In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the AmericasWilliam M. HamlinPerhaps the two best known stories of Europeans being taken for gods by non-European peoples are those of Hernan Cortés in Mexico and Captain James Cook in Hawaii. Separated by two hundred sixty years, five thousand miles, and vast differences in cultural and linguistic context, these two incidents nonetheless share many traits in the conventional telling. Cortés and Cook (...) were both strong leaders, for instance, both capable of inspiring devotion among their subordinates. Both men became amateur ethnographers during their lengthy sojourns away from Europe, both sought to promote an image of respectful rather than rapacious foreign incursion, and both are said to have been taken for returning gods by the native peoples among whom they landed: Cortés for the Toltec culture-hero and demigod Quetzalcoatl, Cook for the Hawaiian deity Lono. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.“The Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson. Courtesy of Chronicle Features, San Francisco.Recent scholarly studies and debates—among them the rather strident dispute between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over the alleged deification of Cook by eighteenth-century Hawaiians—have opened up these returning-god theories to skeptical critique and detailed justification; but such discussions have had little, if any, impact on popular imagination. 1 [End Page 405] Indeed, the idea that redoubtable European explorers can be (and often are) perceived as supernatural beings by non-European “primitives” has been uncritically perpetuated to this day by filmmakers, fantasists, writers of popular history, and purveyors of cultural literacy. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, informs our children that Caribbean islanders encountered by Columbus “asked if he had come from heaven”—the implication being, of course, that they took him for a god. 2 And in the recent film, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, we hear the indefatigable Admiral (played by Gerard Depardieu) claim that “on every island the natives welcome us with great generosity and trust.... Because of our appearance, we have been mistaken for gods, and are treated accordingly.” 3 Fortunately, we also have a “Far Side” parody of the cultural conceit on which such ideas in part rely, but the cartoon serves as well to demonstrate just how thoroughly the conceit has permeated our collective awareness (see figure 1). 4 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” From The Return of the Jedi, dir. Richard Marquand, Lucasfilm, Ltd., 1983. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.Let me offer just one other example. Near the end of the popular 1983 film The Return of the Jedi, the forest-dwelling Ewoks begin to chant and salaam upon first glimpsing the golden robot C-3PO, who in turn tells his captured comrades, “I do believe they think I am some sort of god.” When Han Solo sarcastically asks the robot to use his “divine influence” to help extricate them from their predicament, C-3PO replies that such an action would be improper: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” Here we see, embedded within a film romance, both the classic trope of the apotheosized foreigner and the related motif of the foreigner’s reluctance to [End Page 406] play the god-role (see figure 2). It is worth noting, however, that while C-3PO may be unwilling to exploit the Ewoks’ misperception, Luke Skywalker is not; he uses the “Force” to convince the Ewoks of the robot’s magical prowess and, more to the point, to perpetuate their misapprehension. 5What I wish to suggest in this essay is that certain habitual Western assumptions or conceits regarding cross-cultural encounters—assumptions which have been usefully termed “myth models” inasmuch as they condition human perception and find frequent discursive expression—coexist easily but in fact disjunctively with certain other ideological structures in many early modern travel narratives and colonial accounts. Obeyesekere, in his provocative book on the supposed deification of Captain Cook in Hawaii, has linked such myth models to the conceptual structures of the longue durée as characterized by Fernand Braudel, and it is possible that they may also be... (shrink)

The French author Michel de Montaigne is widely regarded as the founder and greatest practitioner of the personal essay. His extraordinary curiosity and discernment, combined with his ability to mix thoughtful judgment with revealing anecdote, make him one of the most readable of all writers. In 1580 and then again in 1588 he published his Essays, a vast collection of meditations on topics ranging from love and sexuality to freedom, learning, doubt, self-scrutiny, and peace of mind. One of the most (...) original books ever to emerge from Europe, Montaigne's masterpiece has been enormously influential among writers and philosophers from its first appearance down to the present day. In Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction, William M. Hamlin introduces readers to the life, thought, and published work of this unforgettable figure from Renaissance Europe. (shrink)

Cognitive representation is the single most important explanatory notion in the sciences of the mind and has served as the cornerstone for the so-called 'cognitive revolution'. This book critically examines the ways in which philosophers and cognitive scientists appeal to representations in their theories, and argues that there is considerable confusion about the nature of representational states. This has led to an excessive over-application of the notion - especially in many of the fresher theories in computational neuroscience. Representation Reconsidered shows (...) how psychological research is actually moving in a non-representational direction, revealing a radical, though largely unnoticed, shift in our basic understanding of how the mind works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Gildersleeve Prize for the Best Article Published in the American Journal of Philology in 2014 Has Been Presented toWilliam Josiah Edwards Davis, University of Toronto Faculty of LawWilliam M. Breichnerfor his contribution to scholarship in “Terence Interrupted: Literary Biography and the Reception of the Terentian Canon,” AJP 135.3:387–409.Building on the serious and sophisticated attention that has been devoted to literary biography in recent years, Davis shows what can (...) be elicited from the conflicting ancient accounts of Terence’s death. As others have argued, ancient scholarship found biography to be a useful receptacle for literary history and criticism. In Davis’ reading, the mutually incompatible accounts of Terence’s death yield insights into critical debates about the role of literature in republican Rome and the scholarly practices that underpinned it.Terence’s prologues give us a lively sense of the literary debates of his own day, but his biographers, writing in the period when scripts became texts, asked a different set of questions. Did Terence die at sea, or in Arcadia, far from the sea? Was the destination of his final journey Greece, or Asia? Did he die in poverty and neglect, or was he returning to Rome with a literary treasure, a hundred and eight newly adapted Menandrian plays? And who wrote his plays, anyway? Davis analyses ancient responses to these and other questions, teasing out traces of the scholarly argument and cultural polemic surrounding Roman literature in the late second and first centuries BCE and thereby making sense of the questions themselves. Reading Terence’s biography against other literary biographies, for example, he shows how Terence’s fatal journey was exploited to establish a Terentian canon free of the authenticity problems that dogged the Plautine tradition. The story that Terence died in Ambracia, by contrast, pits him against another poet associated with Ambracia, Ennius, and stages their rivalry. Finally, Davis shows, in writing the death(s) of Terence, scholar-poets such as Porcius Licinus and Volcacius Sedigitus and others less well known now but cited by Suetonius or ancient scholiasts inscribed a role for the literary historian, too, as caretaker of the playwright’s literary legacy. By reading the contradictions in the biographical tradition against one another instead of trying to produce a historically plausible version by selection, Davis gives us access to the script, fragmentary but fascinating, of Terence’s earliest reception.Judges for The Johns Hopkins University PressCynthia Damon (Chair) Andrew Ford Sara MyersThe Twenty-seventh Annual Gildersleeve Prize of $1,000 will be awarded for the best article to appear in the Journal in 2015. The Press would like to thank the members of the committee for their time and effort.William M. Breichner Journals Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press [End Page 1]William M. BreichnerJournals Publisher Johns Hopkins University PressCopyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The British journalist Christopher Hitchens has recently noted that the extraordinary excitement created by l’affaire Pound, an excitement sustained for now some forty years, is partly the result of having no fewer than three debates going on whenever the poet’s legal situation and his consequent hospitalization are discussed. As Hitchens says, those questions are: “First, was Pound guilty of treason? If not, or even if so, was he mad? Third, was he given privileged treatment for either condition?”1 I propose to (...) discuss all three issues in a way that fairly reflects the fact that I am neither a physician nor a lawyer. What I know of the state of medical expertise, both today and in the period of time from 1943 to 1958 , leads me, as a layman, to believe that there is an enormous latitude of understanding among medical professionals as to the precise meaning of “insanity.” At one extreme, for some distinguished physicians, the term means almost nothing. They see it as a legal term and as therefore irrelevant to them; some of them follow the line of reasoning developed by Thomas Szasz over his long writing career, namely that “mental illness” if not illness in any ordinary sense of the term.2 For other medical practitioners, it does mean something, but only when it is redefined into much smaller subcategories and enriched with much more precise terminology, and when the given patient and his full range of circumstances are considered.What I know of the legal understanding of insanity is that there has been and is now little firm agreement about “insanity” or “madness.” Equally competent juries and courts have been able to set down findings that are more or less plausible on their face but do not seem to comport at all with each other. I tentatively conclude that whatever “insanity” now is in the United States, and whatever it was when Pound was found unfit to stand trial in 1945, the standard is not the lucid simplicity of the M’Naghten test, namely, the ability of the accused to understand the difference between “right” and “wrong.” Human mind, self-awareness, and motivations are vastly more complicated than such a test would imply. 1. Christopher Hitchins, “American Notes,” Times Literary Supplement, 21 Oct. 1983, p. 1160.2. See Thomas Szasz, Insanity for a synthesis of his ideas as formulated in some eighteen books. William M. Chace is professor of English and Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University. He is author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot , Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics , and scholarly essays on writers including Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and James Joyce. He is now working on a study of the ways in which American culture in this century has been subjected to critical analysis. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between US Marine discourse and civil–military public argument. A computer-aided semantic analysis of public record speech from senior Marine officers shows a style of cohesion, marked by future-oriented, inclusive, highly certain language. An appraisal theory discourse analysis of interviews with US Marines conducted during an ethnography of communication shows their talk argues discursively for cohesion. This way of speaking may constrain Marines in public argument, as they repeat ways of talking appropriate within the community, even (...) when situationally inappropriate for civilian audiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian JohnsonWilliam M. PerrineJulian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford University Press, 2002.In Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, British musicologist and composer Julian Johnson defends the value of classical music in a commercialized culture fixated on the immediate gratification of popular music. At 130 pages divided into six chapters, (...) Johnson’s book is a reasonably accessible and engaging presentation of his topic. This short book contains relevant and sometimes controversial insights of interest to professional music educators. In this review I will provide a brief summary of the author’s primary arguments accompanied by critical commentary.Johnson argues that commercial forces in our society limit serious reflective discourse on music. The marketplace treats music as a commodity which derives its value from relative commercial success. In this context, classical music is relegated to one possible cultural choice among many legitimate options and is in danger of losing its distinctive features as an art form that transcends commercial concerns. Preference for particular musical products becomes an identity marker for an individual’s place within society, and criticism of a particular style of music is perceived as a personal attack. The process of turning classical music into a commodity has been aided by critics who have condemned the Western [End Page 96] canon as elitist, patriarchal, and arrogant. These critics have instead advocated a democratization of culture, placing greater emphasis on the validity of popular art forms and active participation in music-making rather than the more passive contemplation. Johnson describes this as a “pseudo-democratic” attack which encourages downward social mobility. When combined with the omnipresence of commercial culture, this approach undermines individual musical value by assuming the equal validity of all aesthetic judgments. Democracy is damaged when, refusing to discriminate between cultural products, society fails to recognize human individuality and excellence.Johnson is at his strongest when he argues for the importance of classical music fulfilling its function as art. The author argues that different types of music fulfill different functions. In contemporary society music is valued and chosen for how it is used. Music is described as “good” when it functions to provide background music for activities or when it successfully complements or enhances the listeners’ moods. Focusing solely on social use or reception, however, tends to neglect objective differences in the formal structure of music. This is the point at which Johnson begins to distinguish between classical and popular music. Popular music is composed to ensure a uniformity of affect, and deliberately avoids formal or harmonic complexity. As an aspect of popular culture, it is tied to contemporary fashion trends and rapidly becomes obsolete. Like other types of fashion, music becomes a means for expressing a current position within a larger social and cultural space. It is the music of youth; its commercial saturation of the culture blurs the boundaries between youth and adulthood. Johnson claims that the process of commercialization leads to a bland standardization. Classical music can also function as a type of popular music when it submits itself to market processes, but in doing so the music loses its distinctive features.In his discussion on popular music, Johnson presents what might be his most controversial claim: that popular music serves a pornographic function. He defines pornography as “the process by which the humane is reduced to the status of things” (p. 59) and argues that popular music takes pleasure in debasing humanity by reducing individuals to material commodities and denying the spiritual. This contention echoes Allan Bloom’s concern in The Closing of the American Mind that rock music desensitizes and debases youth by destroying imagination and deadening their capacity for passion and wonder. The strength of this language undermines Johnson’s contention in his introduction to the paperback edition that he is not trying to set up a binary opposition between art and popular music in which the classical is “better.” Moreover, if pornography is a form of dehumanization and is a legitimate concern in music, it is important to point out that such a charge is not exclusive to... (shrink)

_Expanding Curriculum Theory, Second Edition_ carries through the major focus of the original volume—to reflect on the influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of "lines of flight" and its application to curriculum theorizing. What is different is that the lines of flight have since shifted and produced expanded understandings of this concept for curriculum theory and for education in general. This edition reflects the impact of events that have contributed to this shift, in particular the logic of school policy changes (...) and reforms in the past decade, and the continued explosion of social media and its effect on the collective understanding of how both "knowledge" and "education" work as forms of repression. The introduction updates the text and puts it into current debates in the field and in the larger socio-economic milieu. New dis/positions are presented that explore central questions circulating within and outside curriculum studies. Exciting scholarship on a range of topics includes notions of desire and commodities, youth culture and violence, new directions in curriculum theory, Eco-Ethical consciousness, new Deleuzian views of normality, the diffusion of technology and lines of flight in transnational curriculum inquiry. (shrink)

On September 9, 2009, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that officials from Everett School District #2 in Mill Creek, Washington did not violate student Kathryn Nurre’s constitutional rights to free speech by denying the Jackson High School Wind Ensemble the opportunity to perform an instrumental version of Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria at the district’s graduation ceremony. This philosophical study addresses implications of this legal case regarding religious music and free speech in public school music programs within the (...) United States. Two questions are investigated: the issue of defining religious music and its relationship to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and the issue of whether students have a right to musical expression protected by the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause. Conclusions suggest that some music in the Western classical tradition cannot be easily categorized as exclusively sacred or secular, and that performances of such music can be supported on both philosophical grounds and through the precedent of traditional performance practice and usage. Further, when students are allowed a choice of repertoire, schools should foster good citizenship by respecting the free expression of students as long as choices are not unduly influenced by the teacher and such performances occur within the context of a respectful and neutral environment that does not overtly demand a religious response from audience members. (shrink)

Imagery has played an important, albeit controversial, role in the study of memory psychophysics. In this commentary we critically examine the available data bearing on whether pictorial based depictions of remembered perceptual events are activated and scanned in each of a number of different psychophysical tasks.

Chapter 1 opens with the example of a PTEV course at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, which combines exploration of vocation, reflective practice, and participation in a learning community. This course combines the study of classic texts with new questions about what can be learned about how to live in the present from understanding how individuals in the past achieved successful lives through searching for purpose and meaning. By reanimating classic aspects of liberal education in this way, PTEV (...) programs like Santa Clara’s were able to successfully address in new ways challenges to educating the “whole student” that derive from the particular stresses affecting this generation of undergraduates, on the one hand, and the current misalignment among the components of college life, on the other. (shrink)

Chapter 6 looks at efforts outside the PTEV to revitalize liberal learning by integrating the academic and social apprenticeships around themes of purpose, service, and community. The chapter examines programs at Harvard University, Wagner College, and Wake Forest University The chapter then proceeds to examines several efforts to spur similar endeavors by national organizations such as the Bringing Theory to Practice program of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, arguing that these developments take on fuller significance when they are (...) recognized as forms of humanistic education aiming at the cultivation of practical wisdom. It has been the mission of liberal learning to provide both training in detached, analytical thinking and yet also cultivate engagement with the world and a search for values. These capacities, at least as much as any specialized skills, are likely to prove key resources for confronting the challenges of the 21st century. (shrink)

Ethics, architecture and philosophy -- Architecture, ethics and aesthetics -- Architecture and culture -- Experiencing architetcure -- Writing on 'the Wall': memory, monuments and memorials -- Building community: new urbanism, planning and democracy.

When one takes the evolution of operant behavior as prototype, one sees that the term replication is too tied to the peculiarities of genetic evolution. A more general term is recurrence. The important problem raised by recurrence is not “information” but relationship: deciding when two occurrences belong to the same lineage. That is solved by looking at common environmental effects.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The AJP Best Article Prize WinnerWilliam M. Breichner, Journals PublisherTHE AJP BEST ARTICLE PRIZE FOR 2021 HAS BEEN PRESENTED BY THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY TO ERIKA VALDIVIESOYALE UNIVERSITYfor her contribution to scholarship in “Dissecting a Forgery,” AJP 142.3 (Fall 2021): 493–533.Valdivieso conclusively demonstrates that Exsul Immeritus, a letter in an Italian collection attributed to the mestizo Jesuit Blas Valera and dated by some to the 17th century, is (...) a forgery written in the second half of the 20th century. Using philological tools—close linguistic analysis and source criticism—Valdivieso makes a decisive contribution to the field of colonial Latin American history. Yet the article is irresistible for scholars of classical antiquity as well, engaging as it does with ungrammatical Latin, Italianisms, and a patchwork of citations from Roman authors, the Vulgate, and the Latin works of Dante, Ficino, and Politian. Valdivieso shows that the letter depends on critical editions and compilations that were not available until much later, establishing a terminus post quem of 1952. The article raises tantalizing questions about the provenance and validation of the whole collection.Although Valdivieso is not the first scholar to claim that the letter is a forgery, she is the first to pay close attention to the Latin. If authentic, the letter would provide otherwise unattested information about the textual transmission of Petronius and Dante as well as Valera’s life and works. The letter also makes claims that subordinate indigenous accounts to Valera’s own and alter what we know about the Incas and the Spanish conquest of Peru. Valdivieso demonstrates masterful control of different fields of study while captivating and educating the reader at every stage.With its acute and highly engaging philological detective work, clarity, and critical service to other disciplines, Valdivieso’s article is a prime example of the vitality of new directions in classical philology. Rigorous and compelling, the article not only definitively settles an ongoing debate but also brings excitement and distinction to known methods.Sonia Sabnis (chair) Alain Gowing Matthew FarmerThe Thirty-fourth Annual Best Article Prize of $1,000 will be awarded for the best article to appear in the Journal in 2022. The Press would like to thank the members of the committee for their time and effort.William M. Breichner, Journals PublisherJohns Hopkins University PressCopyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The Rho GTPases—Rho, Rac and Cdc42—act as molecular switches, cycling between an active GTP‐bound state and an inactive GDP‐bound state, to regulate the actin cytoskeleton. It has recently become apparent that the Rho GTPases can be activated in subcellular zones that appear semi‐stable, yet are dynamically maintained. These Rho GTPase activity zones are associated with a variety of fundamental biological processes including symmetric and asymmetric cytokinesis and cellular wound repair. Here we review the basic features of Rho GTPase activity zones, (...) suggest that these zones represent a fundamental signaling mechanism, and discuss the implications of zone properties from the perspective of both their function and how they are likely to be controlled. BioEssays 28: 983–993, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)