm. Semi-structured interviews with partners and lawyers/legal clerks reveal how partners' professional ideals and ethical values play a pivotal role in: (1) upholding positive normative evaluations of lawyer/firm propriety (moral legitimacy), (2) stressing (...) the importance of a balanced working life (cognitive legitimacy) and (3) satisfying younger lawyers' needs for personal support, autonomy and responsibility (pragmatic legitimacy). The principled actions of partners are portrayed as the cornerstone of shaping a moral community in legal practise. (shrink)

Jason Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society is a masterful attempt to practice productive conflict and democratic dialogue in the face of static antagonisms and deep‐seated divisions. In my response, I underscore Springs’s insistence on mediating between the moral imagination of Richard Rorty and the prophetic critique of Cornel West. For the author of Healthy Conflict, any hope in the survival of democracy relies on balancing critique of domination with constructive proposals for a more just and equitable world. (...) On the one hand, Springs rejects any strong distinction between moral imagination and socio‐political critique; in fact, he argues for their intertwinement, especially in the work of West. At the same time, there are moments when he suggests an opposition between expanding the moral imagination and engaging in the critical enterprise, especially as he identifies the limits in Foucault regarding normativity and democratic struggle. I respond to this slippage by arguing that Foucault, and critical theory more broadly, open up possibilities for rethinking ethics, politics, and our relationship to the violence that sustains the order of things. (shrink)

A wide variety of clinical situations can lead to the implementation of assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH). Both enteral ANH and parenteral assisted nutrition and hydration (PNH) serve to nourish and hydrate those who are incapable of normal eating and drinking. Although PNH via the intravenous (IV) route is comparable to enteral ANH in its intention, IV PNH bypasses the relevant body system—the digestive tract—entirely. Consequently, IV PNH is ethically comparable to mechanical ventilation and thus can be withheld or withdrawn (...) following the ethical criteria that apply to any other extraordinary therapeutic measure. However, other alternatives to oral and enteral hydration that are proportionately less challenging than IV PNH (i.e., hypodermoclysis and proctoclysis) should be further evaluated as potentially ordinary means of keeping patients adequately hydrated at the end of life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.4 (Winter 2011): 649–659. (shrink)

“Writers don’t have tasks,” said Saul Bellow in a Q-and-A. “They have inspiration.”Yes, at the typewriter, by the grace of discipline and the Muse, but here, on Central Park South, in the Essex House’s bright Casino on the Park, inspiration was not running high.Not that attendance at the forty-eight PEN conference was a task. It was rather what Robertson Davies called “collegiality.” “A week of it once every five years,” he said, “should be enough.” He, Davies, had checked in early, (...) Saturday afternoon, and attended every session. In black overcoat and black fur cap, he had a theatrical, Man-Who-Came-to-Dinner look. In the lobby he made a great impression.Why not? After all, weren’t writers here to be seen as well as to see each other, to make as well as take impressions? A month before, I’d spent a couple of hours at the Modern Language Association convention. There were thousands and thousands of scholars and critics there. Some of the most noted make a career of squeezing authors out of their texts. An author, wrote one tutelary divinity, “constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, [and] literature….”1 Not content with auctoricide, deconstructionist critics went after texts. “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”2 Since there’s nothing that doesn’t belong to the text, texts are interchangeable. And it’s not that superfluous, mythical being, the author, who decides they are, but his readers, at least those readers capable of erecting on his miserable pedestal—the poem, the story, the novel—a memorable explication.Ah well, was my thought, for some people a corpse will serve as well as a person. Indeed, for intellectual undertakers, hit-men, and cannibals, as well as for those who suffer the tyranny of authority, corpses are preferable to their living simulacra.Few authors at the PEN conference were troubled by these critical corpse-makers. They were here to see the authors behind the books they’d read, to swap stories and opinions, and to make clear to each other what splendid thinkers and noble humans they were outside of the poems and stories which had brought them here in the middle of winter and New York. In this city, more than any other in the history of the word, the word had been turned into gold. If one were going to abandon the typewriter for the podium, what better place to do it? In 1985, Richard Stern was given the Medal of Merit, awarded every six years to a novelist by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the author of, among other works, the novels A Father’s Words , Other Men’s Daughters , and Stitch . His third “orderly miscellany,” The Position of the Body, will be published in September 1986. This essay is part of a longer work. Stern is professor of English at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Women Englishing Homer RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON Seven kingdoms strove in which should swell the womb / That bore great Homer; whom Fame freed from tomb,” so begins the fourth of “Certain ancient Greek Epigrams ” that George Chapman placed at the head of his Odyssey at its debut in 1615.1 The epigram was no mere antiquarian dressing for the text. It suggests a historical parallel with the (...) translator’s own feat—for this Odyssey appeared on the heels of Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer directly from the Greek. Indeed, the title page of that Iliad boasted, “Never before in any language truly translated” (italics mine). In “Englishing ” Homer (as he put it), Chapman had vanquished not only local rivals but also the whole international field.2 Through Chapman, England bore Homer anew. Yet within a few decades challengers appeared. An octogenarian Thomas Hobbes published an Odyssey translation in 1675 and an Iliad the following year. Alexander Pope’s versions (Iliad, 1715–1720; Odyssey, 1726) were bestsellers in the next century, yet others soon enough sought to better them, including the poet William Cowper (Iliad, 1791; Odyssey, 1809). The rate of Homeric production then intensified in the nineteenth century, becoming in Edith Hall’s apt phrase a “national pastime” in Victorian Britain—and, I would add, in the United States too.3 In the 1860s, a new English Iliad or Odyssey debuted nearly every year, making Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, seem prescient in selecting “On Translating Homer” as the topic for his 1860 lecture series. Anglo-American output of new English Homers has been steady ever since. The opening decades arion 26.3 winter 2019 of our century have been especially high-yielding—more than ten new Iliads and eight new Odysseys have appeared in print alongside fresh editions of twentieth-century favorites. Digital versions now circulate, too. To Chapman we might thus reply: Once seven Greek cities strove to be Homer’s nurse; now seventy tomes vie to be his English verse. Run down the complete bibliography, and a pattern already hinted in my list of notables becomes pronounced: name after name after name belongs to a man. Flip around a bit, and one can often find traces of women in these volumes. Hobbes, for example, argued in the preface to his translations that women have as “just” a “pretence” (in the sense of “claim”) as men to the moral education afforded by heroic poems, though one might cynically read this as a marketing strategy.4 Pope readily acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Homer’s first French female translator, and listed prominent female supporters in the subscription lists at the front of his editions.5 Women thus long factored into the business of “Englishing” classical texts, though almost exclusively as paying audience members. For more than four centuries, Homer’s English audience listened to a boys’ choir. That tune has only just begun to change thanks to the efforts of three women: the classicist and nonfiction writer Caroline Alexander, who became the first woman to publish a complete English Iliad in 2015; Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who published the first English Odyssey by a female translator in 2017; and the poet Alice Oswald, whose selective translation of the Iliad, Memorial, appeared in 2011.6 By virtue of their appearance in such short order, these books have been, and surely will be henceforth, grouped together. And rightly so: ending the male monopoly on the English channel to Homer is a major development. The Homeric epics have not only shaped Western culture; they enjoy enduring prestige. You still need to know Homer to fancy yourself “well-read.” These three books are thus 36 on women englishing homer potent symbols. They mark the passage of English-speaking women from the audience of male efforts to curate and transmit tradition to participants in those endeavors—from the subscription lists, we might say, to the title page. We sell these translations short, though, if we allow their collective meaning to obscure the patent differences in Alexander’s, Wilson’s, and Oswald... (shrink)

In Midstream, photographer Richard Wasserman documents the entire length of the 156-mile Chicago River and gives readers a glimpse into a mostly hidden landscape. As the twentieth century was drawing to a close and the city's industrial manufacturing era was rapidly waning, Wasserman took note of increased efforts to clean, beautify, and conserve the river, and he felt an urgent need to preserve the memory of Chicago's brawling past. As the project progressed and the photographer found himself captivated by (...) the river's extraordinarily diverse uses and visually rich landscape, he grew determined to capture the river in its entirety, in its varying moods and seasons, and from every possible vantage point during a time of rapid transformation. Midstream is the culmination of this ten-year project, in which there was always one more location to explore and another moment to capture. The result is a remarkable record of the Chicago River, revealing the nature of the waterway as it changed throughout the seasons and in relation to the dramatic extremes of Chicago weather. Scenes that had been hidden by foliage in the summer were unveiled in the winter when the trees shed their leaves. During dry spells when the water level fell, artifacts that were usually submerged became visible and offered tantalizing hints of the past. Wasserman's experiences along the riverbanks varied by location: in forest preserves he captured images of deer, beaver, and muskrats in the midst of idyllic flora; in dense urban areas his subjects were nineteenth-century factories and warehouses, many of which have been converted to offices and apartments, standing shoulder to shoulder with gleaming new office towers and condominium buildings. With an essay by Julia S. Bachrach, Midstream will be a significant resource and a lasting documentation of the Chicago River during the first decade of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper examines how the riparian vegetation of perennial and ephemeral rivers systems in the semi-arid, winter rainfall region of South Africa has changed over time. Using an environmental history approach we assess the extent of change in plant cover at 32 sites using repeat photographs that cover a time span of 36-113 years. The results indicate that in the majority of sites there has been a significant increase in cover of riparian vegetation in both the channel beds and (...) adjacent floodplain environments. The most important species to have increased in cover across the region is Acacia karroo. We interpret the findings in the context of historical changes in climate and land use practices. Damage to riparian vegetation caused by mega-herbivores probably ceased sometime during the early 19th century as did scouring events related to large floods that occurred at regular intervals from the 15th to early 20th centuries. Extensive cutting of riparian vegetation for charcoal and firewood has also declined over the last 150 years. Changes in the grazing history as well as increased abstraction and dam building along perennial rivers in the region also account for some of the changes observed in riparian vegetation during the second half of the 20th century. Predictions of climate change related to global warming anticipate increased drought events with the subsequent loss of species and habitats in the study area. The evidence presented here suggests that an awareness of the region's historical ecology should be considered more carefully in the modelling and formulation of future climate change predictions as well as in the understanding of climate change impacts over time frames of decades and centuries. (shrink)

It was his mother's death which allowed [Roland] Barthes to write: "I looked through…" "To write on something is to forfeit it," Barthes used to say, reciprocally, it is licit to write on what is already dead, it was Barthes himself in one of his acceptations. His mother was for Barthes the internal order, who permitted both the external other and the I to exist. Once she was dead, his life was over and could therefore become the object of writing. (...) Barthes no doubt had other books to write; but he no longer had any life to live. I find it emblematic that his last book should have been "on photography" . Eloquent or discreet, a photograph never says anything but: I was there; it leads to a gesture of monstration, to a silent deixis, and symbolizes a pre- or post-discursive world; it makes me an object, that is, a dead man. What Barthes himself calls "my last investigation" also concerned death. Tzvetan Todorov, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, has numerous books on literary theory, including Théories du symbole and Symbolisme et interprétation, which has been published in English. His previous contribution to Crtitical Inquiry, "The Verbal Age," appeared in the Winter 1977 issue. Richard Howard, a poet and critic, has translated many works by Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. (shrink)

In late winter of 1864, Charles Darwin received two folio volumes on radiolarians, a group of one-celled marine organisms that secreted siliceous skeletons of unusual geometry. The author, the young German biologist Ernst Haeckel (fig. 1), had himself drawn the figures for the extraordinary copper-etched illustrations that filled the second volume.1 The gothic beauty of the plates astonished Darwin (fig. 2 ), but he must also have been drawn to passages that applied his theory to construct the descent relations (...) of these little known creatures. He replied to Haeckel that the volumes "were the most magnificent works which I have ever seen, & I am proud to possess a copy from the author."2 Emboldened by his own initiative in contacting the famous naturalist, Haeckel, a few days later, sent Darwin a newspaper clipping that described a meeting of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians at Stettin, which occurred during the previous autumn. The article gave an extended and laudatory account of Haeckel's lecture defending Darwin's theory.3 Darwin immediately replied in his second letter: "I.. (shrink)

Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, the text of a lecture course presented at the University of Freiburg in the winter of 1921–22, was first published in 1985 as volume 61 of Heidegger’s collected works. Preceding Being and Time, the work shows Heidegger introducing novel vocabulary as he searches for his genuine philosophical voice. Here, Heidegger first takes up the role of the definition of philosophy and then elaborates a conception of 'factical life,'or human life as it is lived concretely in (...) relation to the world, a relation he calls 'caring.' Heidegger’s descriptions of the movement of life are original, striking, and unique to this lecture course. As he works out a phenomenology of factical life, Heidegger lays the groundwork for a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle, one of the pivotal influences in the development of his philosophy. As an early articulation of Heidegger’s thought, this book will be an indispensable resource for scholars and students. (shrink)

Rene Descartes's motto challenges his would-be historians: "He lives well who hides well." He hid even in the Discourse on Method, where he professed to recount the story of his "entire life, " but said almost nothing about his childhood and youth. He mentioned neither family nor friends, and he boasted a total freedom from irrational passions. In the Discourse, which presented a new way of achieving certain truth through mathematical reason, Descartes stressed just one event, a day of thinking (...) at the beginning of winter, 1619. Tucked away in an unpublished notebook, however, Descartes also left the Olympica, which documented the wildly irrational dreams he had the night of November 10, 1619, and gave his own enthusiastic interpretations. Embarrassed scholars have tried to reason away this record and even the dreams themselves. Adapting clinical methods to historical research, John Cole offers the first systematic interpretation of the Olympian dreams. He argues that they expressed and masked Descartes's unresolved conflicts: his guilt at having rejected the law career for which he had been trained and which his lawyer father had wanted him to pursue, and his shame over early failures to satisfy the high expectations of his friend and mentor, Isaac Beeckman. Cole shows us how a critical historian can make sense of such irrational material and lets us see the creation of an egocentric and rationalist philosophy. (shrink)

The volume under review here contains the first English translation of Edmund Husserl’s lectures on logic and theory of knowledge, delivered during the winter semester of 1906/07 in Göttingen. (The text of the lectures was first published as Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, Vorlesungen 1906/07 in 1984 in the Husserliana series (Husserliana XXIV)). Husserl had taken a position at Georg August Universität in Göttingen in 1900, thanks in part to the efforts of Hilbert, and he was to remain (...) there until 1916. The 1906/07 lectures are of interest for several reasons. First, they fall midway between the publication of the first edition of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (LI) (1900/01) and his Ideas I (1913). In the LI Husserl characterizes his phenomenology as a form of descriptive psychology in the style of his teacher Franz Brentano but in Ideas I he presents for the first time in publication his new transcendental phenomenology in which we are to ‘bracket’ the ‘natural attitude’ on the basis of the so-called phenomenological epoché (or ‘reduction’). Ideas I provides a mature presentation of the basic ideas of transcendental phenomenology, but it is not a book on logic and mathematics. On the other hand, the LI are of course devoted to logic but not from the point of view of transcendental phenomenology. It is in 1906 and 1907 that this fundamental shift to transcendental phenomenology takes place, and the lectures under review here provide some of the earliest materials on Husserl’s new conception of the methodology of phenomenological investigation. When Gödel says in the quotation above that the LIhas no correct technique because it still adopts the ‘natural’ attitude it is to this shift that he is referring. It was Husserl’s transcendental eidetic phenomenology that Gödel thought would be promising in logic, the foundations of mathematics, and in philosophy itself. The 1906/07 lectures are also of interest for their clarification and extension of some of the central ideas on logic and mathematics that were presented in the LIand earlier writings. Of course they do not take up all of the topics treated in the nearly nine hundred pages of the LI but they do provide an overview of some of the central themes. They also introduce, relative to the LI, some new dimensions of Husserl’s thinking about the relation of logic and mathematics to metaphysics (see especially chapter 3 of the lectures and a number of the appendices that are included in the volume). (shrink)

In Winter 2017, the first author piloted a course in formal logic in which we aimed to (a) improve student engagement and mastery of the content, and (b) reduce maths anxiety and its negative effects on student outcomes, by adopting student oriented teaching including peer instruction and classroom flipping techniques. The course implemented a partially flipped approach, and incorporated group-work and peer learning elements, while retaining some of the traditional lecture format. By doing this, a wide variety of student (...) learning preferences could be provided for. (shrink)

What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the (...) playwright and his political-philosophical views. (shrink)

This edition makes available the correspondence between Paul Tillich and his friend, the philosopher Richard Kroner, who were colleagues at the Technische Universität Dresden from the winter semester of 1925/26. They were to meet again in New York after Tillich's emigration to the United States in 1933, and Kroner's six years later. In 1941 Tillich was able to secure Kroner a visiting lecturer position at Union Theological Seminary. The exchange of letters, which also includes contributions from their wives (...) Hannah Tillich and Alice Kroner, covers the period from 1942 to 1964. It offers a remarkable account of the struggle for self-assertion and reorientation of two very different personalities who escaped the destructive will of the National Socialists. While Kroner and Tillich shared an enthusiasm for the philosophical legacy of German Idealism, they expressed it very differently in their respective works. (shrink)

We are grateful to Stanley Fish for demonstrating what “Against Theory” had merely assumed, that the only kind of theory worth attacking is the kind which claims to be more than just another form of practice. Some readers have thought that our arguments were directed against all general reflection about literature or criticism. Others have thought that we were resisting the encroachment on literary study of themes derived from politics, or psychoanalysis, or philosophy. These are plausible misreading of our intention, (...) since the term “theory” is indeed sometimes applied to any critical argument marked by historical or aesthetic generalization or by the reading of literature in terms of themes derived from other disciplines. But, as Fish shows, neither empirical generality nor thematic novelty is enough to make an argument theoretical in more than a trivial sense, that is, in a sense that marks it as importantly different in kind from other critical arguments. Theory in a nontrivial sense always consists in the attempt “to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without,” and this strong kind of theory is the kind whose coherence we deny . It is also the kind of theory engaged in by the vast majority of those who consider themselves theorists—including many who might prefer to think of themselves as practicing theory in some weaker sense.At the conclusion of “Philosophy without Principles,” Richard Rorty appears to join those who think we are attacking theory in its weaker senses as well as in the strong sense just described. He suggests that eliminating the writing and teaching of theory would deprive literary scholars of “an opportunity to discuss philosophy books—as well as novels, poems, critical essays, and so forth—with literature students” . If this were the only issue between Rorty’s version of pragmatism and ours, our disagreement would come to an immediate end, since nothing could be further from the aims of “Against Theory” than rendering a judgment about what books should be discussed in literary classrooms. But our disagreement runs deeper than debates about the curriculum. It involves, first, a fundamental disagreement about language and, second, an equally fundamental disagreement about the nature and consequences of pragmatism. Steven Knapp is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley; his book Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge is forthcoming. Walter Benn Michaels, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is working on the relation between literary and economic forms of representation in nineteenth-century America. A previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy,” appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. The authors’ joint contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Against Theory,” and “A Reply to Our Critics,” appeared respectively in the Summer 1982 and June 1983 issues. (shrink)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Pragmatists in Venice Alexander Kremer... 5 I. Philosophy and human evolution Persons as Natural Artifacts Joseph Margolis... 8 II. Cultural politics and democracy Is Marx a Pragmatist? Tom Rockmore... 24 The waxing and waning of democracy as a way of life : Some of the economic underpinnings Jane Skinner... 33 Redefining the Meaning of 'Morality': A Chapter in the Cultural Politics of Capitalism Kenneth W. Stikkers... 42 Imperial Irony: Rorty, Richard Henry Pratt and the American (...) Indian Genocide Scott L Pratt... 48 Bruno Latour, American Pragmatism, and the Idea of Non-Human Democracy Leszek Koczanowicz... 59 Beyond culturalism: A Deweyan reading of the expansion of 'Ndrangheta Matteo Santarelli... 66 Philosophy as Cultural Politics in Rorty, Shusterman, And Pragmatism Alexander Kremer... 79 III. Food, Semiotics, Society John Dewey: A Culinary Perspective Dorota Koczanowicz... 88 De-Subjectification in Semiotics: Argumentations, Self-Defense and Signs of Opposing Forces Martin Svantner... 95 IV. Book Reviews Democracy and Consensus: Review Essay of Leszek Koczanowicz's POLITICS OF DIALOGUE John Ryder... 111 Pragmatism Hotel. R. Calcaterra, G. Maddalena & G. Marchetti : lL PRAGMATISMO. DALLE ORIGINI AGLI SVILUPPI CONTEMPORANEl Brunella Antomarini... 117. (shrink)

Richard Tieszen [Tieszen, R. (2005). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXX(1), 153–173.] has argued that the group-theoretical approach to modern geometry can be seen as a realization of Edmund Husserl’s view of eidetic intuition. In support of Tieszen’s claim, the present article discusses Husserl’s approach to geometry in 1886–1902. Husserl’s first detailed discussion of the concept of group and invariants under transformations takes place in his notes on Hilbert’s Memoir Ueber die Grundlagen der Geometrie that Hilbert wrote during the (...) class='Hi'>winter 1901–1902. Husserl’s interest in the Memoir is a continuation of his long-standing concern about analytic geometry and in particular Riemann and Helmholtz’s approach to geometry. Husserl favored a non-metrical approach to geometry; thus the topological nature of Hilbert’s Memoir must have been intriguing to him. The task of phenomenology is to describe the givenness of this logos, hence Husserl needed to develop the notion of eidetic intuition. (shrink)

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his ???vacation voyage,??? To Cuba and Back . These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military (...) ???filibusters.??? Howe's narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. ???I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,??? she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 ???sprightly??? pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of ???foreign??? institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores. (shrink)

The article examines two cases of adoption of evolutionary ways of thinking by modern economists: Nelson and Winter’s (Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 1982), and evolutionary game theory (1990s and after). In both cases, the authors explicitly refer to natural selection in an economic context. I show that natural selection is taken in two different senses, which correspond to two general conceptions of the principle of natural selection, one of which contains reproduction and heredity as key elements, whereas the (...) other does not. (shrink)

This book is a succinct introduction to the orienting of attention.

Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sought. This (...) volume of essays, by some of today's leading philosophers, explores all these topics, as well as the methods, results and status of the theory itself, while two 'classical' discussions by Wittgenstein and Sartre are also included. A number of the contributions – those by Donald Davidson, W. D. Hart, Jim Hopkins, Adam Morton, David Pears and Richard Wollheim – have not been published before, and a very useful bibliography is provided. It is an anthology that will be vital to anyone interested in Freudian theory and, more generally, in philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Anthony Everett () argues that those who embrace the reality of fictional entities run into trouble when it comes to specifying criteria of character identity. More specifically, he argues that realists must reject natural principles governing the identity and distinctness of fictional characters due to the existence of fictions which leave it indeterminate whether certain characters are identical and the existence of fictions which say inconsistent things about the identities of their characters. Everett's critique has deservedly drawn much attention and (...) a number of defensive moves have been made by, or on the behalf of, fictional realists. My goal in this paper is to move this debate on a further step. I have three goals: to clarify the importance of Everett's discussion of identity criteria within the context of fictional realism, to reassess Everett's objections to realism in light of the resultant literature, and to develop a novel strategy for responding to Everett's concerns. On the approach to be developed, the problems emerge due to an indeterminacy inherent in the concept of a fictional character itself. (shrink)

In this bold work of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard W. Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science.

Are there things we should value because they are, quite simply, good? Richard Kraut argues that there are not. Goodness, he holds, is not a reason-giving property - in fact, there may be no such thing. It is an illusory and insidious category of practical thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Freud and Leonardo in Egypt DANIEL ORRELLS Stories of selfhood were central to the nineteenth -century cultural and literary imagination.1 For numerous intellectuals of the nineteenth century, the Italian Renaissance had become a privileged site for thinking about the emergence of the category of the individualized self in the history of the West, in a grand narrative about the rupture from ecclesiastical authority to secular and scientific thinking. The (...) life-story of Leonardo Da Vinci, artist and scientist, was a crucial example for nineteenth-century historiography about the origins of modern individualist subjectivity.2 It is hardly surprising, then, that Freud turned to concentrate on Leonardo in his 1910 biography of the Renaissance man, to construct the psychoanalytic account of the history of the self. What is remarkable and fascinating, however, is that ancient Egypt should be so important in Freud’s biography: it reveals Freud’s investment in Egyptology for the development of the psychoanalytic narrative of selfhood. If the Italian Renaissance was figured as the rebirth of Graeco-Roman paganism in the history of European culture, as late nineteenth-century commentators such as Walter Pater—read and imbibed by Freud—had argued, then what did ancient Egypt have to do with Leonardo?3 This essay excavates Freud’s fascination with the place of Egypt in understanding the beginnings of the self in his 1910 biography of Leonardo, whose pre-Oedipal relationship with his mother was crucial for Freud’s portrait of the Renaissance man. The complicated place of ancient Egypt within arion 28.3 winter 2021 106 freud and leonardo in egypt the modern European cultural imagination—both the object of linguistic and racial anthropologies and the archive of the truth of the biblical narrative—profoundly informed Freud’s psychobiography of Leonardo. On the one hand, the possibility that Egypt was at the origins of the story of what it means to be human—before Oedipus, before Greece—that Egyptian archaeology might contain timeless, esoteric truths was crucial to Freud’s understanding of the subject at the dawn of desire. And yet, on the other, the early-twentieth-century investment in the scientificity of the new discipline of Egyptology provided Freud with a support mechanism for his own “scientific,” psychoanalytic investigations into Leonardo’s life-story. Indeed, Leonardo was such a fascinating figure for Freud—a figure for identification—precisely because, as the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo was both artist and scientist. Freud’s interest in the classical and sacred art of Leonardo as well as Leonardo’s scientific investigations reflected Freud’s own complex intellectual identity, informed by his classical humanistic education and his medical training. As Richard Armstrong has put it so well, the Leonardo essay can be “read as a key for understanding Freud’s personalized genealogy of empirical science.”4 The complexity of the position of Egyptology at the turn of the century, then, will be crucial to any understanding of Freud’s own precarious epistemological authority as it was explored in relation to Leonardo.5 We will begin by examining the importance of Egyptian archaeology for Freud’s understanding of Leonardo’s early relationship with his mother, which in turn provided Freud with a method for interpreting Leonardo’s paintings. Freud will invoke the heroics of modern Egyptologists, such as Jean-François Champollion, who in the 1820s had successfully deciphered hieroglyphic writing, in order to characterize the psychoanalyst as the decipherer of the hidden meaning of Leonardo’s art. And yet, as we shall see, the overdetermined position of Egypt in the European public imagination Daniel Orrells 107 since the Enlightenment would also encourage Freud to turn back to the Egyptology before Champollion’s decipherment. Freud’s Egyptological excavations would also allow him to intervene in early twentieth-century debates in the “racial” sciences which were developing increasingly hardening views about the “Aryan” and the “Semitic” “races.” If Leonardo’s biography was such an important narrative for the story of the origins of the western self, then it was not only Leonardo ’s mix of artist and scientist which was important for Freud. By linking Leonardo back to Egyptian origins, Freud was able to make a point about the “Aryan” / “Semitic... (shrink)

In Mimesis as Make-Believe, Kendall Walton gave a pioneering account of the nature of fictionality, which holds that what it is for p to be fictional is for there to exist a prescription to imagine that p. But Walton has recently distanced himself from his original analysis and now holds that prescriptions to imagine are merely necessary conditions on fictionality. Many of the alleged counterexamples that have prompted Walton's retreat are drawn from the field of photography, and it is upon (...) these cases that I focus. I argue that once Walton's analysis is properly articulated, we can accommodate the apparent counterexamples by paying careful attention both to the general features of the photographic medium and the specific features of the photographs in question. (shrink)

Counterpart theory has many benefits, but few are happy to accept the metaphysical setting in which this account of de re modality was developed by its architect, David Lewis. I argue here that counterpart theory can be made acceptable by the lights of those who repudiate the existence of merely possible objects. To the "ersatz" counterpart theorist I offer two stories: one about the relate of the counterpart relation and one about the relation itself. With these in place, I then (...) defend ersatz counterpart theory from a number of objections that can be found in the literature. (shrink)

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker (...) and observer. (shrink)

The evolution of nonconceptive sexuality in bonobos and chimpanzees is discussed from a functional perspective. Bonobos and chimpanzees have three functions of sexual activity in common (paternity confusion, practice sex, and exchange for favors), but only bonobos use sex purely for communication about social relationships. Bonobo hypersexuality appears closely linked to the evolution of female-female alliances. I suggest that these alliances were made possible by relaxed feeding competition, that they were favored through their effect on reducing sexual coercion, and that (...) they are ultimately responsible for the relaxed social conditions that allowed the evolution of “communication sex.”. (shrink)

There is as yet no general agreement about exactly when Locke's Second Treatise of Government was written. Primarily as a result of Peter Laslett's arguments, the old assumption that it was written after the Revolution of 1688 has been abandoned, and it is almost universally agreed that both of the Two Treatises were written (apart from a small number of additions made in 1689) in the period between Locke's return to England from France at the end of April 1679 and (...) his departure for Holland in August 1683. An earliest possible date for the First Treatise can be established without difficulty. It cannot have been started before Filmer's Patriarcha was published in the winter of 1679-80, and probably not before Locke bought his own copy on 22 January 1680. Theories about the composition of the Second Treatise may therefore be divided into two classes: those which suppose, with Laslett, that it was begun in 1679, before Patriarcha was published, and therefore before Locke could have formed any intention of writing the First Treatise; and those which hold that it was not started until Locke had written at least the main part of the First. The second is of course the traditional view, and one that was taken for granted before Laslett's work; its most notable defender has been Richard Ashcraft, who has accepted Laslett's demolition of the 1689 dating, but has diverged from him in ascribing the Second Treatise to the period after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681. Ashcraft's criticisms of Laslett have been accepted by several recent writers, notably David Wootton, Mark Goldie and John Marshall, but they themselves have not agreed with each other or with Ashcraft in their positive claims. The whole question is therefore worth examining again. (shrink)

While information technologies present organizations with opportunities to become more competitive, unsettled social norms and lagging legislation guiding the use of these technologies present organizations and individuals with ethical dilemmas. This paper presents two studies investigating the relationship between intellectual property and privacy attitudes, Machiavellianism and Ethical Ideology, and working in R&D and computer literacy in the form of programming experience. In Study 1, Machiavellians believed it was more acceptable to ignore the intellectual property and privacy rights of others. Programmers (...) and R&D workers considered violating intellectual property rights more acceptable. Programmers did not consider violating privacy rights more acceptable, but R&D workers did. Finally, there was an interaction between Machiavellianism, programming and R&D. Machiavellians who also had programming experience or worked in R&D found violations of intellectual property much more acceptable. The effect of Machiavellianism on attitudes toward violations of privacy was enhanced by working in R&D, but not by programming experience. In Study 2, idealists believed it was less acceptable to ignore the intellectual property and privacy rights of others. Relativists found it more acceptable to violate intellectual property rights, though they did not consider it more acceptable to violate privacy rights. Those with programming experience were more accepting of intellectual property rights violations, but not of privacy violations. Finally, programming experience moderated the relationship between idealism, relativism and attitudes toward these unethical information practices. Implications for diminishing unethical behavior among Machiavellians, Relativists, programmers and those in R&D are discussed. (shrink)

This book concludes by considering whether growing counter calls to reduce our consumption of meat/dairy products in the face of climate change threats are in ...

Some theorists hold that there is no serious, significant issue concerning cosmopolitanism. They hold that cosmopolitanism is either the anodyne doctrine that we have some duties to distant strangers merely on the ground of shared humanity or the absurd doctrine that we have no special moral duties based on special-ties such as those of friendship, family, and national community. This essay argues against this deflationary position by defending (1) a very extreme cosmopolitan doctrine that denies special-tie moral duties altogether and (...) (2) a slightly milder but still extreme form of cosmopolitanism that allows that there might be special-tie moral duties to intimate associates such as friends and family members but denies that broader social group associations such as those of subjection to a national state or national or ethnic community memberships ever constitute special ties that ground special moral duties. The defense proceeds by rebutting bad arguments leveled against extreme cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)