Drawing on a six-year national study, _Community Organizing for Stronger Schools_ offers a richly textured analysis of community organizing for school reform. The authors examine the role of organizing in building social and political capital and improving educational outcomes for students in some of the nation’s most challenged school districts. In cities across America, community organizations are taking up the cause of public school reform. Their efforts are radically transforming the role of young people, parents, and community members in public (...) education. As the results of their campaigns become more visible, community groups are igniting interest and gaining support among education reform advocates, policy makers, and private foundations. The authors delineate the strategic choices and organizational characteristics that foster successful initiatives and consider how community organizing can support increased civic engagement and sustained educational reform. Finally, they discuss the challenges facing this burgeoning field in a new era of American politics. (shrink)

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)

I argue for the view that envy and jealousy are distinct emotions, whose crucial difference is that envy involves a perception of lack while jealousy involves a perception of loss. I start by noting the common practice of using ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’ almost interchangeably, and I contrast it with the empirical evidence that shows that envy and jealousy are distinct, albeit similar and often co-occurring, emotions. I then argue in favor of a specific way of understanding their distinction: the view (...) that envy is a response to a perceived lack of a valuable object, while jealousy is a response to a perceived loss of a valuable object. I compare such a view with the most compelling alternative theories, and show that it accounts better for paradigmatic cases. I conclude by showing how the lack vs. loss model can handle complications: ambiguous cases, that is, when it is epistemically unclear whether one experiences lack or loss; hybrid cases, that is, when one seems to experience both lack and loss; and borderline cases, that is, when it is metaphysically unclear whether one experiences lack or loss. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. I address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inherent difficulty of recognising violence that happens in an ‘essentially benevolent’ setting such as the (...) medical one, but also, and mainly, due to the pervasive sexual reification of women under patriarchy and the pervasive shame to which women are subjected. My argument is that the practice of vaginal examinations is indeed experienced – bodily apprehended – as violent by many women, but that full epistemic recognition of this violence is frequently obstructed because the experience perfectly coincides with the normal phenomenological situation of women within patriarchy and thus cannot really be framed as violent. A phenomenological analysis presenting the embodied experience of women under patriarchy as always already essentially tied to sexual availability and commodification, and to shame, will explain this epistemological impairment. A phenomenological take on Judith Butler’s distinction between ‘recognition’ and ‘apprehension’ informs my analysis: I deploy it to provide a richer, more nuanced response to the question of why vaginal examinations are not fully recognised and expressed as violent – even when they are, frequently, apprehended as such. Furthermore, Butler’s ideas about the epistemic ‘framings’ through which we make sense of different kinds of lives (grievable versus ungrievable) will help me to explain how the patriarchal sexual reification of women in fact already frames sexual violence as not-violence – which ultimately also prevents labouring women (and obstetrics staff) from recognising vaginal examinations during labour as violence. (shrink)

Obstetric violence has been analyzed from various perspectives. Its psychological effects have been evaluated, and there have been several recent sociological and anthropological studies on the subject. But what I offer in this paper is a philosophical analysis of obstetric violence, particularly focused on how this violence is lived and experienced by women and why it is frequently described not only in terms of violence in general but specifically in terms of gender violence: as violence directed at women because they (...) are women. For this purpose, I find feminist phenomenology most useful as a way to explain and account for the feelings that many victims of this violence experience and report, including feelings of embodied oppression, of the diminishment of self, of physical and emotional infantilization. I believe that the insights to be found in feminist phenomenology are crucial for explaining how and why this phenomenon is different in kind from other types of medical violence, objectification, and reification. Iris Marion Young’s description of feminine existence under patriarchy, as conformed by a perpetual oppressive “I cannot,” is at the center of my analysis. I argue that laboring bodies are at least potentially perceived as antithetical to the myth of femininity, undermining the feminine mode of bodily comportment under patriarchy and thereby seriously threatening the hegemonic powers. Violence, then, appears to be necessary in order to domesticate these bodies, to make them “feminine” again. (shrink)

This essay contends that postcolonial migrants have a right to enter their former colonizing nations, and that these should accept them. Our novel argument challenges well-established justifications for restrictions in immigration-policies advanced in liberal nationalism, which links immigration controls to the nation’s self-determination and the legitimate preservation of national identity. To do so, we draw on postcolonial analyses of colonialism, in particular on Edward Said’s notion of “intertwined histories,” and we offer a more sophisticated account of national identity than that (...) of liberal nationalists. In our view, the national identity of former colonizing nations cannot be understood in isolation from their ex-colonies. This entails that liberal nationalists cannot justify the restriction on the entrance of members of the nation’s former colonies by resorting to an argument about the preservation of national identity: the former colonized constitute an inseparable element of that national identity, because they are already historically part of it. (shrink)

At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl’s classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl’s discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of (...) Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on human persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans, but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency: on the one hand, the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings and on the other hand the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Can we love and envy the same person at the same time? There is an overwhelming, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary, consensus that love and envy are deeply incompatible. In this paper, I challenge this consensus, and focus in particular on the normative thesis that true love should be void of envy proper. I first propose an indirect argument. Because love and envy thrive in the same psychological conditions, it is not unlikely to feel envy toward the beloved. If we want ideals (...) that do not go against our psychological propensities, then we should not aim for a love that is wholly void of envy. I then propose a direct argument, in defense of two positive ideals. I argue that a certain kind of envy—emulative envy—can be beneficial to the loving relationship; in turn, a certain kind of love—wise love— which accepts the presence of envy, can be beneficial to our lives. Thus, that love and envy are so linked in our psychology is not something that we should merely tolerate, but wholeheartedly embrace. (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)

The purpose of this study is to extend and replicate previously published results from a random probability sample of university faculty. The sample assessed reasons given for companion-animal guardianship and for belief in the beneficial health effects of owning pets. In this replication and extension design, these two non-random samples responded to the same questionnaire items as those addressed to university faculty. Results indicated that avoidance of loneliness was the most frequent reason for owning pets among both students and middle-aged (...) community members. This result is consistent with the view that animals provide social support and companionship to humans at various stages of the life cycle. Suggesting an emergent feature of the human-nonhuman animal bond, both groups selected, “the pet helps keep me active” as the second-most common reason. Older women reported a greater belief in the health-giving benefits of pet ownership than did younger persons or men. This belief may contribute to human benefits of pet ownership and requires further research. (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)

Abstract:AbstractWomen's Liberation was a radical, multiracial feminist movement that grew directly out of the New Left, civil rights, antiwar, and related freedom movements of the 1960s. Its insight that “the personal is political,” its intentionally decentralized structure, and its consciousness raising method allowed it to grow so fast and with such intensity that it swept up liberal feminist organizations in a wildfire of change. Though women's liberation was fundamental to the emergence of a mass feminist movement, the persistent stereotypes of (...) this feminist upsurge as white, middle-class, anti-motherhood, and anti-sex have obscured the creative radicalism of this early period and erased the presence of women of color and working class women. In a period of extreme racial polarization, feminist efforts to articulate the intersections of gender with race, class, and sexuality were often deeply flawed, but they began a conversation on which later generations could build. As scholars unearth the complex history of this dynamic and revolutionary moment they complicate narratives of the so-called “second wave.”. (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.

The origins of field guides and other plant identification manuals have been poorly understood until now because little attention has been paid to 18th century botanical identification guides. Identification manuals came to have the format we continue to use today when botanical instructors in post-Revolutionary France combined identification keys with the "natural method" and alphabetical indexes. Botanical works featuring multiple but linked techniques to enable plant identification became very popular in France by the first decade of the 19th century. British (...) botanists, however, continued to use Linnaeus's sexual system almost exclusively for another two decades. Their reluctance to use other methods or systems of classification Can be attributed to a culture suspicious of innovation, anti-French sentiment and the association of all things Linnaean with English national pride, fostered in particular by the President of the Linnean Society of London, Sir James Edward Smith. The British aversion to using multiple plant identification technologies in one text also helps explain why it took so long for English botanists to adopt the natural method, even after several Englishmen had tried to introduce it to their country. Historians of ornithology emphasize that the popularity of ornithological guides in the 19th and 20th centuries stems from their illustrations, illustrations made possible by printing technologies that improved illustration quality and reduced costs. Though illustrations are the most obvious features of late 19th century and 20th century guides, the organizational principles that make them functional as identification devices come from techniques developed in botanical works in the 18th century. (shrink)

Researchers have highlighted how gendered associations of femininity with emotional labor can complicate professional women’s attempts to exercise managerial authority. However, current understandings of how race and gender intersect in professional women’s emotional labor remain limited. We draw on 132 interviews from eight white women and 13 women of color who are novice principals. White women began the principalship wanting to establish themselves as emotionally supportive leaders who were open to others’ influence. They viewed emotional labor as existing in tension (...) with showing authority as a leader. Over time, however, most white women reported adopting more directive practices. By contrast, women of color reported beginning the principalship with a more directive, take-charge leadership style. They viewed emotional labor and authority as part of a blended project and did not talk about these two aspects of leadership as existing in tension. Over time, their self-reported leadership style changed little. We analyze our findings in light of recent theorizing about gender and intersectionality. (shrink)

Labour, for capitalist critique, is not just slavery analogised; it is slavery materialised and expanded. Across the Marxist terrain, class struggle is presupposed by the struggle not to be a slave: the struggle of ‘the worker’ combats a slavery simultaneously more complex, because it is more mediated, and implicitly more emancipatory, because it materialises what has been called ‘objective possibility’. In this article, I track symptoms of the sublation of slavery by labour in the telling of ‘new labour history’ and (...) counter with ‘objective impossibility’ as a more open and efficacious diagnostic for the slave’s political position. Though the sentences of United States labour history are alive with promises of solidarity, the field also remains an unstable landmine of antagonism, death, failure, limit. I argue that this labour history, despite its gestures towards the problem ‘race’, is grammatically caught in a web of desires that Sylvia Wynter names ‘the hegemony of the labour conceptual frame (i.e., the frame of the struggle against capitalism)’. The labour conceptual frame is hegemonic because the relation between race and class already presupposes a latent Marxist orientation to subjects, objects, consciousness, and history that renders perfect the slave’s objective impossibility and culminates, at the nexus of race and class, in an uncritical conversion of labour’s objective possibility into pure, unmediated possibility. This article tracks how the black worker remains stubbornly impossible throughout this theoretical convergence, bending the apparatus of labour history, the purchase of Marxist theory, and the salience of class-first politics through the excess of blackness to labour. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

We propose a model of reference that contrasts with standard linguistic approaches in that it focuses on the role of interaction in reference, arguing that referring expressions in conversations are not designed for interchangeable audiences but rather exploit the common ground between partners. Our model also differs from psycholinguistic approaches in that it uses conversational data, since critical aspects of natural conversations are absent from laboratory tasks used so far and thus are not captured by current models. Examples from conversations (...) are presented to demonstrate that speakers often try to manage the accessibility of a problematic referent to an addressee by presenting a context for it as well as a referring expression, even at the cost of syntactic orthodoxy. We also present examples demonstrating that partners negotiate as to what representation is good enough for present purposes and whether that has been achieved. While strategies may vary as to explicitness, we believe these negotiations underlie all formulations of referring expressions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of motherhood as potentially ambiguous and empowering, using the Beauvoirian concept of the erotic. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of the erotic can allow us to reevaluate “nonproductive,” repetitive, apparently immanent activities—such as going through pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising a child—as projects through which we disclose freedom, and, thus, as projects that possibly lead to transcendence.It is often argued that Beauvoir considered these experiences to be ways of embracing immanence and avoiding transcendence. (...) Yet even supposing Beauvoir’s argument was against not maternity per se, but the oppressive construction of the institution of motherhood under patriarchy, can maternal engagement be viewed as an existentialist, phenomenological project? I claim that Beauvoir’s own premises show that it must be so considered once motherhood is recognized as potentially joyful, ambiguously erotic, and creative. (shrink)

2020 was a year of global crisis. During this time, I experienced crisis on a very personal level. For me this coincided with the beginning of the pandemic, when my older brother developed a kind of dementia. In this text, I briefly explore a few philosophical issues relating both to the spread of COVID-19 and to my brother’s disease. Reflecting on themes such as anxiety, uncertainty, grief, privilege, vulnerability, social distancing, and misfit bodies—mainly through critical phenomenology—I attempt to give sense (...) to the experience of personal crisis in times of global crisis. I conclude by embracing “misfit bodies” in a sincere attempt to recognize the pervasiveness of sickness and absurdity—but also in hope for solidarity and empathy to persist. (shrink)

Pragmatic competence includes the capacity to express illocutionary force and successfully achieve perlocutionary effects, in order to guarantee fully functional communication exchanges. Alzheimer’s Disease is characterized by a constellation of limitations derived from progressive cognitive impairment, which is usually viewed as a global uniform phenomenon. In this paper it is argued that looking independently at the loss and recovery of pragmatic function related to illocutionary and perlocutionary abilities can be a productive way of understanding the progressive deterioration of communicative capacities (...) by patients or their improvement under targeted treatment. (shrink)