THE OBJECT OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO SHOW THAT SCEPTICISM IS NOT ALWAYS USED TO CHALLENGE BELIEFS: IT IS SOMETIMES USED TO "FOSTER" CERTAIN BELIEFS. GLANVILL’S SCEPTICISM REGARDING OUR KNOWLEDGE OF NATURAL CAUSES IS BASED ON THE WEAKNESS AND LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. BUT THIS ALLOWS HIM TO ARGUE FOR THE EQUAL POSSIBILITY OF BOTH NATURAL AND NON-NATURAL CAUSES, AND THUS OPENS THE DOOR TO BELIEF IN THE SUPERNATURAL. HUME, HOWEVER, WHOSE SCEPTICISM IS ALSO BASED ON THE LIMITATIONS OF THE (...) UNDERSTANDING, REJECTS ANY EXPLANATION WHICH IS OVER AND ABOVE OUR UNDERSTANDING, THAT IS, EXPLANATIONS IN TERMS OF NON-NATURAL CAUSES. (shrink)

Sept cavaliers quittèrent la Ville au crépuscule, face au soleil couchant, par la porte de l'ouest qui n'etait plus guardée. Tête haute, sans se cacher, au contraire de tous ceux qui avaient abandonné la Ville, car ils ne fuyaient pas, ils ne trahissaient rien, espéraient moins encore et se gardaient d'imaginer. Ainsi étaient-ils armés, le coeur et l'âme désencombrés scintillant froidement comme du cristal, pour le voyage qui les attendait. Sur l'ordre du margrave héréditaire, simplement, ils allaient, ils s'étaient mis (...) en mouvement et le plus jeune d'entre eux, qui n'avait pas seize ans, fredonnait une chanson…Seven cavalrymen left the City at dusk, facing the setting sun by the Eastern gate, which was no longer guarded. Head held high, not hiding themselves, contrary to those who had left the City, for they were not escaping, they were not betraying, were hoping even less, and guarded themselves from imagining. Thus they were armed, their unfettered heart and soul sparkling coldly like crystal, for the voyage which awaited them. On the order of the hereditary Margrave, they were simply going, they were setting out, and the youngest of them, who was not yet 16, was humming a song …. (shrink)

When reading Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia, we find ourselves in seventeenth century Renaissance Italy and the social life of Artemisia d'Orazio Gentileschi, a woman painter who was raped, tortured by the Inquisition and due to her fine and original paintings, was the first woman painter to become a member of the famous Accademia del Disegno. In sum, she struggled for her personal and artistic liberation long before anyone in Europe had heard about feminism. Moreover, Artemisia is a (...) timely reminder of how sometimes in the past for Europeans, and more specifically for Italians, Art in general and Painting in particular, was an integral part of a form of life not only for artists but for ordinary people as well. (shrink)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. By Jean‐Dominique Bauby, trans. by Jeremy Leggatt 139 pp. £9.99 cloth.

This short novel by the writer S´ndor M´rai, regarded by many as the finest Hungarian writer of our time, was published in 1942 but became known in the West only many years later and was finally translated into English in 2002. Its central subject is the importance and value of friendship between men and love between men and women, involving the three central characters, Henrik, Konrad and Krisztina. The men, who had been friends since their early youth, meet again 41 (...) years later. Although Krisztina, Henrik's wife and Konrad's lover, is long dead, she is fully present in the memory of both. Like Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Embers is remembrance of things past, but with a difference. M´rai's novel plays on the contrast between their past friendship and their present broken friendship, and the contrast between Henrik's love for his wife, and her love for Konrad. But whereas Proust's novel is a recapture of the past, M´rai's novel is a recapture of the past through the present. What is left are only embers of friendship and love. (shrink)

In his beautiful and haunting novel The Garden of the Finzi‐Continis, Giorgio Bassani, the well known Jewish Italian writer, records the calm, happy life of the Jewish community of Ferrara, in north Italy, in the 1920s and 1930s, the growth of Fascism and the response of the Jewish and non‐Jewish Italians to it. The main characters are the wealthy, aristocratic family of the Finzi‐Continis and their friends and their response to the changing political climate in their town. It is also (...) the unhappy love‐story of Giorgio and Micòl Finzi‐Continis. The novel ends with the deportation of all the family and the whole Jewish community to the concentration camps in Germany and their certain death. (shrink)

Erratum In the Review Historical Individualism by Sascha Talmor, which appeared in Vol. 7 No. 6, 1986, p. 661, line 2, Maurice Mauss should read Marcel Mauss. The editors and publishers apologise for this error.

In European nations, the aging of the workforce is a major issue which is increasingly addressed both in national and organizational policies in order to sustain older workers’ employability and to encourage longer working lives. Particularly older workers’ employability can be viewed an important issue as this has the potential to motivate them for their work and change their intention to retire. Based on lifespan development theories and Van der Heijden’s ‘employability enhancement model’, this paper develops and tests an age-moderated (...) mediation model (which refers to the processes that we want to test in this model), linking older workers’ (55 years old and over) perceptions of job support for learning (organizational factor) and perceptions of negative age stereotypes on productivity (job-related factor), on the one hand, and their intention to retire, on the other hand, via their participation in employability enhancing activities, being the mediator in our model. A total of 2,082 workers aged 55 years and above were included in the analyses. Results revealed that the two proposed relationships between the predictors and intention to retire were mediated by participation in employability enhancing activities, reflecting two mechanisms through which work context affects intention to retire (namely “a gain spiral and a loss spiral”). Multi-Group SEM analyses, distinguishing between two age groups (55-60 and 61-65 years old), revealed different paths for the two distinguished groups of older workers. Employability mediated the relationship between perceptions of job support for learning and intention to retire in both age groups, whereas it only mediated the relationship between perceptions of negative age stereotypes and intention to retire in the 55-60 group. From our empirical study, we may conclude that employability is an important factor in the light of older workers’ intention to retire. In order to motivate this category of workers to participate in employability enhancing activities and to work longer, negative age stereotypes need to be combated. In addition, creating job support for learning over the lifespan is also an important HR practice to be implemented in nowadays’ working life. (shrink)