Introduces the sociology of music to those who may not be familiar with it and provides a historical perspective on popular music.

Envy is almost universally condemned. But is its reputation warranted? Sara Protasi argues envy is multifaceted and sometimes even virtuous.

In What's the Use? Sara Ahmed continues the work she began in The Promise of Happiness and Willful Subjects by taking up a single word--in this case, use--and following it around. She shows how use became associated with life and strength in nineteenth century biological and social thought and considers how utilitarianism offered a set of educational techniques for shaping individuals by directing them toward useful ends. Ahmed also explores how spaces become restricted to some uses and users with (...) specific reference to universities. She notes, however, the potential for queer use: how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended. Ahmed posits queer use as way of reanimating the project of diversity work as the ordinary and painstaking work of opening up institutions to those who have historically been excluded from them. (shrink)

Advancements in novel neurotechnologies, such as brain computer interfaces and neuromodulatory devices such as deep brain stimulators, will have profound implications for society and human rights. While these technologies are improving the diagnosis and treatment of mental and neurological diseases, they can also alter individual agency and estrange those using neurotechnologies from their sense of self, challenging basic notions of what it means to be human. As an international coalition of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners, we examine these challenges and make (...) recommendations to mitigate negative consequences that could arise from the unregulated development or application of novel neurotechnologies. We explore potential ethical challenges in four key areas: identity and agency, privacy, bias, and enhancement. To address them, we propose democratic and inclusive summits to establish globally-coordinated ethical and societal guidelines for neurotechnology development and application, new measures, including “Neurorights,” for data privacy, security, and consent to empower neurotechnology users’ control over their data, new methods of identifying and preventing bias, and the adoption of public guidelines for safe and equitable distribution of neurotechnological devices. (shrink)

This paper brings two fresh perspectives on Lewis’s theory of time travel. First: many key aspects and theoretical desiderata of Lewis’s theory can be captured in a framework that does not commit to eternalism about time. Second: implementing aspects of Lewisian time travel in a non-eternalist framework provides theoretical resources for a better treatment of time travel to the future. While time travel to the past has been extensively analyzed, time travel to the future has been comparatively underexplored. I make (...) progress on this topic. Along the way, I discuss Lewis’s lesser-known time travel oeuvre, especially his volume of correspondence and lectures on the topic collected in Beebee and Fisher (2020) and Janssen-Lauret & MacBride (forthcoming). Lewis’s body of unpublished work on time travel yields fruitful insights into his broader thinking on the subject. (shrink)

Prevention of age-related disorders is increasingly in focus of health policies, and it is hoped that early intervention on processes of deterioration can promote healthier and longer lives. New opportunities to slow down the aging process are emerging with new fields such as personalized nutrition. Data-intensive research has the potential to improve the precision of existing risk factors, e.g., to replace coarse-grained markers such as blood cholesterol with more detailed multivariate biomarkers. In this paper, we follow an attempt to develop (...) a new aging biomarker. The vision among the project consortium, comprising both research and industrial partners, is that the new biomarker will be predictive of a range of age-related conditions, which may be preventable through personalized nutrition. We combine philosophical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the possibilities and challenges of managing aging through bodily signs that are not straightforwardly linked to symptomatic disease. We document how the improvement of measurement brings about new conceptual challenges of demarcating healthy and unhealthy states. Moreover, we highlight that the reframing of aging as risk has social and ethical implications, as it is generative of normative notions of what constitutes successful aging and good citizenship. (shrink)

Obstetric violence – psychological and physical violence by medical staff towards women giving birth – has been described as structural violence, specifically as gender violence. Many women are affected by obstetric violence, with awful consequences. The phenomenon has so far been mainly investigated by the health and social sciences, yet fundamental theoretical and conceptual questions have gone unnoticed. Until now, the phenomenon of obstetric violence has been understood as one impeding autonomy and individual agency and control over the body. In (...) this article I will argue that the phenomenon of obstetric violence occurs in a specific state of embodied vulnerability and that might be destructive for subjectivity since it fails to recognize that state and instead disallows support and demolishes relationships and interdependence. This might introduce a conceptual shift and the phenomenon might be reconceptualized as a moment where vulnerability is misrecognized and ambiguity, relations and support are banned. In this case violence is recognized as cutting the original links to our bodies and the world that constitute our phenomenological condition, instead of as hurting the autonomous subject. Obstetric violence, thus, calls to be reflected upon through de Beauvoir’s ideas on ambiguity, the embodied and situated subject and the subject as essentially construed in relations. I believe that de Beauvoir’s conception of the authentic embodied subject as necessarily ambiguous – immanent and transcendent at the same time and ineludibly linked to the world and its others – will be extremely useful for construing this new understanding of how obstetric violence happens and of what precisely constitutes its damage. (shrink)

Today the phenomenological concept of the lived body figures centrally in several philosophical and special scientific debates. In these wide and widening fields, the concept is used with multiple different meanings. In order to clarify and delineate the debates, this paper provides an explication of the phenomenological-transcendental methods. It argues that these methods help us remove the most fundamental ambiguities of the concept of embodiment by distinguishing between the main constituents of the lived body and by illuminating their mutual relations.

Writers on collective action are in broad agreement that in order for a group of agents to form a collective intention, the members of that group must have beliefs about the beliefs of the other members. But in spite of the fact that this so-called "interactive knowledge" is central to virtually every account of collective intention, writers on this subject have not offered a detailed account of the nature of interactive knowledge. In this paper, we argue that such an account (...) is necessary for any adequate analysis of collective intention. Furthermore, we argue that an application of Robert Aumann's theory of interactive knowledge may be used to address several puzzling features of collective intention. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

There are several lessons that can already be drawn from the current research programs on strong AI and building conscious machines, even if they arguably have not produced fruits yet. The first one is that functionalist approaches to consciousness do not account for the key importance of subjective experience and can be easily confounded by the way in which algorithms work and succeed. Authenticity and emergence are key concepts that can be useful in discerning valid approaches versus invalid ones and (...) can clarify instances where algorithms are considered conscious, such as Sophia or LaMDA. Subjectivity and embeddedness become key notions that should also lead us to re-examine the ethics of decision delegation. In addition, the focus on subjective experience shifts what is relevant in our understanding of ourselves as human beings and as an image of God, namely, in de-emphasizing intellectuality in favor of experience and contemplation over action. (shrink)

Patient-derived xenografts are currently promoted as new translational models in precision oncology. PDXs are immunodeficient mice with human tumors that are used as surrogate models to represent specific types of cancer. By accounting for the genetic heterogeneity of cancer tumors, PDXs are hoped to provide more clinically relevant results in preclinical research. Further, in the function of so-called “mouse avatars”, PDXs are hoped to allow for patient-specific drug testing in real-time. This paper examines the circulation of knowledge and bodily material (...) across the species boundary of human and personalized mouse model, historically as well as in contemporary practices. PDXs raise interesting questions about the relation between animal model and human patient, and about the capacity of hybrid or interspecies models to close existing translational gaps. We highlight that the translational potential of PDXs not only depends on representational matching of model and target, but also on temporal alignment between model development and practical uses. Aside from the importance of ensuring temporal stability of human tumors in a murine body, the mouse avatar concept rests on the possibility of aligning the temporal horizons of the clinic and the lab. We examine strategies to address temporal challenges, including cryopreservation and biobanking, as well as attempts to speed up translation through modification and use of faster developing organisms. We discuss how featured model virtues change with precision oncology, and contend that temporality is a model feature that deserves more philosophical attention. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 63, Issue 3, pp 293 - 350 It is widely agreed that there is a gap between the personal and the social ethics of the Stoics due to the difficulty of harmonizing personal and social _oikeiōsis_. By reconstructing Epictetus’ theory of _oikeiōsis_, this paper aims to show that, in his ethics, there is no such gap, and this for two reasons: first, his account of social _oikeiōsis_ is not meant to ground his social ethics; second, his theory (...) of personal _oikeiōsis_ is a philosophical construct designed to provide a naturalistic justification to the utopian social project of the cosmopolis rather than to ground his personal ethics. (shrink)

Despite the enormous progress made in the advancement of health technologies over the last century, infectious diseases continue to cause significant morbidity and mortality in developing countries. Neglected diseases are a subset of infectious diseases that lack treatments that are effective, simple to use, or affordable. Neglected diseases primarily affect populations in poor countries that do not constitute a lucrative market sector, thus failing to provide incentives for the pharmaceutical industry to conduct R&D for these diseases. Of the treatments that (...) do exist for neglected diseases, most are completely out-dated, with poor side-effect profiles, cumbersome logistics of administration, and inadequate efficacy. Historically, the impetus for a majority of neglected disease research was driven by early 20th-century colonialism, and in the post-colonial era, these diseases have been virtually ignored. Of the 1556 New Chemical Entities brought to market during the 30-year period from 1975 to 2004, only 20 — less than 0.02% — were for neglected diseases. (shrink)

There is an increased controversy surrounding Westerners' use of ayahuasca. One issue of importance is psychological resiliency of users and lack of screening by ayahuasca tourism groups in the Amazon. Given the powerful effects of ayahuasca coupled with lack of cultural support, Western users are at increased risk for psychological distress. Many Westerners who experience psychological distress following ayahuasca ceremonies report concurrently profound spiritual experiences. Because of this, it may be helpful to consider these episodes "spiritual emergencies," or crises resulting (...) from intense and transformative spiritual experiences. Although the author warns readers to avoid romantic comparisons of Western ayahuasca users to shamans, ethnographic data on indigenous shamanic initiates along with theory on liminality may be of some use to understand difficult experiences that accompany ayahuasca use. Given that psychotherapy is culturally sanctioned, therapists trained in treating spiritual crises can help Western ayahuasca users make meaning of their distress. Three case studies are offered as examples of individuals working through various sorts of crises following ayahuasca ceremonies. (shrink)

These lines from the second book of the Aeneid introduce the night on which Troy falls. They have always been felt to be impressive: rich in allusion, noteworthy for the monosyllabic ending of the first line, and memorable for the majestic zeugma of the last two lines. Line 250 opens by incorporating a half line from Ennius: vertitur interea caelum cum ingentibus signis and closes with a near-translation of the substance of a half-line from Homer.

Romance novels are primarily aimed at, written about, and written for women. They have been accused of being fantasies which feature sexually objectified heroines who are passive recipients of overwhelming masculine sexual energy. After shoring up these critiques of romance novels with A.W. Eaton’s account of how art can objectify its subjects, we examine a challenge to romance novels: does the sexual content in romance novels objectify its heroines? There is strong reason to think so. However, we argue that careful (...) attention to the ways art can objectify its subject reveals that romance novels are structured to make it impossible for their heroines to be objectified. In many cases, individual signs of objectification are raised as possible outcomes and dismissed as part of the plot of a romance novel. Satisfying sex in a romance novel does not appear until it is impossible for the romantic heroine to be objectified. Understood in this way, romance novels serve as a model for one way that objectification could be avoided. The fantasy of a romance novel is not objectifying sex. It is sex free of objectification. (shrink)

Background:Smart Aging is a serious game (SG) platform that generates a 3D virtual reality environment in which users perform a set of screening tasks designed to allow evaluation of global cognition. Each task replicates activities of daily living performed in a familiar environment. The main goal of the present study was to ascertain whether Smart Aging could differentiate between different types and levels of cognitive impairment in patients with neurodegenerative disease.Methods:Ninety-one subjects (mean age = 70.29 ± 7.70 years)—healthy older adults (...) (HCs,n= 23), patients with single-domain amnesic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI,n= 23), patients with single-domain executive Parkinson's disease MCI (PD-MCI,n= 20), and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (mild AD,n= 25)—were enrolled in the study. All participants underwent cognitive evaluations performed using both traditional neuropsychological assessment tools, including the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Montreal Overall Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and the Smart Aging platform. We analyzed global scores on Smart Aging indices (i.e., accuracy, time, distance) as well as the Smart Aging total score, looking for differences between the four groups.Results:The findings revealed significant between-group differences in all the Smart Aging indices: accuracy (p< 0.001), time (p< 0.001), distance (p< 0.001), and total Smart Aging score (p< 0.001). The HCs outperformed the mild AD, aMCI, and PD-MCI patients in terms of accuracy, time, distance, and Smart Aging total score. In addition, the mild AD group was outperformed both by the HCs and by the aMCI and PD-MCI patients on accuracy and distance. No significant differences were found between aMCI and PD-MCI patients. Finally, the Smart Aging scores significantly correlated with the results of the neuropsychological assessments used.Conclusion:These findings, although preliminary due to the small sample size, suggest the validity of Smart Aging as a screening tool for the detection of cognitive impairment in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. (shrink)

This study of the history and contents of a hitherto unedited work on geometry by Vincenzo Viviani seeks to present a picture of the scientific environment in Italy in the second half of the 17th century, with particular emphasis on Tuscany and the impact the condemnation of Galileo had on ongoing scholarship. Information derived from unedited or less well-known material serves to illuminate a range of prominent and marginal figures who adopted different strategies for the dissemination of Galileo’s thought and (...) the application of its principles. A selection of texts, edited here for the first time, is presented in two appendices, while in a third decidedly unusual methods are used to elucidate the mathematical aspects. (shrink)

The concept of solidarity is of central importance to the political sense of collective action. But it is a curious fact that solidarity is virtually unmentioned across the large and growing literature in philosophical collective action theory. Instead, we see discussions of collective action overwhelmingly focus on epistemic conditions and group-level correlates of individual action explanations such as collective intentions, collective beliefs, and so on. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the relationship between solidarity and collective action theory. (...) I will try to answer two questions: (1) What is it about the structure of accounts of collective action that seems to preclude discussions of solidarity and related concepts; and (2) How can solidarity be made to play a useful role in those accounts? (shrink)

Extensive research demonstrated that firms may pursue several advantages in hiring individuals with the set of emotional, social, and cognitive (ESC) competencies that are most critical for business success. Therefore, the role of education for competency development is becoming paramount. Prior studies have questioned the traditional methods, grounded in the lecture format, as a way to effectively develop ESC competencies. Alternatively, they propose experiential learning techniques that involve participants in dedicated courses or activities. Despite the insights provided by these studies, (...) they do not take into account a comprehensive set of learning methods and their combined effect on the individual's competency portfolio within educational programs that aim to transfer primarily professional skills. Our study aims to fill these gaps by investigating the impact of the interplay between different learning methods on ESC competencies through a sample of students enrolled in the first year of a master's degree program. After providing a classification of three learning methods [traditional learning (TL), individual experiential learning (IEL), and social experiential learning (SEL)], the study delves into their combined influence on ESC competencies, adopting the Artificial Neural Network. Contrary to prior studies, our results provide counterintuitive evidence, suggesting that TL needs to be implemented together, on the one hand, with IEL to achieve a significant effect on emotional competencies and, on the other hand, with SEL to have an impact on social competencies. Moreover, IEL plays a prominent role in stimulating cognitive competencies. Our research contributes to educational literature by providing new insights on the effective combination of learning methods that can be adopted into programs that transfer technical knowledge and skills to promote behavioral competencies. (shrink)

Se analizan las políticas medio ambientales e indígenas durante el período 1990- 2010 de gobiernos de la Concertación, los tratados internacionales sobre el medio ambiente que inciden en el uso de recursos naturales en territorios huilliche. Se concluye que la política pública medioambiental, por su naturaleza reactiva, en el contexto de los mercados globales, se ha visto sobrepasada por la hegemonía del poder de las transnacionales que invierten en los commodities forestal, minero, agropecuario, amparadas por una legislación ambiental débil y (...) un discurso político obsecuente. (shrink)

The present paper illustrates an autobiographical writing experience carried out in a therapeutic day care center involving nine preadolescents and adolescents with moderate to severe mental distress. According to the literature, autobiographical writing is an useful tool to improve educational work with teenagers, because it can accommodate the need to express themselves that characterizes the adolescence and can prevent or reduce feelings of distress. Autobiographical practice is particularly suitable to work with teenagers because it is focused on the question “Who (...) am I?”, which is typical of adolescence. This question was the central theme of the autobiographical writing workshop. During the workshop, was proposed an introspective journey in search of one’s identity between past (who was I?), present (who am I?) and a possible future (who do I want to become?). This article will describe the themes and various stimuli that were proposed during the meetings and will present and discuss the results achieved. (shrink)

This book offers both theoretical overviews and practical approaches for educators, academics, education students and parents who are interested in transforming schools. It encourages reinvigorating approaches to learning and teaching that can easily be integrated into both public and private K-12 school classrooms, with many ideas also applicable to higher education. It supports an educational system based on the beliefs that heart and spirit are intertwined with mind and intellect, and that inner peace, wisdom, compassion, and conscience can be developed (...) together with academic content and skills. (shrink)

By 2014, each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia will have a new health insurance exchange, or marketplace, established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. These exchanges are the centerpiece of the reform law: they will be the main portals where people who do not have health insurance coverage through their jobs and small businesses will go, either in person or online, to find a health plan and to learn about and apply for federal subsidies. (...) The most immediate challenge facing all fifty‐one exchanges is fulfilling their most basic role: ensuring that all who are eligible to enroll in qualified health plans and to receive federal subsidies in fact enroll. (shrink)

In the framework of the De Regula Aliza, Cardano paid much attention to the so-called splittings for the family of equations $$x^3 = a_1x + a_0$$ x3=a1x+a0 ; my previous article deals at length with them and, especially, with their role in the Ars Magna in relation to the solution methods for cubic equations. Significantly, the method of the splittings in the De Regula Aliza helps to account for how Cardano dealt with equations, which cannot be inferred from his other (...) algebraic treatises. In the present paper, this topic is further developed, the focus now being directed to the origins of the splittings. First, we investigate Cardano’s research in the Ars Magna Arithmeticae on the shapes for irrational solutions of cubic equations with rational coefficients and on the general shapes for the solutions of any cubic equation. It turns out that these inquiries pre-exist Cardano’s research on substitutions and cubic formulae, which will later be the privileged methods for dealing with cubic equations; at an earlier time, Cardano had hoped to gather information on the general case by exploiting analogies with the particular case of irrational solutions. Accordingly, the Ars Magna Arithmeticae is revealed to be truly a treatise on the shapes of solutions of cubic equations. Afterwards, we consider the temporary patch given by Cardano in the Ars Magna to overcome the problem entailed by the casus irreducibilis as it emerges once the complete picture of the solution methods for all families of cubic equations has been outlined. When Cardano had to face the difficulty that appears if one deals with cubic equations using the brand-new methods of substitutions and cubic formulae, he reverted back to the well-known inquiries on the shape of solutions. In this way, the relation between the splittings and the older inquiries on the shape of solutions comes to light; furthermore, this enables the splittings to be dated 1542 or later. The last section of the present paper then expounds the passages from the Aliza that allow us to trace back the origins of the substitution $$x = y + z$$ x=y+z, which is fundamental not only to the method of the splittings but also to the discovery of the cubic formulae. In this way, an insight into Cardano’s way of dealing with equations using quadratic irrational numbers and other selected kinds of binomials and trinomials will be provided; moreover, this will display the role of the analysis of the shapes of solutions in the framework of Cardano’s algebraic works. (shrink)

For Mina Loy, human appetites are often comical, even uproarious. This essay considers Loy’s use of risibility–the desire to laugh–as it accompanies and extends her examinations of longings such as sexuality and hunger. Modernist philosophers like Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud were preoccupied with laughter; Loy responds to their approaches in her writing, as do many of her contemporaries, particularly Wyndham Lewis. Here it is argued that in her poetry and her thirties novel, Insel, Loy depicts a desiring body neither whole (...) nor inviolate—a body determined by otherness and endlessness. Loy’s articulation of desire, in other words, is both in league with, and more extreme than that of French philosopher Georges Bataille, who was himself a product of a large-scale reconsiderationof human longing at the outset of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article seeks to reimagine the relationship between sustainability and financial performance in sustainable investing. Employing a utopian lens, I show how sustainability is constantly negotiated in a process of imagining and actualizing sustainable investing. For this purpose, I explore a fin-tech start-up’s endeavors to democratize sustainable investing through digitalization. Empirically, this article contributes a detailed account of the organizational process of––and the complexities involved in––establishing a sustainable investment organization, to this end focusing on the relationship between sustainability and financial (...) performance. The article further provides a novel theoretical perspective (utopianism) on sustainable investing, one offering a processual approach that uses both external and internal factors in its understanding of the practice. I conclude that a utopian mindset of possibility paves the way for an experimentational attitude and future-oriented thinking. Such a mindset could generate new approaches to the relationship between sustainability and financial performance, thus shining a light on the new and innovative solutions needed to establish financial markets oriented to the common good. (shrink)

In questo saggio, si analizza come, a partire da una radicale e interessante messa in discussione del concetto di popolo, quale soggetto politico, dotato di una propria volontà e presupposto dal sistema democratico, il giurista austriaco Hans Kelsen elabori una teoria della democrazia rappresentativa e parlamentare quale bilanciamento tra eteronomia e libertà. Dopo aver fatto emergere alcune delle componenti teoriche più rilevanti della Demokratielehre kelseniana, si passerà ad esaminarne una serie di aspetti controversi che permettono di problematizzarla.

La autora presenta el concepto de “Línea de Dignidad” como el marco que focaliza las discusiones sobre sustentabilidad socioambiental entre la sociedad civil del Norte y del Sur, buscando conciliar los objetivos de la sustentabilidad ambiental con los objetivos distributivos de la equidad social y la democracia participativa. La autora traza la historia del concepto y sigue luego el trabajo conceptual del Programa Cono Sur, postulando finalmente la necesidad de la dimensión ética que exige construir sustentabilidad Norte-Sur.

Previous research suggests that adversity can have both adaptive and maladaptive effects, yet the emotional and working memory processes that contribute to more or less adaptive outcomes are unclear. The present study sought to investigate how updating emotional content differs in adolescents who have experienced past, recent, or no adversity. Participants who had experienced distant adversity, no adversity, or recent adversity only performed an emotion n-back task with emotional facial expressions. Results revealed that the distant adversity group exhibited significantly faster (...) reaction times than the no adversity and recent adversity only groups. In contrast, the recent adversity only group exhibited significantly slower RTs and more errors than the distant adversity and no adversity groups. These results suggest an emotion and executive control pathway by which both the benefits and negative effects of adversity may be conferred. Results also highlight the importance of time in assessing the impact of adversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hercules Cross-dressed, Hercules Undressed: Unmasking the Construction of the Propertian amator In Elegy 4.9Sara H. LindheimVain trifles as they seem, clothes have, as they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.—Virginia Woolf, OrlandoPropertius begins 4.9 with his version of the story of Hercules and Cacus that he adapts from Virgil’s recently published Aeneid. (...) 1 Once he has recovered his stolen cattle, slain the monstrous, thieving Cacus and founded the Forum Boarium, the Propertian Hercules feels an overwhelming thirst. He hears the laughter of women and follows the sound to a grove in which the worship of the Bona Dea is taking place. Arriving on the threshold of the sanctuary, he pleads for some water from the spring he hears inside the grove, citing his heroic deeds as credentials for admittance. When his request achieves no immediate results, however, he considers that perhaps the women hesitate to open their sanctuary to a strong hero. He then offers a second self-presentation, this time telling how he once dressed as a woman and served Omphale, queen of Lydia. When the high priestess denies him entrance, reminding him that men, by religious prescription, cannot look upon the rites, Hercules gains access to the grove violently, drinks the spring dry, and announces that the Ara Maxima which he establishes 2 will forever exclude women from worship.The poem purports to offer a myth of origins for the Ara Maxima. Indeed, in the opening elegy to his fourth and final poetic collection, the poet proclaims his desire to dispense with love and to concentrate [End Page 43] instead on aetiology. Subscribing to Callimachean poetics, he will now compose aetiological verse on Roman subjects. Yet a second voice threatens the unity of the poet’s declaration, suggesting a second and incompatible thematic focus. Even as Propertius proclaims his bold, new stance, Horos the astrologer interrupts, insisting on the poet’s inability to leave behind themes of erotic elegy. 3 The programmatic elegy never resolves the tensions between the two poles of the bipartite agenda, promising that warring interests will haunt the elegies in the fourth book.It comes as no surprise, therefore, that antithetical arguments surface in poem 4.9. I argue that the tension animating the poem emerges from its two competing discourses about gender identity. An exploration of the three stories about the hero in the poem—the opening account offered by the poet, as well as the two self-defining, yet contradictory, narratives that Hercules weaves, in which he presents himself first as a great masculine force and then as the cross-dressed servant of Omphale—suggests the ephemeral nature of “real” gender identity. Considering briefly a modern theoretical model of cross-dressing, I examine Propertius’ own manipulation of transvestism to categorize gender, on the one hand, as a fluid construction, a social performance. On the other hand—and here lies the poem’s tension—a second, antithetical argument also emerges from the poem, which insists on the possibility of assigning persons to a specific gender category based on firm, stable criteria. When the priestess reads Hercules as man, and when the hero ultimately differentiates himself from woman by establishing male-only worship at the Ara Maxima, gender becomes essential or biological. The question I want to pose is: why do these discourses stand side by side, and what kind of synthesis between them ultimately materializes? Finally, I suggest that this debate about gender reaches beyond poem 4.9. By constructing Hercules so that the hero comes to represent, on an exaggerated scale, the Propertian amator, who himself vacillates between “masculine” and “feminine” identities, Propertius invites the reader to see a similar tension in the poet’s first three books of elegies. Thus, towards the end of his poetic career, the poet issues a reconsideration [End Page 44] of the portrait of the lover/poet in light of the questions elegy 4.9 raises about gender identity.While some might consider that to seek out, within ancient texts, whether gender appears essential or constructed in nature reveals an... (shrink)

As he concludes poem 1.12, Propertius romantically asserts that Cynthia was prima and will be the finis. This article explores the supplemental readings that open up if we focus not on the temporal but on the geographical meaning of the word finis, a move invited by the poem itself and by the poems (1.8a, 1.8b, 1.11) with which it belongs interpretively, all containing several allusions to space. Drawing on both Lacanian and cartographic theory, I suggest that the poet's engagement with (...) questions of fines reveals Propertius' response to a growing awareness and concern with issues of physical space and empire in the Augustan period. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Playing with Time. Ovid and the FastiSara MackNewlands, Carole E. Playing with Time. Ovid and the Fasti. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii 1 254.I learned a great deal from Carole Newlands’ Playing with Time about a poem with which I have always had difficulty. Newlands takes the Fasti seriously as a poem. She sees it as an artistically shaped creation, not a mishmash of (...) religious and mythological lore, and she regards its constantly shifting perspectives as intended and effective. I think she is right.The introduction, “The Problem of Ovid’s Fasti,” looks briefly at past assessments of the poem before setting out Newlands’ own thesis: The Fasti is “an exciting, experimental game with genre that offers a profound meditation on the changes and tensions in Roman society in the latter years of Augustus’ reign and the early years of Tiberius’” and that expresses “disenchantment with a political system that could guarantee neither the peace nor the freedom in which the elegiac [End Page 149] poet could flourish” (18). The rest of the chapter is devoted chiefly to outlining the argument of the remaining chapters.Chapter 1, “Stellar Connections,” examines the star myths of the Fasti. “Far from providing attractive digressions from Roman ritual, the myths interact with the Roman material, occasionally confirming but more often challenging or undermining the points of view encoded there” (31). Whether they in fact “contribute substantially to the dynamic tension in the poem between Ovid’s former erotic preoccupations and his new national themes,” it is certainly true, as she claims, that Ovid’s introduction of the astronomical theme at F. 1.295ff. has more to do with poetics than it does with astronomy. As always Ovid writes with an eye on his predecessors.In chapter 2, “Narrator and Interlocutors,” Newlands argues that “Ovid invites us to follow his development as a student and teacher of ‘sacra’ who discovers in the Roman past not an inspirational repository of noble heroes, but a patchwork of license and repression, nobility and violence, that is contingent on a variety of competing interests” (52). The narrator becomes increasingly reliant on sub-narrators for information as he becomes less confident in his own ability as narrator and in the feasibility of his project: an elegiac poem on Roman themes.In chapter 3 Newlands argues the need to look at the description of the temple of Mars Ultor in the context of the whole of book 5 and with an eye to the bias of its narrator in order to assess its presence in a poem that initially claims to oppose aras to arma. “The star myths of Chiron (379–414) and Orion (493–544), offer divergent perspectives upon the key concepts of war, Roman history, and revenge that are enshrined in the temple” (89). Mars, who takes over the narrative, has his own perspective on things. Furthermore, Mars has taken over the role of the Scorpion in Ovid’s rewrite of the catasterism myth of Orion and Scorpio “in a substitution that... gives a hint that the concept of revenge, glorified in the war god’s new Augustan temple, cannot be wholly refined of brutal elements” (114). I found this a very interesting chapter, although I was not convinced by some of the details, such as the contrast between Achilles’ and Romulus’ pietas. The analogy with the dream vision in the Aeneid is a bit misleading because the proper parallel is not Aeneas in tears vs. Romulus dry-eyed, as the argument suggests, but rather Aeneas in tears vs. the twins’ parents in tears.Chapter 4, “Priapus Revisited,” examines book 6 as “a negative mirroring of the themes of Book 1” (125). One of its major topics is Ovid’s treatment of Vesta. Newlands examines the Priapus-Vesta episode in book 6 which is usually read as a failed and expendable doublet of Priapus-Lotis in book 1. I think she is right that each has a spot in the poem and that part of the fun of the Vesta episode is that Vesta doesn’t fit into a world where nymphs may get raped while they sleep off the... (shrink)

The role of the individual scientist as a socialization agent is increasingly emphasized in science policy. This article analyzes offshore wind scientists’ narratives about science–technology–society relations and their role in them. It particularly focuses on the nuanced and detailed reasons that scientists give for their level of engagement with society. The analysis is based on semistructured individual and focus group interviews with thirty-five scientists. It finds a diversity of narratives related to the questions of whether socialization of technology is needed (...) and which approaches to socialization scientists should pursue. The six narratives identified are upstream engagement, design against resistance, the outreaching scientist, the difficulty of outreach, the outsourcing scientist, and disembedded development of technology. Despite the importance attributed to scientists for the socialization of science and technology, most interviewed scientists did not embrace their role as socialization agent. Based on the scientists’ narratives, this article argues that we should rethink both who should be responsible for socialization and what should be the object of sciences’ engagement with society. (shrink)