In Alabaster v. Barclays Bank plc and Secretary of State for Social Security (No. 2: [2005] E.W.C.A Civ. 508, [2005] I.R.L.R. 576.) Michelle Alabaster won a grand total of £204.53 (plus £65.86 interest) after eight years of litigation, which included two visits to the Court of Appeal and one to the European Court of Justice. This marathon resulted from the sex discrimination which Alabaster had alleged in relation to the calculation of her Statutory Maternity Pay (S.M.P.) whilst she was pregnant (...) 10 years earlier. The technicalities of the statutory schemes involved should not be allowed to disguise the important principle which finally emerges in the Court of Appeal and which underlines one of the longstanding criticisms of the equality legislation, namely the requirement that a woman must compare herself with a man in order to establish unlawful sex discrimination. (shrink)

An obituary of Jean E. Hampton (1954-1996) by the editors of Economics and Philosophy. At the time of her premature death, Jean was serving as a member of the Editorial Board of the journal.

Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This research applies the impression management theory of exemplification in an accounting study by identifying and measuring differences in both auditor and public perceptions of exemplary behaviors. The auditors were divided into two groups, one of which reported self-perceptions (A-S) while the other group reported their perceptions of a typical auditor (A-O). There were two separate public groups, which gave their perceptions of a typical auditor and were divided based on their levels of accounting sophistication. The more sophisticated public group (...) was comprised of bank loan officers (LO) while the less sophisticated public group consisted of investment club members (IC). Comparisons were made on 30 behaviors contained in the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, which served as the basis for the research instrument. Profile analysis, a special form of MANOVA technique, was used to analyze the results. A-S perceptions were the highest of the four treatment levels and were significantly higher (i.e., more exemplary) than the perceptions of both the A-O and LO groups. The more sophisticated user group (LO) provided the lowest perceptions of the four treatment levels. For at least four of the six measures, the LO treatment group perceived the typical auditor to be less exemplary than both the IC and A-O treatments. There were no differences in perceptions between the A-O group and IC. Additional analysis revealed that auditors overrated the degree to which the public relied on financial statements. However, both public groups reported a reasonably high level of reliance on financial statements when making decisions. (shrink)

MORRIS: But come back to that other kind of fiction, in which the author himself is involved with his works, not merely in writing something for other people but in writing what seems to be necessary to his conscious existence, to his sense of well-being. For such a writer, when he finished with something he finishes with it; he is not left with continuations that he can go on knitting until he runs out of yarn. This conceit reflects my (...) own experience as a writer, relying on the sap that keeps rising, the force that drives the flower, as Dylan Thomas put it. It is plantlike. We put it in the sun and when it doesn't grow, we take it and put it in another room. I don't think of repotting the plant. The plant must make its own way. BOOTH: I like the organic metaphor, but I keep wanting to come back to particular cases to see how you actually work, in literal detail. Even the organic novelist obviously still has the matter of collecting notes, starting a novel, having it fail to go. Let me put a simple question, and move out from there. How many actual novels, whether they ever reach fruition or not, do you have "growing" at a given time? MORRIS: You don't mean simultaneously? BOOTH: I mean actual notes that exist in some kind of manuscript form, starts on a novel, something you are actually working on. MORRIS: It is so unusual for me to have more than one or two things in mind at once that I don't find this a fruitful question. Wright Morris's work as a novelist, essayist, and photographer is examined by prominent critics in Conversations with Wright Morris; the collection, edited by Robert E. Knoll, was published in the spring of 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. "The Writing of Organic Fiction" is a chapter in that book. Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" ,"Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" , "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" , “'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" , and, with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979". (shrink)

Early Analytic Philosophy: An Inclusive Reader With Commentary contains the most important readings in the development of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Featuring primary source material accompanied by introductions and commentaries, it brings together work by thinkers at the origins of the tradition. Beginning in the 1890s with F.H. Bradley and ending in the 1950s with W.V.O Quine, each chapter includes readings from a particular thinker or movement. Background information and further reading recommendations appear alongside discussion of the main ideas (...) in the readings. Covering well-known figures such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore, this reader also highlights the central role of neglected figures, such as E.E. Constance Jones and her logical writings, and L. Susan Stebbing's work on analysis and scientific discourse. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Black Natural Law by Vincent W. LloydDaniel A. MorrisBlack Natural Law Vincent W. Lloyd NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. XV + 180 PP. $49.95Black Natural Law introduces and analyzes a "tradition" (Vincent Lloyd's term throughout the text) of African American natural law reflection. In so doing, Lloyd dismantles stubborn boundaries between Christian ethics, black religion, and American religious history. Black Christian writers such as Frederick Douglass are (...) often confined to the category of "history" and rarely elevated to esteemed intellectual disciplines such as "theology" and "ethics." Lloyd reverses that tendency. Like Catherine Bell, Robert Orsi, Miguel De La Torre, and others, he makes us question the hierarchical dualism between thought and practice, and our habit of associating white Christianities with the former and nonwhite Christianities with the latter. This book is worth reading for that feature alone. But there are many other worthwhile arguments as well.In his surveys of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lloyd identifies a coherent tradition of natural law reflection in African American Christianity that imagines a concentric series of laws, including God's law, moral law, and civic law. The tradition emphasizes the image of God in all human beings and thus the "inherent value of human life" (22). Black natural law reflection is distinctive primarily because it is rooted in black experience. At its core, it is informed by experiences of oppression sponsored by the civic law. Critique of ideology (which Lloyd sometimes uses as a synonym for civic/worldly law) is at the heart of black natural law, as is the organizing of social movements as a practical outgrowth of that critique. Lloyd also shows that black natural law sets itself apart from its white/European counterparts by understanding reason and emotion as mutually informing: emotion does and indeed should inform reason in moral reflection. And because God privileges the oppressed, black natural law also emphasizes its own priority over white theological ethics. Through close readings of black theologians, Lloyd pulls all these features together and persuasively shows that there is a coherent tradition of black natural law thinking in American Christianity. This primary argument is clear and indispensable for scholars of either black theology or natural law (or both).Lloyd also makes a provocative historical argument: the tradition began to decline after the civil rights movement and is currently in a state of disarray. He writes that "elements of black natural law continued to be invoked in various [End Page 199] ways during the decades that followed the civil rights movement—invoked in ways that were disconnected from the tradition" (120). He shows that literary, activist, and political uses of natural law ideas within black communities have lost the coherence and distinctive features that they once had. This argument includes innovative interpretations and critiques of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, and others. This argument is all the more worthwhile for scholars and students of ethics and American religious history because Lloyd notes that a coherent expression of black natural law could help meet the crisis of mass incarceration.The book could, at times, engage secondary sources more effectively; for example, which natural law theories "focus exclusively on the human capacity to reason" (38)? How have other scholars understood Douglass's invocation of natural law concepts? It also offers an underdeveloped critique of pragmatism. These quarrels are trivial, though, in light of the thought-provoking arguments that Lloyd offers. Scholars working on Christian ethics, American religious thought, and black Christianity should all read this book. Black Natural Law would fit well on upper-level and graduate syllabi in these fields.Daniel A. MorrisAugustana CollegeCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age by Maria Serena MirtoJoseph W. DayMaria Serena Mirto. Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the Classical Age. Trans. by A. M. Osborne. Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture 44 Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. x + 197 pp. 10 black-and-white figs. Paper, $19.95.Mirto (with Osborne) has given us a readable book on a topic of (...) perennial interest, full of learning but unencumbered by the development of a comprehensive argument with full scholarly apparatus (there are no footnotes or endnotes). I devoured it on a couple of airplane rides, during which its intelligent presentation thoroughly distracted me from my physical discomfort. The book provided a clear and concise review of important topics which I have not studied intensely for years, and it initiated me into recent trends and made me thirsty to approach its suggestions for further reading—while avoiding the spring by the white cypress, of course.The volume is an expansion and updating, as well as a translation, of the Italian original, La morte nel mondo greco (Rome 2007). Much scholarship from 2007 and later is cited, especially in discussions of Dionysian and “Orphic” material (chap. 2). Important additions are a useful section on the confusing (to the uninitiated) topic of hero cults and “an appendix outlining fundamental developments in modern studies of death in the Greek world” (x). The latter traces an interesting journey through the history of mentalities from R. Hertz (Durkheim’s student), through E. de Martino and P. Ariès, on to C. Sourvinou-Inwood’s disagreement with I. Morris about change and stability in early Greek attitudes toward death.Mirto articulates her goal in the preface as “a general synthesis of people’s relationships with death in the Greek world... [a] survey of the ways in which archaic and classical Greek culture dealt with the trauma of death” (ix). One does not judge such a book on its original interpretations and scholarly arguments; other criteria apply. For example, how comprehensive (or representative) is the selection of topics, approaches, and examples? How useful (or user-friendly) is the selection, especially for the audience to which it is addressed?At the level of overall structure, Mirto scores high for comprehensiveness. Any treatment of Greek death must devote major attention to the three topics she announces : (1) “beliefs about the afterlife, on the boundary between literary imagination and religious faith”; (2) “funerary rituals and material evidence of the cult of the dead”; (3) “ideologies... that construct an ideal model of death, making it an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, event” (ix). Chapter 1 on traditional views, mostly derived from Homer (also treated in chap. 5.1), commences Mirto’s discussion of the first topic, which is continued in chapter 2 on more [End Page 337] optimistic eschatologies, especially those associated with Dionysus and Orpheus. The second topic is treated in chapters 3 (on death, mourning, and last rites) and 4 (on markers, epitaphs, and tomb and hero cult). Chapter 5 is devoted to the third topic, with particular attention to the development of the polis and Athens’ patrios nomos and funerary legislation. R. Garland’s widely used survey (The Greek Way of Death [Ithaca 1985], 2d ed. 2001) covers much the same ground, though that book’s feel is quite different. Garland provides a richness of source and scholarly citations that Mirto eschews; for example, Garland devotes twenty-three pages (chap. 7 and its dense endnotes) to visits to the grave, while Mirto barely touches on the matter.At the level of specifics, Mirto’s comprehensiveness is uneven. Reflecting her expertise in archaic and classical poetry, as well as her engagement with the history of mentalities, discussions of literature and some sub-literary textual material are excellent, while she is less full but still useful on iconography (especially that of white-ground lekythoi and sculpture) and polis regulations. Perceptions of comprehensiveness, of course, will vary among readers. Because of gaps in my knowledge, I learned most from Mirto’s presentation of Dionysian and “Orphic” material: the gold lamellae, the Olbia bones, the Derveni papyrus (chap. 2, with the... (shrink)

This is a study of "three metaphysical naturalists" who, although minor figures in their own right, nonetheless substantially influenced the direction and cast of American naturalism. The theme that unites them, according to Delaney, is their reaction to the bifurcation of mind and corporeal nature bequeathed to modern philosophy by Descartes and Locke. Morris R. Cohen, as a logician and philosopher of science, saw such a bifurcation as engendering conventionalism and a type of nominalism in science, and he reacted (...) against these with his own "logical realism." Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, working out of the Aristotelian and Spinozistic traditions, saw it as entailing subjectivism and attempted to counteract this by reasserting an "experiential realism." Roy Wood Sellars, himself an evolutionist, viewed the duality of mind and nature as a stimulus for the imaginative projection of idealism and the quietistic escapism of spiritualism, and countered these with a thorough-going "materialistic humanism." Delaney elaborates his thesis with clarity and cogency, using it as a vehicle to reconstruct the metaphysical views of the three men under study. He concludes with a critical comparison of the resulting "naturalistic reintegrations" of the mind-nature bifurcation: Cohen's through a more adequate philosophy of science, Woodbridge's by a realistic theory of experience, and Sellars' by an emergent theory of evolution. Delaney's critique focuses on the fundamental notions of existence, nature, and man, using these to expose essential differences between the "metaphysics" of the New York naturalists and that of Sellars. Woodbridge emerges from Delaney's analysis as the most substantial philosopher of the group. This is not a ponderous tome--it can be read practically at one sitting--but it succeeds in throwing new light on American naturalism in terms of its positive contributions to both the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mind.--W. A. W. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays in honor of Radoslav A. Tsanoff, Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Rice University for forty years. Besides a tribute to Tsanoff written by J. S. Fulton, there are ten essays written by distinguished philosophers, each considering a topic in his field of interest. Virgil Aldrich discusses the importance of language in an essay entitled "Self-Consciousness." An examination of the new in art and an attempt to explicate its value and rationale is (...) presented by Van Meter Ames; illustrative material is drawn from such sources as contemporary film, pop art and chance music. In "Social Science and Social Norms" Clifford Barrett discusses the relevance of facts and norms in systematic considerations of social scientists. C. P. Snow's concept of two cultures is examined by A. Cornelius Benjamin in "Philosophy and the Cultures." Other essays presented are "Philosophy and Common Sense" by George Boas, "Conscience and Conscientiousness" by A. Campbell Garnett, "Criteria for Ideas of God" by C. Hartshorne, and "Sovereignty and the Idea of Republic" by C. W. Hendel. Charles Morris examines the common themes of the pragmatic movement, discussing such fields as epistemology, axiology and cosmology, and such philosophers as Peirce, Dewey, Mead and Lewis. In the concluding essay G. R. Morrow discusses Plato's views about a God and the many gods of the Greek pantheon. This book is a loose collection of papers, lacking any single theme or determinate relation between the essays presented; each essay, however, is competently handled and is interesting in its own right.—E. M. (shrink)

Serious study of Peirce began some fifty years ago, in 1931, with the publication of the first of six volumes of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Arthur Burks added two volumes to that collection in 1958. In the meantime there had appeared, and continued to appear, several one-volume editions, namely those by Morris R. Cohen, Justus Buchler, Vincent Tomas, Philip P. Wiener, and Edward C. Moore. A new era in Peirce (...) scholarship began in 1975 with the appearance of the first of three important multi-volume editions: Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to “The Nation,” edited by Kenneth L. Ketner and James E. Cook ; The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, edited by Carolyn Eisele ; and Charles Sanders Peirce: Complete Published Works, Including Selected Secondary Materials, the 149-microfiche collection edited by members of the Texas Tech University Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. (shrink)

This book is an appealing, worthwhile, even illustrated study of the life and thought of an idealistic philosopher who has not been given the attention his originality deserves. John Elof Boodin belongs to what we may call the second generation of American idealists. Most of them studied under thinkers who represented the first real surge of idealistic thought on this continent. That group includes: G. S. Morris, B.P. Bowne, G. H. Howison, Josiah Royce, J. E. Creighton, and Mary W. (...) Calkins. Boodin’s generation includes J. A. Leighton, W. E. Hocking, Elijah Jordan, E. S. Brightman and Brand Blanshard. Only Jordan and Leighton are less well-know than Boodin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:‘Reading’ Greek Death: To the End of the Classical PeriodJoseph W. Day and Leslie Preston DayChristiane Sourvinou-Inwood. ‘Reading’ Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. xiv + 489 pp. 11 pls. Cloth, $79.This important book contributes much to the growing, though divided, scholarship on Greek mortuary practice as a system of behavior that reflected and constructed eschatological, religious, and socio-political attitudes and (...) ideologies. Distancing herself strongly from I. Morris’ historical analysis of mortuary data (Burial in Ancient Society [1987]; Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity [1992]), with its rejection of what he sees as limiting text- and object-based approaches, S-I derives cultural attitudes from texts like Homer and artifacts like the archaic grave monument. Her approach to this conventional material is hardly conventional, however, nor are its results.Chapter 1, which most classicists could read with benefit, explains S-I’s reader-oriented method; but methodology is foregrounded throughout, especially the semiological principle that no element of a text or artifact, independent of its context, has a fixed meaning for readers. S-I recreates ancient readings of grave monuments, epitaphs, literary texts, and other artifacts accordingly, by reconstructing the cultural lenses through which contemporaries would have interpreted such an artifact (that is, their attitudes to death, expectations about relevant genres, and other aspects of their cultural repertoire). To alleviate the dangers of circularity inherent in such approaches, S-I constructs, and criticizes others for failing to construct, several independent arguments to support each point. Though “very idiosyncratic post-structuralist” (113), S-I’s method can be compared to recent semiological, cultural, and functional approaches to literary and artistic “texts” (e.g., C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece [1993]) and inscriptions (e.g., D. T. Steiner, The Tyrant’s Writ [1994]).Chapter 2 deals with views of the afterlife in the Homeric poems and with beliefs about the dead from the Late Bronze Age to the seventh century. For S-I, Homer represents the culture of eighth-century Ionia, and she uses the poems to show later eighth-century attitudes toward death. This is too facile a solution to complex Homeric problems, and while her analysis of the beliefs reflected in the poems is excellent, she does not apply archaeological evidence to demonstrate that this analysis is relevant to eighth-century Greece. She sees two attitudes in the poems: the predominant belief that “everyone must die,” a simple statement of the inevitability of death without any idea of reward and punishment, and the nascent idea that a few individuals can achieve happiness and even immortality after death. She debunks the theory that this latter concept of Elysion comes from Minoan Crete. What she does not do is use archaeological evidence to support her hypotheses. As she rightly points out, reconstructing “belief systems on the basis of archaeological data is a complex and problematic enterprise” (90); [End Page 645] but given the hundreds of burials excavated all over the Greek world from this period, it seems amazing that she refers to them so little. S-I is not unfamiliar with archaeological evidence and uses it to good account in discussing Minoan and Mycenaean burial practices, and she makes excellent use of sculpture and vase painting in chapters 3 and 5; but she chooses not to use actual burial data for Homeric beliefs, perhaps partly in response to Morris. Chapter 2 supplies a useful background for the study of archaic grave markers, but the unwary classicist should know that a methodologically rigorous archaeologist, in particular, will have trouble with it, as with Morris, although for different reasons.Morris and his methodology come under heavy attack in the lengthy Appendix. While some find Morris’ model-building methodology problematic, it is widely accepted by anthropologists looking for an objective method akin to scientific hypothesis testing. S-I opposes this methodology because of its a priori assumptions, yet no methodology is free of cultural bias. We need a variety of approaches, and archaeology must be allowed to give its evidence without either being forced into Morris’ a priori models or S-I’s (and the traditional... (shrink)

John McCormick's ‘democratic’ interpretation of Machiavelli depends on the view that Machiavelli unequivocally endorses the people's moral and political wisdom over that of princes and the elite alike. Leo Strauss's interpretation of Machiavelli offers a means for appraising the anthropological basis of this reading, which is yet to appear in the scholarship. Strauss argues that Machiavelli reduces human nature to the mere desire to stay alive. The people will therefore choose whatever political option stands to offer them the best chance (...) for survival, and, this being equivocal to them, they are just as likely to opt for democracy as they are to raise up a tyrant. From this anthropology also emerges a strand of intellectual elitism in Machiavelli, which is incompatible with what McCormick considers to be Machiavelli's staunch anti-elitism. This article therefore uses Strauss to challenge McCormick's reading of Machiavelli as a populist, arguing that McCormick exaggerates Machiavelli's populist partisanship. (shrink)

Housed in one volume for the first time are several of the seminal essays on Du Bois's contributions to sociology and critical social theory: from DuBois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and culture; and finally from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and cultural criminologist to Du (...) Bois as critic of the disciplinary decadence of the discipline of sociology. Unlike any other anthology or critical reader on Du Bois, this new volume offers an excellent overview of the critical commentary on arguably one of the most imaginative and innovative, perceptive and prolific founders of the discipline of sociology. (shrink)