In this essay, I qualify Jean-Luc Marion's anti-ontological interpretation of Anselm's argument. Marion claims that the argument is not ontological but in line with Dionysian apophatic theology. To substantiate his anti-ontological reading, Marion suggests that the main regulative idea of the Proslogion is bonum. The final regulative idea, however, is gaudium, since gaudium, not bonum, leads the argument to the beatific vision. If we reformulate the Proslogion focusing on gaudium, we find that Marion's analysis misses the evident ontological aspects of (...) the argument, such as the tradition of prayer and hermeneutics. Since Anselm promulgated the argument within the Benedictine tradition of Bec, the practice of prayer or meditation is the legitimate context of the argument. However, because of his emphasis on the structure of call and response over the ontological and hermeneutical aspects of revelation, his analysis neglects the importance of the hermeneutic relation within which the Proslogion is born. (shrink)

This paper examines the influence of CEO career horizon problems on corporate social responsibility. We assume that as CEOs are getting older, they tend to disengage in CSR due to their shorter career horizons. We further argue that high levels of industry-level discretion and blockholder ownership amplify the negative effects of CEO age on CSR. Using a panel sample of US-based firms over 2004–2009, we do not find the main effect of CEO age on CSR, but find support for the (...) moderating effects, such that CEO age is negatively associated with CSR when there are high levels of ILD and blockholder ownership. Therefore, results suggest that CEO career horizon problems matter for CSR when CEOs have sufficient discretion over the firm’s strategic decisions and outside blockholders put more pressure on CEOs to engage in financial earning management. (shrink)

Previous studies in Western contexts have examined the relationships between various board characteristics and CSR, yet the relationships need to be re-examined in non-Western contexts given differential theoretical premises across contexts. We specifically propose that the effects of board characteristics on CSR in Korea should be patterned distinctively from Western-based existing literature, focusing on three important board characteristics, such as a board’s independence, social ties, and diversity. Using a panel dataset from large Korean firms, we found that various relationships between (...) board characteristics and CSR were non-linear, whereas most of the previous research on Western contexts found that the same relationships were linear. Specifically, curvilinear relationships were found between CSR and board independence, CEO-outside director social ties, and educational diversity. Our findings suggest that there is no universal feature of CSR-supportive board characteristics due to the unique characteristics of various institutional contexts. (shrink)

This study examines how the corporate philanthropy decisions of group-affiliated firms in Korea are made. Based on the attention-based view, we argue that when corporate decision makers at group-affiliated firms focus their attention more on internal markets than external stakeholders because of the firm’s high reliance on intragroup transactions, the firm will decrease its level of corporate philanthropy. We further argue that the relationship will be stronger when governance mechanisms focus on the instrumental value of corporate philanthropy. Using a panel (...) sample of group-affiliated firms in Korea from 2011 to 2015, we find that as intragroup sales increase, the level of corporate philanthropy decreases, and such a negative relationship is stronger when outside director representation and foreign investor ownership are high. Our study suggests that internal dependence and corporate governance mechanisms jointly affect the level of corporate philanthropy at firms in a business group. Thus, this study contributes to the literature on corporate philanthropy, business group, and corporate governance. (shrink)

The extant literature has examined the effects of ownership structures on corporate social responsibility, yet it has overlooked the non-linear and interactive effects among major shareholder groups. In this study, we examine the non-linear effects of insider and institutional ownerships on CSR. We also examine whether it is necessary to have both incentive alignment and monitoring mechanisms or it is sufficient to have either mechanism to promote CSR. Using a sample of the U.S. Fortune 1000 firms, our results suggest that (...) insider and institutional ownerships have non-linear effects on CSR. We also find support for the complementary mechanisms view, in that the highest CSR rating is observed when both ownership levels are high. Therefore, firms need to maintain strong governance structures to realize synergistic effects in promoting CSR. Our findings provide a more in-depth understanding of the relationships between ownership structures and corporate social outcomes. (shrink)

The author of this paper aimed to understand the early Buddhism community in its entirety by examining the individual episodes in the "Mahavagga". There is a remarkable experience of the psychic power between the Buddha and the Brahmins. They are both aware of coming across of psychic forces that entered the way to the Buddhist Community. Using the brahmins mythology as a instrument for missionary work, the early Buddhism brings people close to Buddha's community. The Buddha visited Uruvela-Kassapa and took (...) lodging for the night where the sacred fire was kept, in spite of Kassapa's warning that the spot was inhabited by a fierce Naga. The Buddha, by his magical powers, overcame, first this N ganad then another, both of whom vomited fire and smoke. Kassapabeing pleased with this exhibition of iddhi-power, undertook to provide the Buddha with his daily food. The Buddha spent the whole rainy season there, performing, in all, three thousand five hundred miracles of various kinds, reading the thoughts of kassapa, splitting firewood for the ascetic sacrifices, heating stoves for them to use after bathing in the cold weather, etc. Still Kassapa persisted in the thought, "The great ascetic is of great magic power, but he is not anarahant like me." Finally the Buddha decided to startle him by declaring that he was not an arahant, neither did the way he followed lead to arahantship. Thereon kassapa owned defeat and reverently asked for ordination. The Buddha asked him to consult with his pupils, and they cut off their hair and threw it with their sacrificial utensils into the river and were all ordained. Nadi Kassapa and Gaya Kassapa were ordained with their pupils. At Gay sisa the Buddha preached to them the Fire Sermon, and they all attained arahantship for the early Buddhist Community. The episode of Uruvela Kassaps in the Mahavagga text ultimately idealizes the power of psychic and the start of the community. It is probable, even at the time when the episode were written, that as a matter of fact every one, in ordinary daily life, spoke imply the vernaculars in a much more simple and natural state of society. It is the Mahavagga authors, when addressing a cultured public at a date when the vernaculars had become the paramount literary language. Another point is that though brahmins take part in the religious and philosophical conversations of those early tims, and in the accounts of them are always referred to with respect, and threaten with the same courtesy that they always themselves extended also to others, yet they hold no predominant position. The majority of the ascetic, and the most influential individuals among them, are not brahmins. That is only a matter of course will be the obvious subjection. The Mahavagga texts I quotes, if not the work of bitter opponents, were at leastcomposed under India bramins influence, and are prejudiced against the brahmins. (shrink)

The author of this paper aimed to understand the early Buddhism community in its entirety by examining the individual episodes in the "Mahavagga". There is a remarkable experience of the psychic power between the Buddha and the Brahmins. They are both aware of coming across of psychic forces that entered the way to the Buddhist Community. Using the brahmins mythology as a instrument for missionary work, the early Buddhism brings people close to Buddha's community. The Buddha visited Uruvela-Kassapa and took (...) lodging for the night where the sacred fire was kept, in spite of Kassapa's warning that the spot was inhabited by a fierce Naga. The Buddha, by his magical powers, overcame, first this N ganad then another, both of whom vomited fire and smoke. Kassapabeing pleased with this exhibition of iddhi-power, undertook to provide the Buddha with his daily food. The Buddha spent the whole rainy season there, performing, in all, three thousand five hundred miracles of various kinds, reading the thoughts of kassapa, splitting firewood for the ascetic sacrifices, heating stoves for them to use after bathing in the cold weather, etc. Still Kassapa persisted in the thought, "The great ascetic is of great magic power, but he is not anarahant like me." Finally the Buddha decided to startle him by declaring that he was not an arahant, neither did the way he followed lead to arahantship. Thereon kassapa owned defeat and reverently asked for ordination. The Buddha asked him to consult with his pupils, and they cut off their hair and threw it with their sacrificial utensils into the river and were all ordained. Nadi Kassapa and Gaya Kassapa were ordained with their pupils. At Gay sisa the Buddha preached to them the Fire Sermon, and they all attained arahantship for the early Buddhist Community. The episode of Uruvela Kassaps in the Mahavagga text ultimately idealizes the power of psychic and the start of the community. It is probable, even at the time when the episode were written, that as a matter of fact every one, in ordinary daily life, spoke imply the vernaculars in a much more simple and natural state of society. It is the Mahavagga authors, when addressing a cultured public at a date when the vernaculars had become the paramount literary language. Another point is that though brahmins take part in the religious and philosophical conversations of those early tims, and in the accounts of them are always referred to with respect, and threaten with the same courtesythat they always themselves extended also to others, yet they hold no predominant position. The majority of the ascetic, and the most influential individuals among them, are not brahmins. That is only a matter of course will be the obvious subjection. The Mahavagga texts I quotes, if not the work of bitter opponents, were at least composed under India bramins influence, and are prejudiced against the brahmins. (shrink)

While the effect of top executives' social networks on their compensations has received substantial scholarly attention, little effort has been made to integrate segmented views to offer more complete understanding of this effect. In this paper, we propose an integrative two-stage model by taking both economic and socio-political views into account. We theorise that some characteristics of top executive's outside social ties are positively related to firm performance, and those relationships are conditioned by external and internal strategic contexts, such as (...) environmental uncertainty, strategic relevance, and tie strength. We also theorise that firm performance leads to executives' compensations, but this linkage is moderated by the socio-political dynamics among executives (within-group dynamics) as well as between executives and a board of directors (between-group dynamics) inside the firm. Based on our integrative framework, this paper provides the comprehensive understanding of how executives' compensations are determined and highlights the importance of executive's social ties and their implications. (shrink)

Relatively little research has examined the effects of ownership on the firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). In addition, most of it has been conducted in the Western context such as the U.S. and Europe. Using a sample of 118 large Korean firms, we hypothesize that different types of shareholders will have distinct motivations toward the firm’s CSR engagement. We break down ownership into different groups of shareholders: institutional, managerial, and foreign ownerships. Results indicate a significant, positive relationship between CSR ratings (...) and ownership by institutions and foreign investors. In contrast, shareholding by top managers is negatively associated with firm’s CSR rating while outside director ownership is not significant. We conclude that different owners have differential impacts on the firm’s CSR engagement. (shrink)

Previous studies have been split over how to view family owners’ CSR engagement, arguing that they either engage in or disengage from CSR based on different motives (i.e., preserving socio-emotional wealth vs. seeking rent expropriation). Focusing on family owners in business groups, this study integrates these divergent views. We hypothesize that family owners would pursue both motives simultaneously by optimizing the level of CSR of each affiliated firm depending on their ownership level. Furthermore, we argue that this tendency is moderated (...) by group-level contexts. Using a sample of Korean business groups, we found that family ownership is negatively associated with affiliated firms’ CSR. Also, this negative relationship is more pronounced when firms belong to business groups with more charitable corporate foundations and when business networks are greater in their scope and scale. This study contributes to the literature by offering a more complete understanding of how family owners make CSR decisions in business group contexts. (shrink)

Since its debut in 1964, Jeopardy! has been one of America's favorite and longest-running daytime quiz shows. It turns the question-answer format of traditional quiz shows on its head and requires contestants to pose correct questions to answers in selected categories. While mining information and facts from Alchemy to Zoology, Jeopardy!, is a uniquely intellectual, erudite, and challenging daytime television program. Far beyond entertaining its fans with nail-biting contests of knowledge, memory, and speed, it all but requires them to participate. (...) Few people watch Jeopardy! without pressing an invisible button and blurting out questions to their TV screen. Because of this personal and intellectual investment, most Jeopardy! fans are devout. Watching the show is valued as a daily ritual in which genuine intellectual skill and encyclopedic knowledge are not only respected and placed in the spotlight, but also rewarded with national prestige and prize winnings. Champion Ken Jennings has won over three million dollars and remained champion seventy-four times. For those who embrace Jeopardy! as an intellectual oasis in the arid desert of popular culture, it is the geeks who shall inherit the earth. Jeopardy!'s celebration of intellect and forward-thinking is well recognized throughout popular culture and among all age groups. Ken Jennings, Chuck Forrest, and other all-time champions are near celebrities, while the show itself regularly reaches out through special tournaments to different segments of American culture, such as actors and musicians, high-school and college students and senior citizens. Still, despite its widespread respect and, some might complain, smug self-respect, neither the show nor its fans take themselves too seriously. Jokes about host Alex Trebek's hair and famous parodies of Jeopardy! on Saturday Night Live are as familiar as Weird Al Yankovic's MTV-mainstay "I Lost on Jeopardy!" : Don't know what I was thinkin' of, I guess I just wasn't too bright. Well, I sure hope I do better Next weekend on The Price Is Right. (shrink)

The paper aims to show how Japanese theoretical physics groups emerged between the First and Second World Wars. First, it will be argued that by the early 1930s the Japanese physics community had been predominantly inclined towards experimental physics and that several academic, cultural, and social factors had worked for the maintenance of this status quo. Next, how the situation slowly changed during the early 1930s, and how the young theoretical physicists successfully established a bridgehead during the mid-1930s will (...) be analysed. Four different elements are suggested: the dazzling success of quantum mechanics and its spread in the West; the dominance of experimental physics and its effect on the university system; cultural/social influence; and the emergence of the research network. (shrink)

Moral judgments, we expect, ought not to depend on luck. A person should be blamed only for actions and outcomes that were under the person’s control. Yet often, moral judgments appear to be influenced by luck. A father who leaves his child by the bath, after telling his child to stay put and believing that he will stay put, is judged to be morally blameworthy if the child drowns (an unlucky outcome), but not if his child stays put and doesn’t (...) drown. Previous theories of moral luck suggest that this asymmetry reflects primarily the influence of unlucky outcomes on moral judgments. In the current study, we use behavioral methods and fMRI to test an alternative: these moral judgments largely reflect participants’ judgments of the agent’s beliefs. In “moral luck” scenarios, the unlucky agent also holds a false belief. Here, we show that moral luck depends more on false beliefs than bad outcomes. We also show that participants with false beliefs are judged as having less justified beliefs and are therefore judged as more morally blameworthy. The current study lends support to a rationalist account of moral luck: moral luck asymmetries are driven not by outcome bias primarily, but by mental state assessments we endorse as morally relevant, i.e. whether agents are justified in thinking that they won’t cause harm. (shrink)

A funny, touching look at the life of a social media influencer who starts to question the #goals life she has created for herself. Every day, Élie motivates her hundreds of thousands of followers to become the best versions of themselves by posting videos of exercise routines and high-protein breakfast recipes. Far from the shy teenager that she was, she is now in a very public relationship with singer Samuel Vanasse, and together they have become one of the most popular (...) influencer couples in the country. She has succeeded. She shines. And yet, Élie worries that her life is not as flawless as she makes it seem on YouTube and Instagram. Between her obsession with the "ideal weight," her growing attraction to another man, her family's disdain for her career as a content creator and a collaboration with another influencer who Élie can't stand, a thought haunts her. What if, by trying to become everything she wanted to be, she's lost herself along the way? Suck it In and Smile is an intimate exploration of our obsession with appearances and the hypocrisies that appear when you must craft the perfect online life. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative (...) conceptions of politics, grounded in the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

Recent research has provided compelling evidence that children experience the negative counterfactual emotion of regret, by manipulating the presence of a counterfactual action that would have led to participants receiving a better outcome. However, it remains unclear if children similarly experience regret’s positive counterpart, relief. The current study examined children’s negative and positive counterfactual emotions in a novel gain-or-loss context. Four- to 9-year-old children (N = 136) were presented with two opaque boxes concealing information that would lead to a gain (...) or loss of stickers, respectively. Half of the children chose between two keys that matched each box, whereas the other half were compelled to select one box because only one of the two keys matched. After seeing inside the alternative, non-chosen box, children were significantly more likely to report a change in emotion when they could have opened that box than when they could not have. The effects were similar for children who lost stickers and won stickers, and neither effect varied with age. These findings suggest that children may become capable of experiencing regret and relief around the same time, although their expression of these counterfactual emotions may vary with actual and counterfactual gains and losses. (shrink)

Youth work is deemed to require a distinctive commitment to ethical behaviour from the adults involved. This is expressed in the requirements for the initial education of workers, in the subject benchmarks and national expectations for youth workers. A significant influence in this debate is Howard Sercombe. Sercombe seeks a substantive framework for youth work ethics. The project offers clear potential benefits alongside equally great dangers. His platform is an integration of two foundations: a particular definition of youth work and (...) a particular account of what it means to be ‘a profession’. I argue that both foundations are flawed, and potentially harmful to practice and policy. At the heart of Sercombe’s account, however, is a focus on youth work as based on a ‘covenantal relation of trust between youth workers and young people’. This insight, submerged and marginalised, does offer a substantive foundation for youth work ethics. (shrink)

One of the basic tenets of paediatric ethics is that competent parents may render healthcare decisions for children who are too young or too incapacitated to make meaningful medical choices for themselves. In the USA, many jurisdictions have expanded this principle to include the right to terminate a child's life support, including nutrition and hydration, when that child enters a persistent vegetative state. However, this approach to the withdrawal of care in the paediatric setting has been put to the (...) test by an increasing number of cases in which one or both parents are themselves accused of causing the child's life-threatening injuries. In such “mixed-motive” situations, parents may express a desire to keep a child on life support for religious or moral reasons; at the same time, forestalling the child's death may also prevent a murder charge against the accused parent. Principles need to be established for handling such tragic cases. (shrink)

A young man, terminally ill and in extreme suffering, asks to be removed from life support, requesting morphine first so he'll be asleep when the machine stops. His physician agrees, but the hospital's chief administrator intervenes, arguing that the morphine might itself cause death, leaving the physician open to criminal indictment for murder. To placate the administrator, the doctor and patient reach a grim compromise: life support will be disconnected first, and only after manifest signs of suffering appear will (...) the physician administer the morphine, to alleviate pain. The patient's request is ultimately respected, but many staff members feel he has been made to suffer needlessly. This is just one of many cases Ruth Macklin discusses in Enemies of Patients, an eye-opening look at the growing number of forces that are hostile to the interests of patients, including hospital administrators, lawyers who represent hospitals, insurance companies, government regulations, and even some well intentioned physicians. Macklin, a highly regarded medical ethicist, the author of Mortal Choices and the subject of a New York Times Magazine cover story, provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the patient's ethical rights are often violated. She describes, for instance, how a new breed of hospital administrator, the risk manager, acts consistently as an enemy of the patient, often urging physicians to continue aggressive, expensive treatments for critically ill patients--even when the patient and doctor agree the treatment should cease--for fear of lawsuits, bad publicity, or criminal indictment. (Macklin points out, for instance, that even though no physician has ever been convicted of a crime for withdrawing treatment from a patient in a permanent vegetative state, hospital lawyers and risk managers regularly assert that there is a danger of criminal liability in such cases.) The government also can become an enemy of patients. The most egregious case, according to Macklin, is the Federal government's "gag rule" which has prohibited health care facilities that receive Title X funds from discussing abortion with pregnant women, violating the patient's right to full information. And physicians themselves can become enemies of patients. Some, seeing themselves as fiscal gatekeepers, ration expensive health care procedures on financial rather than medical grounds. Some physicians refuse to treat patients who don't follow their advice (a cardiologist, for instance, who will not take care of patients who smoke) and others won't treat patients who pose a threat of lawsuit (such as a California woman in need of life-sustaining dialysis, who had previously sued another physician). Packed with numerous case histories drawn from the author's experience in a major urban medical center, Enemies of Patients will give readers a better understanding of their rights as patients and show them how to forge an alliance with their doctors against common enemies. (shrink)

The young designer Serpica Naro is the center of attention during Fashion Week. But she doesn’t exist. A collective of flexworkers created her from scratch, to have a laugh at the city of Milan whose blood is sucked dry by the fashion vamp. And to show its dark side too: extreme precarity, with three-quarters of those under 35 working on short-term contracts.

Pakatan Harapan won the 14thGeneral Election held in May, 2018 in Malaysia. PH thus ended sixty-one years rule of Barisan Nasional.While the slogan of Malaysia Bahru, indicating changes to come in the country, became a popular slogan, one thing remained constant. This was the number of women contesting the GE-14 as candidates and the number of them who were elected was much less than the number of men contesting and getting elected in GE-14 although women represented slightly more than 50% (...) of the total registered voters in that election. The main objective of this paper is to examine the main factors that influenced the female voters in GE-14. Two states in the northern Malaysia were selected with 200 eligible female voters. They were clustered and conveniently sampled and were given self-administered questionnaires. Demographic variables were cross-tabbed while asking the women which factors had influenced their votes. The findings show that majority of the female voters were influenced by the candidates’ social background. Younger women were very concerned with the issues directly affecting them. Significantly, preference for political party was of least interest to them while voting. While the majority of women voters from the three main ethnic groups supported more women to be nominated as candidates in elections, the Malay women showed the highest level of disagreement on that matter as compared to the rest. The study also shows that majority of the female voters, whether young or old, rural or urban, use social media as the main and the most trusted source of news on election. These findings have concluded that, their demographic background interplayed with each other constructing their voting preferences. Female voters are crucial and each contesting parties need to pay closer attention to the women’s concerns in order to secure their votes. (shrink)

Writing to the young emperor Nero, Seneca elaborates a sophisticated distinction between compassion and mercy for use in forensic contexts, agreeing with earlier Stoics that compassion is a vice, but adding that there is a virtue called mercy or 'clemency.' This Stoic repudiation of compassion has won the attention of Nussbaum, who argues that it was motivated by a respect for persons as dignified agents, and was of a piece with the Stoics' cosmopolitanism. This chapter engages Nussbaum's presentation of (...) the Stoics, examining Seneca’s On Clemency and Epictetus' use of the term prohairesis, showing that while there is some truth in her characterization, it needs to be qualified in important ways. It also analyzes Augustine's engagement with Seneca's On Clemency in the City of God 9.5, and in his letters concerning punishment for vandalism, theft, and human trafficking. It argues that Augustine has a nuanced mercy ethic that is deeply informed by Seneca's position, but that he intentionally improves upon it. (shrink)

1. Animal Cruelty Industrial farming is appallingly abusive to animals. Pigs. In America, nine-tenths of pregnant sows live in “gestation crates. ” These pens are so small that the animals can barely move. When the sows are first crated, they may flail around, in an attempt to get out. But soon they give up. Crated pigs often show signs of depression: they engage meaningless, repetitive behavior, like chewing the air or biting the bars of the stall. The sows live like (...) this for four months. Gestation crates will be phased out in Europe by the end of 2012, but they will still be used in America.1 In nature, pigs nurse their young for about thirteen weeks. But in industrial farms, piglets are taken from their mothers after about ten days. Because the piglets are weaned prematurely, they develop a lifelong craving to suck and chew. But the farmers don’t want them sucking and chewing on other pigs’ tails. So the growers routinely snip off the tails of all their pigs. They do this with a pair of pliers and no anesthetic. However, the whole tail is not removed; a tender stump remains. The point is to render the area sensitive, so the pigs being chewed on will fight back. Which they do.2 Over 113 million pigs are slaughtered each year in America.3 Typically, these pigs are castrated, their needle teeth are clipped, and one of their ears is notched for identification —all without pain relief.4 In nature, pigs spend up to three quarters of their waking hours foraging and exploring their environment.5 But in the factory farms, “tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. ”6 Bored, and in constant pain, the pigs must perpetually inhale the fumes of their own waste. These pigs often get sick, and their ill health is exacerbated by the overcrowding. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture compared hog farms containing over 10,000 pigs—which is the norm—with farms containing under 2,000 pigs. (shrink)

* Editor’s Note: This paper won the Young Epistemologist Prize for the Rutgers Epistemology conference held in 2003.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Francis Sparshott TEXT AND PROCESS IN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY Ir. H. Bradley in an optimistic moment described philosophy as an • unusually intense and sustained attempt to think clearly.1 If that is what it is, it is clearly a process; and, if it is a process, one does not see what a philosophical text could be. A text is surely not a process, though it may be the product (...) of one. A text that purported to be philosophy would deceive, as many of us complain that textbooks deceive, by substituting for the living endeavors of thought a series of slogans and purported conclusions the parroting of which demonstrates that thought has been evaded, not clarified. But there are such things as philosophical texts, and we could not easily do without them. They are, indeed, central to our experience ofwhat philosophy is. They must be doing some work, and it is up to us to establish what that work could be. 2. If philosophy is indeed a process of clarifying thought, it must in each of us be a self-critical monologue, and it must in the world be a manyvoiced conversation among Thaïes and his contemporaries and successors through history. (Similar traditions in other parts of the world constitute different conversations, in other corners of the room, and sometimes we eavesdrop on each other's conversations; but we will not be concerning ourselves witii them here.) A philosophical text should be a record of parts ofthat conversation, a minute ofthe long meeting ofminds. Without such a record the conversation could be no better than a bull session; we would be forever returning to the beginning, not to recover our origins but because memory had stretched to snapping. After all, what use would the clarification of thought be unless die progress won could be preserved? Philosophy begets philosophy as humanity begets humanity; there must be an Aristotelian efficient cause, a form-bearer. 2 Philosophy and Literature 3.As minute of the clarifying conversation, the text might serve the purpose of an interim conclusion, a tentative result. But not necessarily, and not if the clarity sought is indeed clarity in thinking. Minutes of decision-making bodies may record only the motions passed; but deliberating bodies often prefer to include in the minutes the arguments on either side, so that when they come to reconsider a matter on which a motion has been passed they may do so with renewed insight. A progress report may report only where one has progressed to, but it may also retrace the progression whereby die progress was made. So perhaps die best sort of text in philosophy is die sort I shall call a philosophoumenon, a text that recreates in and for the reader the experience ofclarification itself. But if this is to be done the reader must be sucked in: before clarification can be done, unclarity must be re-enacted. Confusion must be induced and its recognition must be enforced: the reader must be enticed not only to recognize but to undergo in person the Socratic elenchus, which for two millennia has ensured that the best philosophers shall be the best hated philosophers. To do its elenctic work, a philosophoumenal text must be deeply ambiguous, internally divided, blatantly self-contradictory. The Platonic dialogues are exemplary in this as in most ways: dramatic denunciations of drama, written disparagements of writing, conclusive proofs of the impotence of reason. But the other masters did the same: Descartes guides the reader of his Meditations step by step through the argument that is to lead the reader to doubt Descartes's existence; Aristotle invents and deploys a highly technical vocabulary which he never uses in the same way twice, and establishes a classification of intellectual methods into which none ofhis own work can be fitted; Wittgenstein obsessively philosophizes to show the folly of philosophizing, and carefully ensures diat his students circulate die content of the texts that he ostentatiously refuses to publish; Kierkegaard stridently claims authorship of his pseudonymous works so that he can repudiate them audioritatively; G. E. Moore accurately defines goodness so as to make it clear exactly what he is saying when he says that goodness is... (shrink)

In this fascinating autobiography from the foremost genius of twentieth-century physics, Max Planck tells the story of his life, his aims, and his thinking. Published posthumously, the papers in this volume were written for the general reader and make accessible his scientific theories as well as his philosophical ideals, including his thoughts on ethics and morals. Max (Karl Ernst Ludwig) Planck was a German physicist and philosopher known for his quantum theory, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics (...) in 1918. Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1858 to an academic family, and he valued education from a young age. He attended the Universities of Munich and Berlin to study physics under the great scientific leaders Kirchhoff and Helmholtz. His early work mainly focused on the study of thermodynamics, and in 1900 he published a paper on his quantum theory that would change the face of modern physics. Planck worked as a professor at Berlin University his entire life, and he also served as the president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Promotion of Science. During World War II, Planck experienced great hardships while he remained in Germany but openly opposed the Nazi regime. One of his two sons was executed during this time for an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life, and Planck's home in Berlin was eventually bombed. He continued to write on physics and philosophy until his death in 1947. (shrink)

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in the (...) late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tribute to Daniel Tanner (1926–2023)Jessica HeybachOn September 23, 2023, education lost one of its most prolific writers and staunchest defenders. Dan Tanner lived 97 years and spent most of his life thinking and writing about education and the project of schooling. Dan was a longtime member of the John Dewey Society (JDS) and dedicated his life's work to the study of curriculum. He served as the president of JDS (...) from 2002 to 2004 and won the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Dan Tanner was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Founding Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Professors of Education. He held faculty positions at Purdue, Northwestern, and Rutgers Universities, and established the doctoral program in curriculum studies at Rutgers University.To honor Dan's contributions to JDS and education broadly, Education and Culture offers to its readers this tribute to his work. Drawing from interviews with three academics who call Dan a mentor, it is clear his life's work stretches far beyond what was printed in the many books and articles he contributed during his prolific career.As has been repeated in many places, Dan Tanner was a titan and contributed a significant body of research and scholarship. He wrote over fifteen books, including Schools for Youth: Change and Challenge in Secondary Education and Crusade for Democracy: Progressive Education at the Crossroads. With Laurel Tanner, he coauthored History of the School Curriculum and four editions of Curriculum Development: Theory into Practice. Moreover, Tanner also published dozens of articles in a variety of venues within both scholarly and popular realms. He contributed a diverse body of scholarship that serves as the bedrock of curriculum studies and that reached well beyond the walls of the academy to engage various audiences. A recent article describing his $1 million dollar donation to Ohio State University for an endowed professorship attributes his early life as an orphan living in foster care and his relationship with teachers to having fueled his curiosity regarding adolescence and its importance in the development of both citizens and a nation.1 He came to understand that "Teachers [End Page 76] saved me. … They opened up the world to me." In regard to adolescence, he claimed, "It may last your whole life or may change, but adolescence is the period when you form an ideology." Having experienced the power of schooling and curriculum in the transformation of his own life as a young person, he remained committed to a holistic view of curriculum and academic disciplines that is often neglected in education today. As one of his former students stated: "His life work was asking 'How can we provide educational experiences for all kids that will have the kind of empowering impact that it had on him?'"To offer a candid look at Dan Tanner's impact, I interviewed three academics who worked closely with him as doctoral students or in their early career. These interviews explored Dan's impact on their thinking, career, and life. In particular, this tribute will take up Dan's legacy as a mentor in what one interviewee described as "a lost generation" of academics. It was clear from these discussions that Dan was complex and exacting—he pushed his students to think critically and carefully. He could suspend the demands of material and political constraints and move beyond the obvious answers to educational and social problems. One of his former students describes a classroom exchange where he asked Dan, "Can you tell me a school where they actually do that?" in relation to some alternative visions of what could go on in school. "And Dan couldn't, but that wasn't a problem for Dan. That means, well, we should be doing this. Just because no one's doing it doesn't mean its not a good thing to do."He was described as a generous mentor who challenged students in unanticipated ways. One asserted that "he transformed my view of school." Dan clearly articulated a view of schooling that caught... (shrink)

One of the earliest refutations of the Visum et Repertum (1732) by Johann Flückinger was from Johann Wilhelm Nöbling, a young student of philosophy and theology at the University of Jena, who attacked the findings from a position of scientific scepticism enshrouded with Lutheran theology in his thesis Concerning the Blood-Sucking Corpses of those so-called Vampires or People-Suckers. While he is best remembered for first proposing the incubus or nightmare of sleep paralysis as being the real cause of the (...) superstition, his major contribution was theological, concerning the relation between body and soul. And yet while Nöbling provides a rigorous, scripture-based denial of vampirism, his framework necessarily accommodates contemporary medical theory, demonstrating both the adaptation of theology to science and the extent to which pneumatology still inhered in scientific enquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviews 87 c:\users\arlene\documents\rj issues\type3501\rj 3501 061 red.docx 2015-07-10 4:07 PM RUSSELL AS “SPANISH ASTRONOMER” (A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW) Sheila Turcon Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 [email protected] Constance Malleson. The Coming Back. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933. Pp. 328. 7s. 6d. ublished in 1933 and never reprinted, The Coming Back is Constance Malleson’s first novel. She had been publishing shorter fiction as well as articles since (...) 1919.1 Her lover, Bertrand Russell, had encouraged her writing career, assisting with the placement of her first short story in The English Review.2 He thought a writing career preferable to acting. Using the stage name “Colette O’Niel”, she had a successful career on the stage.3 The novel is a fictional account of the love affair between Russell and Colette.They appear as Gregory del Orellano and Konradin Waring. It was not, however, recognized as a roman à clef when it was published, as their affair was not known by anyone except their closest friends and family members. John Slater recognized it for what it was.4 Three of the four Russell biographers mention the novel.5 Presumably all three relied on Slater’s article. Ronald Clark quotes one sentence from the novel, a summation of Gregory’s character by one of the other characters who shared the view of many. Gregory was seen as “a man exhausting other men by his intellect; exhausting women by his intensity; wearing out his friends, sucking them dry, passing from person to person, never giving any real happiness—or finding any” (Coming Back, p. 307; Clark, p. 583). Caroline Moorehead quotes several sentences about the 1 Turcon, “A Bibliography of Constance Malleson” (2012). 2 Malleson, “The End” by “Christine Harte” (1919). 3 Turcon, op. cit., appendix, acting roles, pp. 188–90. 4 John G. Slater, “Lady Constance Malleson, ‘Colette O’Niel’” (1975), pp. 10–11. 5 Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (1975); Moorehead, Bertrand Russell (1992); Monk, Bertrand Russell,Vol. 1 (1996). m= 88 Reviews c:\users\arlene\documents\rj issues\type3501\rj 3501 061 red.docx 2015-07-10 4:07 PM importance of work to Konradin—work that Gregory deplored (Coming Back, p. 105; Moorehead, p. 264). Only Ray Monk undertakes a detailed description of the novel, even naming the last chapter of The Spirit of Solitude, “The Coming Back”. He identifies, as did Slater, several other characters with their real life counterparts: Ottoline Morrell is Magdalena de Santa Segunda; T. C. Maynard is T. S. Eliot; Jevons is Clifford Allen; Marcus Beazley is Maurice Elvey; Gertrude West is Dora Black. He quotes the sentence that Clark had used earlier (Monk 1: 607). Monk writes that “Russell claimed never to have read The Coming Back (or any of Colette’s other books). Perhaps he knew it would make painful reading” (1: 608). Monk provides no source for this judgment, and in fact it is untrue. Although The Coming Back is not specifically discussed in their correspondence, her other three books are.6 My reading of the novel is coloured by an attempt to identify what is true in the novel. My knowledge of the truth is based on editing their correspondence.The novel is a fascinating portrait of the Russell and Colette relationship, far more revealing to those in the know than her autobiographies, where libel concerns were always at the forefront. Her first autobiography, AfterTenYears, had been published two years earlier, in 1931, to great acclaim. The Coming Back’s dust-jacket reads: Here is the first novel from the author of that vivid and successful autobiography, After Ten Years. And as might be expected, it shows the same vitality, integrity, and the same passion for beauty as the earlier work. Constance Malleson presents a portrait of a young girl of our times, and of her stand for freedom, through all its stages from selfishness to a fine renunciation. Before the novel begins Colette includes four things. She dedicates the book to “Joneen when he is grown up”. Colette was very fond of Russell’s son John, and this may well refer to... (shrink)

Do time travellers retain their normal freedom and abilities when they travel back in time? Lewis, Horwich and Sider argue that they do. Time-travelling Tim can kill his young grandfather, his younger self, or whomever else he pleases—and so, it seems can reasonably deliberate about whether to do these things. He might not succeed. But he is still just as free as a non-time traveller. I’ll disagree. The freedom of time travellers is limited by a rational constraint. Tim can’t (...) reasonably deliberate on killing his grandfather, certain that he’ll fail. If Tim follows his evidence, and appropriately self-predicts, he will be certain he won’t kill his grandfather. So if Tim is both evidentially and deliberatively rational, he can’t deliberate on killing his grandfather. This result has consequences. Firstly, it shows how evidential limits in the actual world contribute to our conception of the future as open. Secondly, it undercuts arguments against the possibility of time travel. Thirdly, it affects how we evaluate counterfactuals in time travel worlds, as well as our own. I’ll use the constraint to motivate an evidential and temporally neutral method of evaluating counterfactuals that holds fixed what a relevant deliberating agent has evidence of, independently of her decision. Using this method, an agent’s local abilities may be affected by what happens globally at other times, including the future. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Child psychologist Mallory James returns to Moonglade, the Australian plantation where she was raised, to care for her beloved uncle Robert, who has had a heart attack. Having left the area years earlier after being betrayed by her fiancâe, Jason Cartwright, Mallory is shocked and dismayed to find that Jason and his decidedly disturbed twin sister, Jessica, have been hired on at her uncle's estate. Her longtime friend and occasional adversary, Blaine Forrester, is also nearby. As Mallory settles back into (...) her old home, she can't help but begin to love Jason's feisty young daughter, Ivy. She and Blaine begin to wander down the path of romance, but it's obvious that their happiness won't come easily. (shrink)

The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 456-458 [Access article in PDF] Quarrel & Quandary, by Cynthia Ozick; xiii & 247 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, $25.00. Ask Cynthia Ozick to define a Jewish book and she launches into an extended defense of the integrity of the body of traditional Jewish writing: Torah, Talmud, liturgy, ethics, and philosophy. Ozick takes her Judaism seriously; its literature, in the broad sense, (...) for her, is didactic and dedicated to the promotion of virtue attained through study. She takes literature seriously too and strenuously defends fiction as an act of the "free imagination," with an equal emphasis on both elements of that phrase although, Ozick rightly argues, the imagination by definition is free. Thus, a Jewish book and Jewish fiction are contradictory. To different degrees, emphasis, and purpose, both are freighted by moral purpose.So are the various Ozicks! A traditional Jew, a Jewish American writer, a novelist, an essayist, a classical feminist—all describe Ozick who obviously belies all simple categories save one: writer. Yet even as a writer, Ozick is complex and conflicted, lamenting that she hasn't written enough fiction but claiming that it simply could not have been different.While Ozick may not be as prolific as she would like, she is a commanding presence in American fiction and belles lettres. Her latest collection of non-fiction work, Quarrel & Quandary, demonstrates her clear thinking, breadth of expertise, seriousness, and intelligence. Ranging from the autobiographical to the political, each essay is informed by history and none is light nor nostalgic. "Dostoyevsky's Unabomber" is perceptive and regrettably prescient in its depiction of the philosopher-murderer. In "The Posthumous Sublime," Ozick walks us through the "grieving that has been made beautiful" in the four stories of Sebald's The Emigrants. "A Drug Store Eden" is a warm and familiar but never sentimental portrait of her hard-working parents and her Uncle Ruby. The humor of "Lovesickness" and "How I Got Fired from My Summer Job" resonate for middle-class, studious, awkward young girls. In another essay, awe-inspired respect for Kafka is balanced by reverent awe of God, which is tempered by an uncomfortable acceptance of Job's acquiescence. Where is Job's "impious impatience" in the face of his renewed prosperity and health?, she asks. Where is "the father's bitter grief over the loss" of his first family? In quintessential [End Page 456] Ozick, she acknowledges the staying power of the ancient sages who argued God's majesty at the same time reserving her right to "philosophic doubt," especially in light of the Shoah.Two essays in this volume are exceptional in their insight and influence. "Who Owns Anne Frank?" should put to rest the sentimentalization of Anne Frank and her diary. It should stop the shameless marketing of the Holocaust—the catastrophe that marked a century—as yet another genocide. Ozick's relentless focus on the reality of Nazi evil and its consequent waste of human lives and potential should abort further distortions about Anne's short life, but it probably won't. The diary has been "bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced... infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied." It has "nonsensically" been described as cheerful and optimistic, even in the face of the fact that Anne, along with other members of the attic community, were targeted for murder and that, one month before liberation, Anne and her sister Margot died as prisoners in the unimaginable horror of Bergen Belsen, a camp so lice-ridden and disease-infested that it was burned to ashes by the British rather than cleansed, disinfected, or rehabilitated.Ozick tracks the controversy centered on the transformation of Anne's diary into the Americanized, christianized, perky Junior Miss that American audiences would accept, including the fabrication of lines that rendered the targeting of the Jews as one victim among many: "We're not the only people that've had to suffer" instead of Anne's more thoughtful and complex—and potentially problematic—"In the eyes of the world, we're doomed.... Who knows, maybe our religion will teach... (shrink)