This chapter contains sections titled: Objectification Physical Bonds? Moral Bonds? Epistemological Bonds? The Upshot.

This book takes a new approach to the question, "Is the philosopher to be seen as universal human being or as eccentric?". Through a reading of the Theaetetus,Pappas first considers how we identify philosophers - how do they appear, in particular how do they dress? The book moves to modern philosophical treatments of fashion, and of "anti-fashion". He argues that aspects of the fashion/anti-fashion debate apply to antiquity, indeed that nudity at the gymnasia was an (...) anti-fashion. Thus anti-fashion provides a way of viewing ancient philosophy's orientation toward a social world in which, for all its true existence elsewhere, philosophy also has to live. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Trouble with TruthDavid NovitzTruth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective, by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen; 481 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, £45.00 cloth.Lamarque and Olsen have written a surprisingly old-fashioned book. For one thing, it is carefully argued and altogether willing to sacrifice the sensational for the painstakingly difficult. Because its style is sometimes reminiscent of the careful labored philosophy of Oxford in the sixties, (...) there are many who will yawn, others who will grumble at the very idea that arguments can be sound or unsound, and assertions true or false. As a result, the book, which is a wholesome antidote to pretentiousness in literary theory and philosophy, runs the risk of being ignored by those who most need it.IThe story of the book is easily told. It begins with an excellent and accessible account of fiction (Part 1) which is used to dissect the pretensions of postmodernist literary theory—most especially the tendency (as the authors see it) to regard all discourses as fictional (Part 2). Although fiction and literature are identifiable as such “only within the context of certain practices,” each belongs to its own distinctive practice and should not be confused with the other. Even so, just as a proper understanding of fiction requires that we adopt the right “stance,” literary value can be apprehended only by taking the conventionally [End Page 350] prescribed stance—the “literary stance”; one which cannot be explicated in terms of the concept of truth. Theirs is a no-truth theory of literature that purports to distinguish literature from philosophy, and to offer an account of literary merit in terms of “universal values” that transcend particular cultures (Part 3).Needless to say, the value of this book does not only reside in the story it tells. Since it is a philosophical work and forms part of the practice of philosophy, the book is concerned with the development of our understanding, and not with the development of an intriguing narrative. In short, the value of the book—and it has considerable value—resides in careful analyses and well-developed arguments, in the understanding it promotes, in its engagement with other positions on the topic, and in its commendable clarity. Presumably, then, its value is to be determined by adopting not a “literary stance,” but what, following the authors, we could call a philosophical stance. Put thus, we see at once that whatever else this book achieves, it also invites reflection on philosophy as a practice, and on its relation to what the authors regard as the practice and the institution of literature.But why can’t philosophy develop and deploy narratives? The short answer is that it can, and that some philosophers have done as much. 1 And it is arguable, too, that there are philosophical tracts that would be much improved by doing so. But most traditional Anglo-American philosophy does not incorporate narratives. This, it seems to me, has much to do with fashion. As presently conducted, Anglo-American philosophy is a practice that emphasizes truth and reason to the exclusion of narrative and literary adornment. And so, in this respect, it is very different from literature—or at least this is what Lamarque and Olsen propose to argue. For according to the “no-truth” theory of literature that they defend, “the concept of truth has no central or ineliminable role in critical practice” (p. 1), and it is simply false that literary works “have the constitutive aim of advancing truths about human concerns...” (p. 368).IIThe argument that follows is a responsible and perceptive philosophical treatment of the relationship between fiction, literature, and truth. Fiction, we are told, cannot be explained as a type of language, nor can it be explained in terms of the truth-value of its sentences. Rather, it must be explained as a rule-governed practice, “central to [End Page 351] which are a certain mode of utterance (fictive utterance) and a certain complex of attitudes (the fictive stance)” (p. 32). Fictive utterance and response depend on the practice of fictive story-telling which is mastered at an early age (p. 33). In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene DescartesRichard A. WatsonAndrea Nye. The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene Descartes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xiii + 187. Cloth, $57.95. Paper, $18.95.Princess Elisabeth was an acute, persistent critic of Descartes's philosophy. Because he liked her and she was a princess, Descartes did not dismiss her (...) criticisms as he did those of Gassendi and Hobbes. How can an immaterial mind interact with a material body? How can God determine all our actions and yet give us free will? Elisabeth was dissatisfied with Descartes's answer that an all-powerful God can do anything even if we cannot understand how.Andrea Nye analyzes the correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes to support the thesis that Elisabeth developed and defended a worldly philosophy of life in opposition to the unworldly rules Descartes offered for living a tranquil and happy life. Descartes said she should focus on the separation of the mind from the body to avoid disturbing the intellect with sensory matters. Think positively about such nice things as birds and flowers and not of bad things that happen to one. Descartes told Elisabeth that "there are no events so dreadful, nor so absolutely bad in the judgments of people, that a person of spirit cannot look on them with a bias that makes them appear favorable" (48). If we do our best to find out the right course of action and act accordingly, then even if the results are bad, we have no reason for remorse or recrimination, but can be happy that we have done the best we can. Descartes even says that a person who follows his rules can view everything that happens to him, even the worst, as though these events were taking place in a theatre, for in the end they do not impinge upon the ultimate happiness of one's immortal soul.Elisabeth, earnestly. sardonically, and sometimes with annoyance responds that this is perhaps possible for a single man of independent means with few civil and personal relationships, but for someone engaged in family affairs, royal politics, and social interaction with other human beings, Descartes's philosophy of life is both impossible and wrong. One never knows what is best; even if one did know, it is difficult to carry it out; and finally, if the results are bad, then one is after all responsible. One would be inhuman to deny fault, monstrous to deny moral responsibility. Above all, Elisabeth says, one should not view one's own life as theatre. One must be responsible for oneself and others.Nye casts this as a difference between Descartes's abstract and Elisabeth's particularist approaches to life, but also as a contrast between those who can live a disengaged life and those who cannot. Some of the amusement in Nye's perceptive discussions comes from her showing how Descartes's passions often run away with him, and how Elisabeth gently turns his own rules back onto him. [End Page 277]Nye's analyses of the correspondence are excellent, but she makes some mistakes about the lives of Descartes and Elisabeth. Nye explains Descartes's coolness by his having suffered from a "motherless infancy" (129), even speaking of "the mother's milk denied him as a child" and calling him an "orphan" (156), which he was not. His mother died thirteen months after his birth, but he had a wet nurse. Descartes may never have tasted his own mother's milk, but he was never deprived of nursing. Children were often sent to live with wet nurses for as long as four years, although Descartes is traditionally said to have been raised by his grandmother. In any event, such psychoanalyzing is off the mark.Nye also says that Descartes was asked by Queen Christina to write a ballet. She cites the wrong ballet and attributes a verse from the right ballet incorrectly, but beyond that, there is no evidence either that Descartes wrote verses for a ballet or that Christina asked him to.Then Nye speaks of Descartes's daughter Francine... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cross-Examining Socrates. A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early DialoguesMark L. McPherranJohn Beversluis. Cross-Examining Socrates. A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 416. Cloth, $69.95.This book is a valuable and thoroughly-researched contribution to the study of Plato's Socratic dialogues. Its fine qualities stem in part from its cathartic motivations: for years Beversluis suppressed his ever-growing reservations concerning (...) the "standard picture" of Socrates's interaction with his various interlocutors (16). On Beversluis's account, this position naively takes Socrates's own apologia at face-value, portraying him as a self-sacrificing soul-therapist who treats his corrupt, one-dimensional interlocutors fairly, despite their many carefully drawn faults (e.g., stupidity, vanity, and violence, followed by face-saving exits). Beversluis aims to rectify this picture by retrying Socrates in a class-action suit on behalf of Socrates's interlocutors—who, he thinks, the standard account has quite unfairly maligned (while it has simultaneously ignored Socrates's "dark side"; e.g., his unscrupulous, hypocritical, and harmful tactics [esp. his conscious use of fallacy]).Beversluis's book contains a Preface, Introduction, and seventeen chapters, finishing with a very good bibliography, general index, and indexes of passages cited, names, and modern authors. Chapter 1, "The Socratic Interlocutor," examines the structure of Plato's Socratic dialogues and the role of their interlocutors. Beversluis contrasts Plato's dialogues with those produced by Augustine, Anselm, Hume, and Berkeley, arguing that a key difference between them lies in the fact that Socrates is presented as having no system to expound, championing instead the intrinsic value of philosophizing. Also, Socrates's interlocutors are drawn from a "narrow sociological group," (29) and are unprepared for their (unpleasant) encounters with Socrates (31).Chapter 2, "Elenchus and sincere assent," cogently argues that the "say what you believe" constraint on Socrates's use of the elenchus represents a consensus in need of critical reappraisal. In particular, Beversluis contends that Socrates often relies on qualified or uncomprehending assent, and that our texts do not support the idea that Socrates never argues with the soul-ignoring intention to win an argument using faulty argumentation and willful misrepresentation of the interlocutor's statements.The next fourteen chapters closely assess Socrates's encounters with Crito, Ion, Hippias, Laches and Nicias, Charmides and Critias, Euthyphro, Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Hippocrates, Protagoras, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. The book ends with a chapter on "The last days of the Socratic interlocutor," outlining the view that Plato's later work features non-elenctic spokesmen who are sensitive to the moral dangers of careless (i.e., Socrates's) elenchus-wielding.In his central chapters, Beversluis argues that "Saint Socrates" is in fact a philosophical [End Page 583] Jekyl and Hyde. Although scholars have celebrated the former philanthropic figure as a model philosopher, that has obscured his Hyde-like, predatory behavior towards innocents such as Euthyphro and Crito. However, here readers are themselves given a mixed bag: while Beversluis offers, for example, a detailed and smart defense of Cephalus against those who portray him as a petty-minded, superstitious, moral fraud (Chapter 9)—as well as sensitive, careful analyses of Socrates's less-than-clear arguments throughout—other chapters occasionally go overboard in their apologetic efforts. One example will have to suffice here.According to Beversluis, Euthyphro's typical characterization as a pretentious, dense, father-bashing, religious zealot who "would have done well in the Nazi Youth Movement," (R. F. Holland; 163), has drawn attention away from the fact that Socrates's treatment of Euthyphro is abusive and ineffectual. But although Beversluis rightly sees that the figure of Euthyphro is being used in a complex fashion by Plato, his account is marred in several ways. For example, although it is likely that Socrates does not himself possess complete definitions of virtue-concepts such as justice (164-169), unlike Euthyphro, Socrates can presumably provide elenchus-proof defenses of his own non-traditionalist claims. Again, while Socrates may overwhelm Euthyphro with his principles of proper definition (Eu. 5c-d, 6d-e), proceeding on uncomprehending, merely verbal agreement (169-177), Plato surely did not intend... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project by Ann HartleVicente Raga RosalenyHARTLE, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2022. ix + 178 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $30.00Why are we witnessing increasing social polarization in Western societies? What has happened to make our liberal democracies so ideologically charged? Professor Ann (...) Hartle's book tries to answer these and other questions in line with the concept of civility that, according to her thesis, Michel de Montaigne created in early modernity and that is about to disappear in our day. Not in vain is Montaigne the protagonist of this book, given that Professor Hartle is a world-renowned specialist on the author of the Essays, although in this case she is interested in the transformations that gave rise to modernity in order to understand our present day. She reads Montaigne for a better interpretation of some central problems of our time, such as the difficulty to speak freely that is experienced on university campuses and, in general, the increasing politicization of our civil societies.Thus, in the first place, Professor Hartle's work interrogates the origins of civility, the social bond created in modernity. To this end, she exposes what happened in the time of Montaigne, when societies, based on the classical and Christian tradition, were plunged into a general crisis. This is what the French essayist detected, and it led him to propose a new type of bond. For this, it is necessary to free oneself from tradition, which had legitimized the division between masters and slaves, the source of all conflicts.Montaigne's movement is philosophical in character: It consists of a split carried out in his Essays between the natural human being and the philosophical observer, which leads to a break with traditional moral standards, identified with Nature. The new human being, thus unfolded, can choose his own hierarchy of values and address the good he chooses with his own will (although this will be a will purified of particularisms, without excessive self-esteem). Such self-awareness, achieved by Montaigne as an accidental philosopher, is concretized in the predominance of the concept of judgment, in the ability to freely choose our possibilities (and not ends dictated by Nature).The new world thus created, Hartle explains, gave rise to the liberal order. It is true that Montaigne was not a theorist, but in his work it is possible to find the rupture of the traditional hierarchy between masters [End Page 351] and slaves, now considered as equals before the law, which is above all, and which is the fruit of reason. In this civil society, human beings no longer dominate each other, and each peacefully pursues his purposes. It is the state, as the embodiment of the law, that regulates everything, except the space of freedom gained with the emergence of the modern public sphere.In this context, the concept of authenticity makes sense, which, according to Professor Hartle, is the best reflection of the breakdown of the traditional order and the disappearance of its moral community. Now each individual pursues his purposes and is no longer to fulfill the ends of a universal human nature. That is why the bond of civility, in which the absolute autonomy of the subject is recognized, as well as his equality before the law, replaces the moral ties of the traditional community and its hierarchies. It is the French thinker who best exemplifies this transit, by showing himself openly in his Essays as a common subject who pursues his purposes and who relates to others as equals, no longer as someone superior, capable of disputing merit, and dominating others.However, this new society and its civil bonds are in crisis; civility fades, or that is Professor Hartle's pessimistic conclusion. Today we are witnessing an ideologization of previously depoliticized areas, such as the university, with the demand for the use of politically correct language and the fear of expressing oneself freely, especially when one's own opinions do not align with the current political trends. The failure... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 57-74 [Access article in PDF] An American Novelist in the Philosopher King's Court Thomas P. Crocker I MORAL PHILOSOPHY has languished long within the confines of something like the following purported dilemma: either moral discourse is the discourse of principles and rules rationally grounded, or moral discourse is the discourse of passions and personal preferences, clothed in the garments of rational justification. Alasdair MacIntyre's (...) disquieting suggestion—that our language of moral debate is nothing more than the "simulacra of morality"—provides a grim outlook for moral philosophy. 1 Indeed, when moral inquiry is conducted in terms of ethical theory, without independent grounds upon which competing arguments can meet, philosophical discourse, embedded in competing theories, seems to be only so much cacophonous clamor, rationally convincing no one except those who already accept the terms employed by their own theory. One way to avoid this philosophical effluvium produced by moral philosophy is to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein in rejecting the very terms upon which it is made (the distinction between the particular perspective and the universal standpoint), recognizing that moral inquiry begins from where we already are—the everyday world in which we find ourselves.Towards the end of avoidance here, I wish to add to this simmering background of ethical discord Mark Twain's story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 2 Twain's controversial voice provides a place for moral thinking unavailable through strictly theoretical discourse. 3 And reading Huck and Jim's story through the philosophical avoidance of Wittgenstein's latent ethical thought provides the transformative possibility of seeing the domain of the ethical in a new light. 4 [End Page 57]Although Twain boldly states at the beginning of his novel that "persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished," 5 he does show us without the need of theory or dogma how a change in one's way of seeing is intertwined with a change in one's way of living; this connection between ways of seeing and ways of living makes possible a kind of moral transformation that characterizes the change in Huck's perception of Jim, from that of a slave to that of a friend. This moral conversion is much like the perceptual transformations that Ludwig Wittgenstein considers in his discussions of "noticing an aspect," 6 in which a shift in what one sees is connected to the background against which the perceptual object is seen and to the ways in which one is prepared to respond to it. When confronting perceptual ambiguity, as in the case of Jastrow's ambiguous duck/rabbit figure, one looks to the context and background to clarify what one sees, just as one does with semantic ambiguity. In coming to see in one way or the other, nothing is explicitly stated, nothing is put into argumentative form. And in Twain's narrative, we are not given arguments for why we should see Jim as human, nor does the narrative recount Huck's confrontations with moral arguments; rather, through his interactions with Jim, Huck is shown Jim's humanity, his friendship, and we, the readers, are shown the possibility of a moral transformation that is not determined by or grounded in rules or philosophical arguments.The moral realist might agree that such a transformation could be motivated in ways other than rational arguments, but to be legitimate, it must be possible to reconstruct the transformation according to rational considerations. The ability to "get behind" the transformation in some justificatory way is what I am denying here (as is Wittgenstein); for what one finds when one "gets behind" is another situated language game that is itself not open to question (though it could be if we direct our attention towards it). There is no final "getting behind" the things we do and the situations in which we do them, and hence there is no final justificatory argument one can give—as Wittgenstein famously says, "If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:604 Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Alix Genter Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945–1969 The 1956 image of Sunny and Doris (figure 1) is a typical one when conjuring images of butch-femme lesbianism in the post-World War II era: a femme looking glamorous in a dress, makeup, and heels, and a dapper butch sporting (...) a man’s suit and tie and a slick D.A. haircut with a pompadour and one casual curl in front.1 The butch’s masculine appearance and the sharp gendered contrast between the two make their queerness highly legible, a standard feature in images of postwar butch-femme lesbians in both the public and scholarly imagination.2 Indeed, lesbian visibility at midcentury was almost entirely dependent on gender transgressions in the form of “mannishness,” demarcating butches as the public face of lesbianism—a role that scholars such as Joan Nestle, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline Davis, and Donna Penn argue had powerful political implications. Butches not only challenged normative conceptions of gender and claimed lesbian social space, they also defiantly announced their queerness through their looks, thereby expressing women’s sexual autonomy and acting as vehicles for introducing others to gay life. Alongside them, femmes, while generally undetectable by 1. D.A. refers to “duck’s ass,” a popular hairstyle from the 1950s. The hair was slicked back into a point at the nape of the neck that resembled a duck’s tail. 2. In addition to dress and appearance, postwar butch-femme lesbianism was defined by gendered behaviors and mannerisms, and by roles in courtship, relationships, and sex. Alix Genter 605 themselves, proclaimed their own lesbianism and contributed to these modes of visual resistance.3 In these analyses, femmes are incorporated into lesbian rebellion by association with butches—their willingness to stand beside butches and be read as queer and to provide love and support for their partners who bore the brunt of homophobic abuse because of their overt gender expression. Butch visibility remains the foundation of butch-femme resistance, and legible butch masculinity remains an idealized icon of subversive lesbian power. But what if butches in postwar America were not as visible as commonly believed? Consider Miriam Wolfson and May Brown, for example (figure 2), both butches in New York City in the 1950s. Wolfson sees herself as a shy-but-aggressive butch who has always felt masculine, and she sees her friend May Brown as “the butch of the century.”4 Yet, the image shows two women in skirts with feminine hairdos and hints of lipstick. Photographs such as this one demonstrate the visual disconnect between what one might expect butchness to look like and what it did look like for some women during this era. While New York City’s butches certainly employed the classic suit-and-tie and jeans-and-T-shirt looks, they also conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions. In doing so, they offered a range of ways of interpreting butchness in their everyday lives that did not necessarily rely on the men’s clothing and styling that made lesbians visible in larger US culture. This article interrogates the relationship between masculine style and lesbian self-presentation during the postwar period. Queer legibility could enable entrance into lesbian communities and attract one’s next lover as well as provoke hostility, violence, and arrest. In this context, appearance carried tremendous significance, and butches and femmes employed diverse strategies to both convey and conceal their queerness, 3. See Joan Nestle, “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” in her A Restricted Country, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 92–102; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Donna Penn, “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Postwar America,” in Gender and American History since 1890, ed. Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), 106–24. 4. Miriam Wolfson, interview with author, New York, NY, July 1, 2010. 606 Alix Genter knowing that the consequences varied by time, place, and... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Is It To Be Fashionable? Appearing Fashionable Two Concepts of Fashion Fashion and Alienation The Metaphysics of Fashion.

The late Vivienne Westwood sketched a role for fashion that elevates it from the prosaic to the status of art, as something important, life-enhancing, and worthy of pursuit. Here, a philosophical treatment of Westwood’s vision of fashion that does justice to the artistic and life-enhancing value that fashion can realise is offered, using an emergent theory in contemporary analytic aesthetics. The virtue theory of art delineates the intrinsic worth of art in terms of the opportunities it provides (...) for us to exercise and cultivate virtues such as courage, self-expression, imagination, wit, or authenticity. Our engagement with art can subsequently be genuinely life-enhancing in lieu of the constitutive role the virtues play in living well. The present study takes Westwood’s claims as a jumping-off point, considering how they speak not just to her own designs but to our relationship with our clothes more broadly. Fashion is defended as a practice that performs this function in analogous ways to other genres of art and thus has clear artistic value as well as enables us to live well. Given this potential, just as Westwood claimed, there are reasons to perform the practice well because it has importance for the ways in which it can realise artistic value and aid us in living well. (shrink)

Aristotle�s account on natural slavery is neither misleading nor paradoxical, but plausible even though controversial, unlike many commentators think of. On his view natural masters are essentially the virtuous people, viz. those who have been perfected in their process of growing, and natural slaves are essentially the vicious people, viz. those who have been injured or corrupted in some way in their growing up so as to suffer from a lack of autonomous practical rationality. Of course, many barbarians are (...) in this state, but there is no need to presume that all of them are. More to the point, some Greeks will be in this state, especially the many and he who the many have a high regard for. Because of this state, slavery is for the better allowing a slave�s life to become more worthwhile as an instrumental part of the master�s living a good life. Particularly, nature requires that some humans will be able to attain happiness some other will not. Masters and slaves are linked through the rational pursuit of happiness by the political community where they play different roles but equally required. Thus, master and slave will form a single system whose working unity does confirm that a clear separation between that which dominates and that is being dominated must always take place for natural things to be according the best standard. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. By HANS Kii'NG. Translated by J. R. Stephenson. New York: Crossroad, 1987. Pp. 601. $37.50 (cloth bound). This is an imposing book (first German edition, 1970), not only in length, but in breadth of presentation. Kiing, in the introduction, outlines the philosophical, theological and cultural milieus out of which Hegel's theology (...) and philosophy emerged. In the next 400 pages (seven chapters), Kiing thoroughly articulates the historical development of Hegel's theological and philosophical thought as expressed in his successive writings, specifically examining and evaluating the christological elements. Kiing's final chapter interprets Hegel's Christology in light of recent biblical historical/critical methodology, by way of a prolegomenon to a future Christology. The book concludes with five integral historical/theological excursus which take up specific questions that arise out of this Hegelian enterprise, for example: "Does God suffer?," "The Dialectic of the Attributes of God," "Immutability of God?". In the preface to this English edition, Kiing states that the purpose of this work is to "provide theologians with an introduction to Hegel's theological and christological thought.... [It will be] a many-leveled 'invitation' into Hegel's life and 'thought, with particular reference to his religious world, and then into his theology and Christology " (p. ix). "Moreover,.this book is an introduction to Hegel's thought by way of 'prolegomena to a future Christology '. In ·these pages we endeavour to return... a provisional reply that will take us some way in the right direction" (p. x). Why did Kiing look to Hegel for the clue to a future Christology? His thesis is that "the biblical message concerning a God who is by no means separated from the world but rather operates within it, and who is by no means stuck immovable and immutable in an unhistorical and suprahistorical realm but rather performs living acts in hi&tory can be better understood [along the lines of Hegelian thought] than in terms of the metaphysics of either classical Greece or the middle ages" (p. xii). Any student of historical or philosophical theology/christology will be captivated by Kiing's treatment of.the development of Hegel's ilhought. Undoubtedly he has mastered Hegel's life, writings and 698 694 BOOK REVIEWS thought, and presents these in a clear, complete and engaging manner. Kiing notes that Hegel, beginning with his student days at Tiihingen, was influenced by three strong cultural and intellectual currents: the Enlightenment as it specifically culminated in the thought of Kant, the French Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic movement. Kiing shows that, while the young Hegel was acquainted with the Bible, and even,though he already displayed an interest in the role of religion (folk religion) as formative of society, nowhere was he "seized in a lively and inward fashion by the Christian faith, by the figure of Christ himself" (p. 54). To rthe contrary, Hegel's early experience of Christianity was lifeless and joyless. During his subsequent time in Bern, Hegel's evaluation of Jesus un· derwent a transformation. Hegel became fascinated with Greek religion, not because it was true, but because it embodied the culture and spirit of the people. Developing this train of thought, he stated that "The supreme end of man is morality, and his religious bent is pre· eminent among his aptitudes for promoting that end" (p. 69). In light of this, Hegel considered Jesus,to lack the humane and universal scope of Socrates, who was " the paradigm of a free, good and humane Hellenism and of harmony with nature, world and state " (p. 63). Jesus' teaching was too much an authoritarian imposition upon people rarther than, like Socrates', a nurturing of their inner spirit and life. Shordy, as reflected in his Life of Jesus, Hegel's view of Jesus was to change. Now he was placed above Socrates, not because he was acknowledged to be the eternal Son of God, nor because he reconciled mankind to God by his death on the cross, but rather because he per· sonified the divine ideal of virtue that is so necessary for social order. " Whart is... (shrink)

Philosophers are uniquely qualified to negotiate a balance between the reflective potential of globalization and the great routine powers of nations, states, tribes, and families. Here's how we can do it: we can teach the difference between playing a game and choosing a game. From time immemorial people of all tribes and cultures have marked a sharp distinction between those individuals deemed qualified by age, expertise, or status to choose or write the rules, and those other, lesser individuals who are (...) obliged merely to obey those rules. This is the traditional difference between a person, on the one hand, and a utensil, on the other: persona est sui iuris; servus non est persona ("A person chooses its own laws; a slave is not a person"). Persons, but not utensils such as shoes, have, and deserve, good will. To a person, a culture is a means of creating a sustainable humane environment. To a culture, a person is a means for the culture to replicate itself. Placing culture first is a tradition we can no longer afford to maintain, because it makes enduring peace impossible. The purposes utensils can be made to serve have become too terrible (and, with the advent of global communication, too obvious) for the human race to endure, and the capacity of the voiceless to express themselves violently is increasing without limit. Hence we must create new traditions in which we teach all our children reflective thought, with which rules are pragmatically justified rather than unquestionable. To that end I propose to distinguish random, routine, and reflective thought and action. Each of these three levels of thought and action has its costs and its benefits; together they contain the entire range of human possibility. Three familiar philosophical concepts support my claim that reflective thought and action can and must be taught to and learned by all. (shrink)

Pharmacogenetics is an emerging biotechnology concerned with understanding the genetic basis of drug response, and promises to transform the development, marketing and prescription of medicines. This paper is concerned with analysing the move towards segmented drug markets, which is implicit in the commercial development of pharmacogenetics. It is claimed that in future who gets a particular drug will be determined by their genetic make up. Drawing on ideas from the sociology of expectations we examine how pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are (...) constructing, responding to and realising particular ‘visions’ or expectations of pharmacogenetics and market stratification. We argue that the process of market segmentation remains uncertain, but that the outcome will be fashioned according to the convergence and divergence of the interests of key commercial actors. Qualitative data based both on interviews with industry executives and company documentation will be used to explore how different groups of companies are developing pharmacogenetics in distinct ways, and what consequences these different pathways might have for both clinical practice and health policy. In particular, the analysis will show a convergence of interests between biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies for creating segmented markets for new drugs, but a divergence of interest in segmenting established markets. Whilst biotechnology firms have a strong incentive to innovate, the pharmaceutical industry has no commercial interest in segmenting markets for existing products. This has important implications, as many of the claimed public health benefits of pharmacogenetics will derive from changing the prescribing of existing medicines. One significant implication of this is that biotechnology companies who wish to apply pharmacogenetics to existing medicines will have to explore an alternative convergence of interests with healthcare payers and providers . Healthcare providers may have a strong incentive to use pharmacogenetics to make the prescribing of existing medicine more cost-effective. However, we conclude by suggesting that a question mark hangs over their ability to provide the necessary economic and structural resources to bring such a vision to fruition. (shrink)

The Qur'an began to descend in the Arabian Peninsula in a period when the traditions of ignorance were dominant. In the period of ignorance, when weak and powerless people were oppressed, excluded, exploited, humiliated and subjected to various oppressions, being right was not enough. It was also necessary to have the power and strength to get his due. In such a period when the strong are generally considered right, the Qur'an considers every individual created by Allah as a valuable (...) being. As a matter of fact, there are many basic principles in the Qur'an that reinforce the feelings of brotherhood among individuals, strengthen the social fabric and increase trust in society. One of these basic principles is to defend the rights of every weak person regardless of the person's lineage, race, gender and status. In this context, in our study, first of all, the analysis of the meaning of the word of poor in the semantics of the Qur’an, the attitude of the Prophet towards poverty and wealth and which one is superior has been briefly touched upon. Then, information is given about the difference between the concepts of faqîr (the poor person), miskîn (the needy person). After dealing with the basic principles necessary for the protection and care of orphans and for them to live a virtuous life, the situation of oppressed slaves and mustad'af people in society is discussed. (shrink)

Medieval European culture was obsessed with clothing. In _Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High-and Late-Medieval England,_ Andrea Denny-Brown explores the central impact of clothing in medieval ideas about impermanence and the ethical stakes of human transience. Studies of dress frequently contend with a prevailing cultural belief that bodily adornment speaks to interests that are frivolous, superficial, and cursory. Taking up the vexed topic of clothing’s inherent changeability, Denny-Brown uncovers an important new genealogy of clothing as a representational (...) device, one imbued with a surprising philosophical pedigree and a long history of analytical weightiness. Considering writers as diverse as Boethius, Alain de Lille, William Durand, Chaucer, and Lydgate, among others, Denny-Brown tracks the development of a literary and cultural trope that begins in the sixth century and finds its highest expression in the vernacular poetry of fifteenth-century England. Among the topics covered are Boethian discourses on the care of the self, the changing garments of Lady Fortune, novelty in ecclesiastical fashions, the sartorial legacy of Chaucer’s Griselda, and the emergence of the English gallant. These literary treatments of vestimentary variation—which develop an aesthetics of change itself—enhance our understanding of clothing as a phenomenological and philosophical category in medieval Europe and illustrate the centrality of the Middle Ages to theories of aesthetics, of materiality, and of cultural change. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 137-139 [Access article in PDF] Gareth B. Matthews. Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 137. Cloth, $29.95 Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith. The Philosophy of Socrates. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Pp. x + 290. Paper $22.00. Matthews' little book tracks the course of Socrates' perplexity, which, Matthews contends, starts out (...) as an obstacle to successful inquiry, but becomes, eventually, itself the target of inquiry. Matthews regards as quite genuine the perplexity that Socrates professes in certain of the early dialogues—Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro—largely, however, because Matthews himself finds Socrates' questions so stubbornly persistent. Yet, couldn't Socrates, at least with respect to some of his questions, experience no state of confusion, no perplexity, but, nevertheless, profess perplexity? Perhaps Socrates' confessions of perplexity signal only his awareness that he lacks knowledge of virtue; perhaps they are but rhetorical devices for encouraging Socrates' interlocutors to admit to their own ignorance.As the book continues, Matthews, following a line fairly standard by now, thinks that, in the "transitional" Meno, Socrates discovers two ways out of the perplexity: recollection, and the method of hypothesis; and that, in the "middle" dialogues—the Republic and Phaedo—the Theory of Forms comes to his rescue. In the Parmenides and, perhaps later, Matthews maintains, the Theory of Forms becomes itself the object of inquiry, as Socrates recognizes the perplexities with which it is fraught. Matthews mentions, but takes no stand on, the controversies surrounding the late dialogues, moving on at last to Aristotle and the different kind of perplexity one encounters there.For the briefest moment it looks as if Matthews might resist the standard line, when, in discussing the Meno, he notices not only that the geometrical problem of the Meno's slave-boy passage causes no perplexity comparable to that caused by Socrates' philosophical problems, but that Socrates is fully in charge in the geometrical demonstration, stinging another without simultaneously stinging himself. Yet, not only does Matthews fail to pursue his insight that moral or philosophical questions are, for Socrates, not like mathematical ones; on the contrary, he suggests that, in the Phaedo, philosophical problems are viewed by Socrates as mathematical ones.In The Philosophy of Socrates, Brickhouse and Smith undertake the ambitious task of expounding and defending a coherent and cohesive Socratic philosophy, one that encompasses Socrates' method, his wisdom and ignorance, his understanding of the nature of knowledge, his moral philosophy, psychology, politics, and religion. For a book meant to be a popular introduction, it is remarkably comprehensive—even [End Page 137] exhaustive—and serves to acquaint the reader with the current scholarly controversies surrounding Socratic philosophy as it is debated in the analytic tradition associated most frequently with the late and great Gregory Vlastos.In many respects, The Philosophy of Socrates is but an updated version of Brickhouse and Smith's earlier book, Plato's Socrates (Oxford University Press, 1994)—though without the rich and copious notes. The earlier book is the better one. The new book, although it purports to discuss the philosophy of the historical Socrates, is, from Chapter 2 on, a book about the Socrates of Plato's "early" dialogues. Yet, it is precisely this Socrates who is largely absent from its pages. The Socrates of the early dialogues is a character: both in the sense that he is a protagonist in the dramas that are Plato's dialogues, and in the sense that he is sarcastic, funny, makes bad puns, strikes at his interlocutors where they are most vulnerable, teases, baits, and annoys. But, most importantly, this Socrates is no solitary thinker. He talks to people; and what he says and how he says it is influenced both by his interlocutor and by the context of their conversation. Brickhouse and Smith, however, take such factors into account but rarely—and then only to save their own take on a particular Socratic doctrine.The two interpretive principles that Brickhouse and Smith invoke most often... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 15 Candice Lyons Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space In the fall of 1867—just two years after the conclusion of the American Civil War—former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, finding herself in dire financial straits, traveled incognito to New York. She hoped to sell select pieces from her famed wardrobe (...) in order to supplement her income, which was, at the time, rather meager. Accompanying the recently widowed socialite was her self-described “modiste” and “confidante ” Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved African American dressmaker who had been “intimately associated” with Lincoln for years.1 Despite the various measures undertaken to ensure the scheme’s success, including attempts to extort monied East Coast Republicans and strategic appeals to the press, it ultimately proved fruitless. Political nemeses seized on the opportunity to publicly mock Lincoln, who was seen as an “extravagant and improper” social climber, for her “pecuniary embarrassment,” treating the public auction of her clothing as a spectacle akin to the World Fair.2 Eventually, the former First Lady was forced to retreat to her home in Chicago, leaving Keckley behind to tend to her affairs. 1. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2015): Location no. 406, 54, 53. 2. Carolyn Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath,” African American Review 34 (2000): 20; Keckley, Behind the Scenes, Location no. 1321. 16 Candice Lyons This decision, however, left the ordinarily sought-after seamstress in dire straits of her own, given that the time she was compelled to dedicate to what would come to be known as “The Old Clothes Scandal ” necessitated closing down her then-thriving business in Washington, DC.3 This, coupled with the fact that indemnification for her services was not forthcoming from Mrs. Lincoln, was likely at least partially at the root of Keckley’s decision to publish her now-infamous memoir, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years A Slave and Four Years in the White House in 1868.4 Keckley explained that she penned her autobiographical text in a bid to “defend [her]self” and Lincoln against charges of impropriety following the New York incident. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the book’s release had the exact opposite effect: Keckley’s literary disclosures were met with scorn, regarded by large swaths of white Americans, including some of the same people who had been most vocal in their condemnation of Mary Todd Lincoln, as constituting a set of socially impermissible transgressions of class, race, and gender. Sales of the book were subsequently suppressed, Keckley’s relationship with Lincoln (who had been caught off guard by the text’s release) came to an abrupt end, and there was even a brief, parodic pamphlet produced, titled Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis, which cast the entire ordeal as a sort of (racist) cautionary tale.5 Given the clear disdain held for Lincoln by people across the political spectrum at the time, it can be difficult to make sense of the visceral reaction prompted by Keckley’s airing of the controversial figure’s dirty laundry (pun intended). Considering the ways Behind the Scenes implicitly challenged the fixity of hierarchical distinctions between Black and white, employee and employer, however, repudiation of the work might be understood as inevitable. Further, given the “intimate” and ambiguous nature of Lincoln and Keckley’s relationship, the book may also 3. Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer,” 19. 4. The text’s infamy is in part attributable to its anomalous structure, which rendered it distinct from many of the era’s other book-length slave narratives ; whereas monographs such as Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl centered on the author’s experience of and eventual escape from slavery, Keckley’s work deals only briefly with these matters, primarily concerning itself with the intimate affairs of the author’s (white) employer. 5. Sorisio, “Unmasking the Genteel Performer,” 19. Candice... (shrink)

Comment: This translation contains a correction of an argument in the original English edition, a correction that was subsequently made in the 1999 English Paperback edition, The correction is described below in the final paragraph. Differences in language can seriously restrict one's access to, and knowledge of, the philosophical work that's being done in other countries, and before the publication in 1997 of my book Time, Tense, and Causation, I was not aware of the depth of interest, in Italy, (...) in analytical philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular. Since that time, however, I've had the opportunity of talking to, and corresponding with, Italian philosophers who are currently working very intensely on problems in the philosophy of time. I very much enjoyed those discussions, and so I'm very pleased indeed that my book has now been translated into Italian. -/- The introduction to the book will provide readers with quite a detailed overview of my approach to the philosophy of time, and of the main theses that I am defending. But perhaps it will be helpful here if I try to sketch, very briefly, the big picture. -/- The central issue in the philosophy of time concerns the choice between tensed and tenseless accounts of the nature of time – or, as I prefer to express it, between dynamic and static conceptions of reality. According to tensed (or dynamic) accounts, there are significant ontological differences between the past, the present, and the future – either because the world contains intrinsic tensed properties of passiveness, presentness, and futurity, or else because the past, the present, and the future are not all equally real. In contrast, according to tenseless (or static) views of the nature of time, there are no intrinsic tensed properties, and the past, the present, and the future are all equally real. In this book, I defend a dynamic view of time dash specifically, one according to which, while the past and the present are now real, the future is not. This view has, of course, a very long history, with a version of it having been defended by Aristotle in his famous discussion of the sea battle tomorrow, in which he argued that, although it is now true – indeed necessarily so – that either there will be a sea battle tomorrow or there will not be one, it is not now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and not now true that there will not be one. Only when tomorrow comes will the world contain states of affairs that make one of these propositions true, and the other false. -/- But while this general view of the nature of time has a very long and distinguished history – and also seems, intuitively, quite appealing – it has become clear, especially in this century, that it is exposed to very strong objections – objections moreover, that come not merely from philosophy, but also from contemporary physics, and especially from Einstein's special theory of relativity. One of the main challenges accordingly, for any defense of a tensed or dynamic view of time, is to show that those objections can be answered. -/- In grappling with those objections, however, one thing that emerged very clearly was that some theses that defenders of tensed approaches to time have traditionally viewed as absolutely essential must be abandoned as unsound. The result is that. I was led to a view of the nature of time that is, in many respects, intermediate between tenseless views of time and traditional tensed approaches. In particular, advocates of traditional tensed views almost always maintain that the simplest temporal facts are themselves inherently tensed: they consist of facts such as, for example, that is certain apple is now red. But I maintain that, on the contrary, the simplest temporal facts, rather than being intrinsically tensed, are facts to the effect, for example, that a certain apple is now red at time t. On this fundamental issue, then, I agree with those who accept a tenseless or static view of time, since they too hold that the simplest tensed facts ¬– and indeed all tensed facts – are not tensed facts. How, then, does my approach to the nature time differ from a tenseless or static approach? The answer is that I also maintain that, although basic tensed facts are not inherently tensed, the world is nevertheless a dynamic one, since every present moment is a point at which things come into existence. Events, therefore, are not merely actual or nonactual – as is maintained by advocates of tenseless approaches to time. Rather an event is actual as of some time, and not actual as of other times. One needs, therefore, a temporally indexed notion of actuality, according to which an event is not actual until the time at which it occurs, and given that notion, one can explain, in a straightforward fashion, what it is for events to lie in the past, the present, and the future, and in the way that entails that the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- One task, as I have said, is to show that the many objections that have been advanced against dynamic conceptions of the world dash by philosophers – such as McTaggart, Quine, Smart, Putnam, and Mellor – can be answered. But even if, as I claim, this can be done, one is still left, of course, with the question of what positive reason there is, if any, for accepting a tensed or dynamic view of the world. -/- The argument that I develop in response to this question centers upon the concept of causation, and here I argue, first, that there are decisive objections to reductionist approaches to causation; secondly, that it is possible to set out a very plausible realistic account of the nature of causation; and, thirdly, that the crucial postulates that are involved in that account can only be satisfied in a dynamic world – indeed only in a dynamic world in which the past and the present are real, but the future is not. -/- This way of defending the view that our world is a dynamic one also has implications for some other issues – in particular, issues connected with the subtle and very difficult metaphysical question of the relation between time and causation. Thus, after setting out the above argument, I attempt to show that if causation can exist only in a dynamic world, then one can both demonstrate that backward causation is logically impossible and defend the view that the direction of time is to be defined in terms of the direction of causation, rather than vice versa. -/- Finally, a comment on the text. It involves one major change from the original English edition – namely in sections 4. 6.2 and 4.7. The change in those sections involves the crucial part in my argument both for the claim that our world is one where the past and present are real, but the future is not, and for the claim that backward causation is logically impossible. It was pointed out to me by Kenji Murota, a graduate student of philosophy at Keio University, that there was a problem in my original formulation of that argument. I'm grateful to him for his incisive criticism, and I'm pleased that I've had the opportunity of correcting that argument in the present edition. (shrink)

There is, to all appearances, a philosophic hostility to fashionable dress. Studying this contempt, this paper examines likely sources in philosophy's suspicion of change; anxiety about surfaces and the inessential; failures in the face of death; and the philosophic disdain for, denial of, the human body and human passivity. If there are feminist concerns about fashion, they should be radically different from those of traditional philosophy. Whatever our ineluctable worries about desire and death, whatever our appropriate anger and impatience (...) with the merely superficial, whatever our genuine need to mark off the serious from the trivial, feminism may be a corrective therapy for philosophy's bad humor and self-deception, as these manifest themselves when the subject turns to beautiful clothes. (shrink)

Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we accept the general outline of Eric Williams’ thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but was as economically conditioned as Britain’s later empire building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues that Britain could afford to legislate against the (...) class='Hi'>slave trade only after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial “take-off.” Britain had lost much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a plantation economy.3The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper involvement in Africa—the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for freed slaves was just a start—but British abolitionists before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in the social sciences had combined to give the British public a widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a form of modern, secularized, “depoliticized speech” —discourse which treats its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960, Nancy Stepan writes:A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.5It is this “fundamental question” which a genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer. Patrick Brantlinger, professor of English at Indiana University, is the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 and Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman PhilosophyBrad InwoodDavid Sedley, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 396. Cloth, $65.00, Paper, $24.00.Readers of this journal are familiar with the Cambridge Companions. What is striking about this one is its broad sweep. A Companion to all of ancient philosophy will necessarily present the reader with a somewhat shallow (...) overview. Is this really such a good idea? What is its role, when there are already Companions to Early Greek Philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, The Stoics, and Plotinus? The editor answers this by aiming also to provide a "book to accompany survey courses on the history of ancient philosophy." It is challenging to provide an overview of the first millennium and more of Western philosophy, but this pedagogical goal is tougher. David Sedley has managed both tasks well. Although some chapters are not suitable hors d'oeuvres for beginners, all will nourish the hungry and whet the appetite for more. Even those chapters which amount to substantial entrées too rich for novices are excellent meat. There are no reheated leftovers. From beginning to end this is a feast of reason.The book makes abundant use of tables to present large amounts of complex material economically—lists of Plato's dialogues indicate topics, speakers and lengths; Roman philosophers are displayed with biographical notes, school affiliations, and major works; philosophical commentators are given with date and the author and work commented on; nineteen Presocratics are adorned with birthplace, date, key ideas and thumbnail comments. Many of the chapters cultivate an elegant but economical style which must be due in part to editorial encouragement and example. Though it is bound to skip over much, it avoids even the appearance of superficiality. Jill Kraye's chapter on "The legacy of ancient philosophy" to the medieval and modern world is a masterpiece of clarity and compression as well as a superb piece of intellectual history.Kraye's survey concludes the volume. Sedley's substantial introduction begins it by motivating the study of ancient philosophy through two characteristic questions, "What is a good human life?" and "Why isn't the earth falling?" and culminates in a highly informative guide to our various textual sources and a compact demonstration of how they become the editions and translations we use.Jonathan Barnes opens (ch. 1) with a homily on "Argument in ancient philosophy"; splendid stuff, but for all its lucidity, not an ideal appetizer for the survey course students I teach—it's a dessert better served later in the volume. Similarly thematic chapters on "Philosophy and literature" (ch. 8, Martha Nussbaum), "Philosophy and science" (ch. 10, R.J. Hankinson) and "Philosophy and religion" (ch. 11, Glenn Most) set ancient philosophy in broader context. Hankinson splendidly communicates the scientific agenda of the ancient world, perhaps over-emphasizing the mathematical sciences, Galen and scientific epistemology at the cost of "scientific" writers like Strabo, Pliny, and Vitruvius. Nussbaum concentrates on the fourth century B.C. at the expense of later centuries, but gives excellent value on the canonical texts, the Republic and the Poetics. Most's essay explores the interpenetration of religious themes with the philosophical (emphasizing how differently pagan religion interacted with philosophy than does any modern faith) and adds an acute though exaggerated set of observations on the religious quality of the ancient philosophical way of life. It would be hard to locate the saintly sages Most presents as typical in the logical landscape evoked by Barnes.The remaining chapters cover periods and major figures. Malcolm Schofield on the Presocratics (ch. 2), Sarah Broadie on the Sophists and Socrates (ch. 3), Christopher Rowe on Plato (ch. 4), John Cooper on Aristotle (ch. 5), Jacques Brunschwig and David Sedley on Hellenistic philosophy, A.A. Long on Roman (ch. 7), and Frans de Haas on Late ancient philosophy. The authors are all eloquent authorities and it's a menu with no bad choices—though I'm sure my undergraduates will find Cooper's treatment of the figures of Aristotle's syllogisms indigestible. I found Rowe's careful balance of old and new in his introduction to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments by Simon TruwantHans-Jörg RheinbergerTRUWANT, Simon. Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Cloth, $99.99The legendary debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, where the two philosophers met and exchanged views on the occasion of the second Davoser Hochschultage in 1929, has been investigated and commented upon many times. The general (...) tenor of these assessments was, as Simon Truwant states, to conclude either that the young Heidegger won out over his elder contemporary Cassirer, or that in fact they talked past each other, that is, that there was no real debate at all. Truwant sets out to contest both of these conclusions, and he fully succeeds in doing so. What may appear as an unnecessary rehearsal at the beginning reveals itself as a balanced and in-depth assessment of the two philosophical projects of the mature Cassirer and the early Heidegger from within and, more broadly speaking, as the expression of a "parting of the ways" (Michael Friedman) in early twentieth-century Western philosophy.Truwant identifies three core topics in the dispute between the two thinkers: first, their assessment of the core of Kant's transcendental philosophy; second, their stance on the human condition; and third, their position toward the proper task of philosophy. Accordingly, the book with its altogether ten chapters is meaningfully divided into three parts. In each part devoted to each of the three topics, a meticulous and close reading of Cassirer's philosophy of human culture qua philosophy of symbolic forms and Heidegger's existential ontology toward being and time is carried out. As the debate advances from an assessment of Kant's critical project, as exposed in his Critique of Pure Reason, to their takes on the essence of the human condition, and finally to the proper task of philosophy, their respective positions more and more appear to become incompatible. This is to be expected, Truwant argues, since each one's stance toward the task of philosophy determines his view on the human condition and, in turn, his interpretation of Kant's transcendental philosophy.This short review is not the place to enter into the carefully exposed argumentative details of Cassirer and Heidegger's views. Suffice it to say that Truwant successfully demonstrates that neither of the above-mentioned standard accounts of the Davos debate can be substantiated. Heidegger did not outmatch Cassirer. Both philosophers argued from an internally consistent position. Cassirer saw the task of his philosophy of symbolic forms as a cosmopolitan one that ultimately strives toward a self-understanding of human culture in all of its facets. He looked at the [End Page 562] human condition from the perspective of mankind as a species of living beings capable of creating a multiplicity of symbolic forms, from myth to language to science, from religion to economy to politics, and he saw the essence of human culture in precisely this irreducible multiplicity that offered the human being a route to transcend its finiteness. At the same time, he shared with Kant the idea that the sciences offer a privileged perspective for the assessment of man's proliferating symbolic capacities, and he held with Kant that our takes on the world are never immediate but always, and necessarily so, mediated by the means with which we approach it. Heidegger, on the other hand, saw the task of his existential ontology to recuperate the fundamental meaning of the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden) that tended to be forgotten (Seinsvergessenheit) both in the course of the history of philosophy and in the busyness of everyday life. He looked at the human condition as being fundamentally finite, and he articulated the necessity to come to terms with its finitude. Finally, he approached Kant's transcendental philosophy as an attempt to have glimpsed, although it was ultimately eschewed, the unavoidability of such a fundamental ontology.In one respect, however, both philosophers shared a common ground, and it is this common ground that lets their controversy appear as a real dispute in an originary sense. In the introduction to his book, Truwant formulates... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Purity and Pollution: Resisting the Rehabilitation of a VirtueAmy Mullin“Purity” is a term used infrequently in contemporary academic literature. A survey of periodical indexes for the past ten years shows that references to purity occur predominantly in metallurgy. Purity is an increasingly important topic in anthropology, religious studies, and history, but it is a decidedly rare concern in philosophy. In my most recent search I found three references.Yet “purity” (...) was once a recurrent term in the philosophical tradition ranging from Plato through Augustine and Kant to Kierkegaard. Today when we encounter the many references to purity in the history of philosophy we too often filter them out. We assume either that “pure” is a generic term for good, or, in what seems a more knowing and sophisticated response, we read “pure” as a code term for chastity or sexual morality, the elimination, suppression or control of sexual desire. In both cases purity is written off either as a generic or as an old fashioned and rather embarrassing virtue. Hence it seems there is little reason for contemporary philosophical investigation into the rhetorical use of the language of purity and pollution.Three assumptions account for the lack of contemporary philosophical interest in the topic. First, it is assumed that purity is no longer a concern in twentieth-century philosophy. Second, purity in historical discourse is considered to be limited to a prudish or downright misogynist hostility to sex. Third and finally, it is assumed that the work historians and anthropologists have done recently into connections between purity beliefs and practices and social cohesion is irrelevant for philosophy. This is because purity in philosophy is supposed to be a resolutely individualist virtue, having little or nothing to do with unified and coherent communities.There are elements of truth to all three beliefs, but they also contain important distortions of the truth. As regards the first assumption, purity remains a concern in contemporary aesthetics, where it often means roughly something like a priori and apolitical; but I am interested in whether the concern with purity has survived in philosophies with ethical implications. [End Page 509] Here it is my contention that authenticity is the twentieth-century descendant of the virtue of purity.Second, there is much more to the rhetoric and practices of purity than concern with the sexual dimension of life, though this is a key aspect of most, and the beliefs and practices are often misogynist. There have been numerous anthropological documentations of ways in which purity beliefs, particularly an emphasis on sexual purity, are used to control women. Santi Rozario’s work, for instance, makes this point in her analysis of contemporary Bengali village life. 1 The connection between the language of purity and the practice of female circumcision, which I will not discuss in this paper, is in itself evidence enough of connections between purity beliefs and practices harmful to women. 2 However, I hope to show that there is more to purity than misogyny. Purity most basically is about order, both social and personal. 3My response to the second assumption, that purity masks an obsession with sexual control, indicates the source of my disagreement with the third, the contention that purity in philosophy is exclusively an individual virtue. Communal beliefs and practices associated with the language of purity and pollution are relevant to the philosophical treatment of purity because of the presence in both the practices and the philosophies of an interplay between social and personal order. As a result I believe an understanding of the dynamics of beliefs about purity in social practice can inform a philosophical concern with purity.First I investigate shifts in beliefs and practices concerning purity and pollution. I will concentrate on three models: ancient Greek (from the eighth to the third century BC), biblical to Talmudic Judaism (from the third century BC to the third century AD), and early Christian (from the first to the fifth century AD). These represent three traditions which have played a very significant role in shaping western civilization, theology, and philosophy. 4 They were also frequently interrelated in this period, as Christian and Jewish Platonists writing in Greek attest and of course as... (shrink)

This paper is partly to get rid of some irritation which I have felt at the quite common tendency of philosophers to elucidate ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks red’. For a relatively recent example see, for example, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, ‘An Objectivist′s Guide to Subjectivism about Colour’. However rather than try to make a long list of references, I would rather say ‘No names, no pack drill’. I have even been disturbed to find the use of the (...) words ‘looks red’ that I am opposing ascribed to me by Keith Campbell in his useful article ‘David Armstrong and Realism about Colour’. I am not saying that such talk is necessarily wrong. Talk of ‘looks red’ may be a way of harmlessly referring to the behavioural discriminations with respect to colour of a human percipient. Where it is dangerous, at least to those of us who wish to argue for a broadly physicalist account of the mind, is that it may have concealed overtones of reference to epiphenomenal and irreducibly psychic properties of experiences. Moreover even if it does not do so it may be fence sitting on this issue and liable to misinterpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities by Debra B. Bergoffen, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ by Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir by Karen VintgesNancy BauerDebra B. Bergoffen. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities. Albany: (...) State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. x + 250. Cloth, $54.50.Eva Lundgren-Gothlin. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996. Pp. xii + 329. Paper, $19.95.Margaret A. Simons. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xx + 263. Cloth, $25.95.Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 202. Paper, $19.95.Anyone who is seriously interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy must contend sooner or later with the fact that she denied, repeatedly and vehemently throughout her lifetime, that she was a philosopher. Of course, a certain species of Beauvoir-detractor will be tempted to take these denials at face value, especially since they almost always went hand in hand with Beauvoir’s plausible-sounding [End Page 688] declarations that anything philosophical about her work could be traced to the thinking of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre, who, she underscored, was the “real” philosopher in their relationship. But the very strength and frequency of her abjurations of the title of philosopher is a sign that, like Freud, Beauvoir (who wrote several straightforwardly philosophical essays, including the monograph-length Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cınéas) was motivated not so much by modesty or self-abnegation but by a desire to distance herself from what counted, at least in the middle of this century, as philosophy.For most of the past 50 years, English-speaking readers of Beauvoir have simply accepted her portrayal of her relationship to philosophy. On the ordinary view, The Second Sex, while an important historical touchstone for “feminist theory” is not, or not quite, a philosophical piece of writing, and those of her publications that merit that title are mere apologetics for Sartrean existentialism. But in the years since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 allowed for the release of her voluminous and revealing letters to Sartre, more and more feminist philosophers have been taking a second look at The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s other essays and fiction as they try to engage productively both with non-academic feminist work and with the philosophical mainstream. As a result, the difficult question of just how to assess Beauvoir’s relationship both to philosophy in general and to Sartre in particular has become pressing and is at the center of the four books under review here.The authors of these books are each committed, in their own sometimes strikingly different ways, to two theses: first, that to understand Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy one must study her appropriations of the work of philosophers other than just Sartre and, second, that at the heart of Beauvoir’s enterprise in all of her work is a desire to think about how to create and sustain reciprocity between an existentially committed self and an equally autonomous other.The most historically oriented and, on my view, meticulous exploration of Beauvoir’s relationship to her philosophical influences is Lundgren-Gothlin’s superb Sex and Exıstence, which chronicles Beauvoir’s indebtedness to and interest in, especially, Hegel and Marx. Lundgren-Gothlin, a philosophically trained Swedish intellectual historian, shows decisively that one cannot make philosophical sense of The Second Sex as long as one reduces its philosophical dimension to boilerplate Sartreanism. Indeed, given Sartre’s antipathy toward Marx and his ambivalence about Hegel in Beıng and Nothingness, Lundgren-Gothlin’s work raises serious questions about the extent to which Beauvoir’s considered views in The Second Sex are even compatible with those of the early... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 369-406 [Access article in PDF] The Body And Its Representations In Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai:Where Does The Costume End? Eva Stehle Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousaiis a rich and funny play, but it gives the impression of lacking a sustained point. Theater directors can happily stage it, subverting Aristophanes by casting women and recasting the text to speak to modern disputes over gender, sex, and politics, as Mary-Kay (...) Gamel has done so wonderfully (see her article in this volume). But the student of comedy who wishes to study the play in the context of its original production in 411, probably at the City Dionysia, has a harder time. Because it has no overt political theme it was for long passed over as a paignion, an escape from relevance in the tense atmosphere of that spring. As a "woman play" it seems less satisfactory than Lysistrata or Ekklesiazousai because it has no female lead character and Euripides' nameless kinsman (whom I call "Inlaw") upstages the women and their concerns. 1 With the current interest in performance and the metatheatrical aspects of comedy, Thesmophoriazousai has finally come into its own as a sly dialogue on theater and ritual, comedy versus tragedy, and gender. 2 But the older view remains in effect that the play has no politics. At the same time, it is assimilated to Aristophanes' other plays in its thematics, while its striking anomalies go unremarked. As a result, it still does not quite come into focus. [End Page 369]As a play about ritual and theater, Thesmophoriazousai is said to absorb women's ritual and restage it within its own festival setting at the City Dionysia. Yet this is the only one of Aristophanes' surviving plays in which the principal male characters exit the stage before the end of the play. Here they flee, in female dress to boot, leaving the chorus to play out the final scene with the Scythian slave. 3 Euripides and Inlaw do not share in the fun of sending the slave running in one wrong direction then another. And the play ends as it began, on Nesteia, the day of fasting for the women performing the Thesmophoria. 4 No revelry brings on the transition to feast and renewal that the audience probably expected. No procession points the way to a new instauration created by the comedy. 5 Given the importance of processions in Athenian life as an expression of community revival, this is a speaking absence. 6As a play about tragedy and comedy, Thesmophoriazousai is said to show the triumph of comedy over tragedy as the more encompassing and flexible art form. The plots of tragedy fail to rescue Inlaw, while a comic plot succeeds: Euripides brings on a dancing girl, Elaphion, who seduces the Scythian slave away for sex while Euripides frees Inlaw. But Euripides' final trick is no comic plot. In the Aristophanic comic plot the [End Page 370] hero wins a desirable young woman, often one whose name promises new fertility, peace, or power; he does not give one away to the blocking figure. 7 Euripides also capitulates to the women, promising never to speak ill of them again. Only by relinquishing both triumph and sex (and thereby also festivity) does he salvage his poor kinsman's life. Euripides' plot fit for a "barbarian nature" (1129) is rather a farcical version of his own rescue-play plot: like Helen and Andromeda it involves deceiving the blocking figure, which allows the principals to escape while leaving others (chorus or a god) to thwart the chase. But its success is based on abandoning pure representation and giving the "real" (within the world of the play) woman away to the internal audience in order to rescue a pseudo-woman.As for gender representation in the play, most analysis holds that men prevail. Different commentators take Aristophanes to be revealing that women on stage are all really men, or questioning what a woman really is since she is the very figure of mimesis, or showing that women deserve... (shrink)

The author starts from the thesis that there is no such thing as a "natural" or "apolitical" economy. The economy is always already political, as it is the economy’s material core of power, control, and its main mechanisms, i.e. exploitation and oppression. It is no less so in the era of neoliberalism, a time in which we witness the divorce between capitalism and democracy. In order to lay the foundations of a different economy, one that is not based on wage (...) labor and the exploitation of human life and nature based on their auto-alienation, but rather on action in accordance with their resources, we need – according the author – to rethink the concept of the state in a non-philosophical and post-capitalist fashion, structurally different from the modern bourgeois state. If the structure originating in the bourgeois state, as conceived by modern humanism, is preserved, it will mean that the determination in the last instance is still the same. In order to arrive at a determination in the last instance of a non-exploitative, non-wage-labor-based social order where the determination is affected by the real, we must first arrive at the generic core of the notion of the modern state. As soon as we determine the generic term of "the state," we can radicalize it by letting it be determined by the effects of the real. The generic notion, isolated from the chôra of the transcendental material that is offered by modern philosophies originating in the Enlightenment, should be used as the minimal transcendental description for the determining effect of the real. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's 'Being and Time.'Robert C. ScharffJohannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's 'Being and Time.'Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 356 + xix. Cloth, $60.00.Focusing on the relatively neglected fifth chapter of Being and Time's Division Two (BT, Sections 72-77), Fritsche argues that BT is an essentially political work. Even Victor Farías, although he talks of (...) "shared attitudes" and "implicit direction," settles for the conclusion that "in no sense can we read National Socialism into Being and Time, but we can identify philosophical beliefs that foreshadow Heidegger's later conviction."(Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989], 60.) Fritsche, however, evidently intends to out-Farías Farías. For him, BT just is "a brilliant summary of the politics of the revolutionary Right" (xii; cf., xv, 216).Following Tom Rockmore, Fritsche insists that by grounding ontological inquiry in a distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence, Heidegger is "committed" to "a political understanding of human being" that "culminates" in the analysis of authentic historicity in Section 74 (29). According to Fritsche, BT proceeds, "in conventional metaphysical fashion," to work out a "hierarchical" presentation of the structures and activities of our existence as a "drama in three acts." The first act is Heidegger's analysis of the conflicted, inauthentic, "downward plunging" condition of everyday life. In act two, there arises out of this condition a "crisis" (of conscience) that calls for a "dramatic solution." The third act "consists in authentic Dasein stepping out of the world in which it has been living as ordinary Dasein, turning back to this world, and canceling it... in order to rerealize the past" (x, 29-30).Fritsche plays BT off primarily against three sources, Richard Wolin's Politics of Being (1990), articles by Peg Birmingham (1991), and Charles Guignon (1992), in order to distance BT from "decisionist," "anarchist," and "politically neutral" interpretations, respectively. Like this selection of foils, Fritsche's comparison of texts often seems merely convenient. In general, if two people use the same term, they probably mean the same thing; and key concepts are typically assumed to have uniform definitions. Hence, if Scheler speaks of a hierarchy of values and Hitler, of a hierarchy of races, they must be employing "the same logic" (108-9). And because vorlaufen [anticipating/running ahead] was the term used by right wing German authors to mythologize the gallant but foolish young "heroes of Langemarck" who "stepped out of their trenches, into the open," and "ran toward" French lines, one should also employ this image a "methodological ideal type to interpret Heidegger's concept of resoluteness" (3, 196, 233). Finally, Fritsche makes no systematic distinction between what an author has once said and what either we or the author might later make of it. Hence, if Heidegger says in 1933 that he is drawing on BT for political purposes, he must have had these purposes in mind when writing it ten years earlier (216ff.). And obviously, choosing "Volksgemeinschaft" to talk of community in BT's Section 74 already unmistakably reveals "Heidegger's option for National Socialism" (217-18).One need carry no brief for an apolitical Heidegger to see that Fritsche's reading is problematic on several levels. Heidegger's own account of BT's purpose and method is ignored rather than challenged. Numerous Heideggerian notions are construed, without [End Page 455] argument, as "really" being just right-wing political or "conventional metaphysical" usage. Moreover, categories of Left and Right are sometimes handled so loosely that, for example, Scheler writing in 1913, Heidegger writing in 1921-24, and Hitler in Mein Kampf, all must "belong" to the revolutionary Right, because they all privilege traditional Gemeinschaft over modern Gesellschaft. By the same reasoning, Heidegger's concept of historicity is "identical" to Scheler's and Hitler's. This has to be right because "Heidegger's text is just too excellent a summary of the revolutionary rightist notion to be the result of a somnambulistic thinking" (136). Fritsche's handling of technical terminology, when not outright political, often seems poorly... (shrink)

Nowadays, young people from all over the world are fascinated by the mass popular culture of South Korea. This process of spread of Korean culture in the world came to be called “Korean current” or “Korean wave”, which became a kind of “Korean cultural boom”. The spread of the “Korean wave” has been compared to a viral disease that first spread throughout East Asia, then Southeast Asia, and eventually engulfed the entire world. Despite the fact that the phenomenon of the (...) “Korean wave” had a sufficient public resonance, due to its novelty and unexpected emergence, it remains an understudied subject of scientific study, especially in the West and in particular in Ukraine. That is why the topic of this study is relevant nowadays. The aim of the article to investigate the mass cultural phenomenon “Korean wave”, to analyze its sources and dynamics of development, to characterize its inherent features, to determine the aspects of its spread and popularization, to investigate its influence on world society and culture, as well as to find out the peculiarities of its influence on the consciousness of the masses. The research methodology is based on a philosophical and cultural analysis of such a mass phenomenon of modern artistic culture as the “Korean wave”. When writing the work, we tried to adhere to the principles of objectivism, systematicity, comprehensiveness and multifactoriality. To comply with these principles, we used a number of general scientific and special methods in the research: comparative-historical, axiological, phenomenological, logical, retrospective, analytical-synthetic, socio-critical, systemic, structural-functional, generalizing and statistical. Adherence to these principles and methods made it possible to avoid bias and tendencies in judgments. Results. Such a mass cultural phenomenon as the “Korean wave” is a kind of entanglement of opposite principles: modern Western (progressive-innovative) and traditional Eastern (Confucian) cultural values. It manifests itself in the spread of fashion to everything Korean (or to be more precise, South Korean): not only K-pop, dramas, toys, clothes and other types of South Korean entertainment industry, but also Korean cuisine, household items, etc. In the past, despite the geographical proximity and cultural connectivity, for political reasons the countries of Asia largely suppressed cultural exchanges among themselves. China, Korea and Japan began to develop cultural ties between themselves relatively recently. It should also be noted that South Korea is a country that was previously considered a cultural periphery in international exchanges, now it plays an important role in the regionalization of mass culture as a whole in East and Southeast Asia and the product produced by it is considered a center of mass culture and one of the ways of cultural exchange throughout Asia. Conclusions. To sum up, we can say that the great popularity of the “Korean wave” is a kind of leap in the modern culture of South Korea. This phenomenon is represented not only by the synthesis of modern Western (European-American) culture and traditional Eastern (Korean), but also by the fact that in our time it has turned into a powerful locomotive of the entire South Korean economy, a kind of “dragon’s head”. The phenomenon of the “Korean wave” helps to raise the level of the image of South Korea as a prosperous country, and also visually demonstrates the modern South Korean culture to the world. The “Korean Wave” demonstrates to other countries in Asia and to the whole world in general that South Korea is not a periphery in our time, it is no longer a third world country, and it is as modern an urbanized country as most of the developed countries of the West, which has not only modernized its culture, but also spread it, and even managed to influence other countries and their cultures. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 129-135. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Successions of words are so agreeable. It is about this. —Gertrude Stein Nachoem Wijnberg (1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. He also a professor of cultural entrepreneurship and management at the Business School of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1989, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four novels, which, in my opinion mark a high point in Dutch contemporary literature. His novels even more than his poetry are (...) criticized for being inaccessible, which I generally take to be a compliment. It would be like saying that Fernando Pessoa is inaccessible, which he is not. Neither is Wijnberg. When we think of the combination economist-poet we are immediately reminded of the American poet Wallace Stevens, who, as the story goes, had two stacks of paper on his desk, one for contracts, one for poems. We also know that Stevens wrote on the economy and that questions of economy and insurance surface at multiple points in his poems. The following text is a very preliminary attempt to point at the intersections between poems, novels, business, and poetry in Wijnberg’s work. On the back cover of his novel De opvolging ( The Succession , 2005), Wijnberg states the following: “[This is] a novel for whomever is interested in the workings of a company as much as in the workings of a poem.” Wijnberg thus claims that the way in which a company “works” may be similar to the way in which a poem “works.” The question is the obvious one, what does this similarity consist in? De opvolging tells the story of company in which bosses and company doctors, secretaries, children, clowns, and beggars have tons of meetings, recite poems, perform plays, tell jokes, and succeed each other, climbing up and down in the company’s hierarchy. De opvolging is a novel in which the career of people follows the career of words. It resonates with Gertrude Stein's sentences, "Grammar. What is it. Who was it" (1975, 50). The words in Wijnberg's poems are like he characters in his novel. And if we keep in mind this allegorical reading of De opvolging , which is obviously only one of the possible readings, we may be able to understand some aspects of Wijnberg’s poetry. A repetition is already a pun. Look, that word is trying it again, as if it is afraid that by not doing it it would give up the hope that it will ever be able to do something. A pun is the opposite of the first word coming to the mind of someone who shouts it when he suddenly discovers something. (104) The repetition, the succession of the same word, is already a pun, a joke. The succession of the father by the son after the revolution is a joke. "Look he's trying it again!" The essence of a joke is a repetition. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” is its opposite. Poems can easily become jokes, depending on the way the words follow and repeat each other. In De opvolging , the careers of the bosses, good and bad secretaries, and company doctors easily become jokes, as they are “afraid that by not doing it [they] would give up the hope that [they] will ever be able to do something.” Not only the repetition, but also the distance and difference between the words in a poem, their cause and effect relations can be read as company relations. This becomes clear when we, for example, read the first lines of the poem “Cause, sign” from Het leven van ( The Life Of , 2009). A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate some- thing only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I would be able to say more about it. (49) Upon reading the first two lines we can already conclude that any word may be cause or sign or both. If a sign is also a cause there is no reason to discriminate it, yet to the poet they are still different. This difference only becomes expressible the moment he would have a secretary. Just like in De opvolging , the secretary introduces a distance; not in a company but in a poem. Hence the difference between “good” and “bad” secretaries in a company, where the good secretary of one boss may be the bad secretary of another one. The more we can say about the bosses of the company, or signifiers of the poem, the greater the distance we introduce between them and us. We should take serious the relation between Wijnberg’s novels and poems. Although they operate on different scales, they explain and converse with each other. Another example may be the novel Politiek en liefde ( Politics and Love , 2002), which deals with the relation, precisely, between politics and love. In the novel, Nicolai, a lieutenant in the Dutch army, is sent to Africa on a military mission. Upon leaving a receives a letter from his father. Dear son, Don’t do anything stupid before your father has advised you to do so. Your mother asked me to write a wise letter. I have been looking for wisdom for half a day and haven’t found much. If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave. What I want to say is that you have to return from Africa in good health, and before you know it the world will be your slave [....] Signed with a kiss from your father. (88) The line, “If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave,” returns as the title of poem in Het leven van: “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” (12-3), which elaborates this theme. So both in the way that these poems are structured and in their subject matter, they refer to the structures of our economy, to the ever-continuing line of CEOs succeeding each other like words, to the distance between them introduced by bureaucracy, and giving and receiving as economical and poetical acts. Poem and economy map onto each other, as in another episode from De opvolging : Edward reads two of the beggar’s poems about presents. Of a holiday nothing remains, except for memories, and if some of them are bad I’d rather forget them all; if I get a present I’d rather get something that’s useful to me for a long time. If I may choose, I choose what I can use longest, long enough to partially forget that this was the present, because it feels bad when nothing is left of it. […] Giving away becomes destruction in the stock destruction economy [ voorraadvernie -tigings-economie ], that is a gift economy [ geschenkeneconomie ], encountering for the first time an economy in which there’s selling and buying on markets. Instead of destroying supplies someone can also quickly say that they aren’t worth anything anymore; if someone wants to take them I’d gladly give him something extra. In a stock destruction economy he is someone who each day wants to work more hours than his colleagues. If around a company there is a gift economy in which someone’s rank is determined and made visible by the gifts someone can give someone else, a company will be more often character- ized by an invisible or unclear system of ranks. (152) Two poems about gifts present two different economical models, described by Wijnberg with the terms “stock destruction economy” and “gift economy.” Here we immediately recall the opposition introduced by George Bataille’s work on the concept of expenditure in The Accursed Share , where a “general economy” would surpass the stock destruction economy based on scarcity (capitalism) and become a gift economy (potlatch) and an egalitarian (communist) society. These claims are made both on the level of the poems and in their discursive explanation. They follow each other and on each other. I would like to finish this introduction to Wijnberg’s writing with a translation from his novel De joden ( The Jews , 1999), which develops the story of Hitler abdicating as chancellor of the Third Reich, appointing philosopher Martin Heidegger as his successor. In a conversation with two Russian actor-spies, sent by Stalin to figure out the situation, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the abdication scene. Maimon: You were there when Hitler resigned? Benjamin: In the room we’re right now. The desk and the chairs are new. After his resignation Hitler would like to take his furniture to his new house. Martin naturally agrees. It is a sunny day. Martin is very nervous and complains about the heat. Martin is wearing his best dark blue suit, not his professor’s robe. Hitler is wearing his uniform. We enter the room and Hitler gets up and embraces Martin. Martin is not very good at embracing. Hitler shakes his hand. Hitler’s cap is on the desk. The cap has a metal lining. Hitler has strong neck muscles. Hitler says: A man is unclean. He takes a bath. Does he make the bath water unclean? I say: a man is unclean. He steps into a river. A little further a man steps into the river; does he become unclean? Hitler nods. I say: a man is standing in music. Another man hears the music but also sees the first man moving on the beat of the music in a way that he is certain that the music would excite different feelings in him if he wouldn’t to see the first man. Hitler says: a man is clean, listens to music, is suddenly touched and he doesn’t know by what. The conversation ends in the way you know it ends. Hitler picks up his cap from the desk and puts it on Martin’s head. (73-4) Aware of the never ending debate on the question of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi regime, Wijnberg has the audacity to present the arguments of complicity in the religious terminology of cleanliness and uncleanliness, while at the same time recalling overtones of Hitler’s supposed love for Wagner, suggesting a relation between Benjamin and Hitler, and so on. The space of this introduction is to small to treat a novel like De joden , a reading of which together with passages from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political , Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit , Christopher Fynsk's Heidegger: Thought and Historicity , and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book would be extremely elucidating and potentially open new avenues in thinking Heidegger's emphasis on poetry after the fall of the Nazi empire. But at this point we will have to curb our curiosity and follow the poet himself. The themes of the relation between business and poetry, but also Chinese landscape painting, love, Indian and Japanese poetry, and Western philosophy are analyzed and assimilated in Wijnberg’s work without ever losing the clarity of expression. It may be that, according to Alain Badiou, the “Age of the Poets” is over, but its end (Paul Celan) has exactly brought a new balance between philosophy and poetry, and it is this playful, but nonetheless serious balance that makes one hope that one day Wijnberg’s complete oeuvre might become available to readers across the planet. Tiranë, Albania February 15, 2011 English translations (all of them translated by David Colmer, who is preparing an English collection of Wijnberg’s poems entitled Advanced Payment ): Poetry International Words Without Borders Green Integer Review from Het leven van ( The Life of ) THE LIFE OF KANT, OF HEGEL As if every day he takes a decision that is as good as when he’d been able to think about it all his life. The life of Kant, of Hegel, the days of the life of, select three or four of them. Tell what he has discovered during those days as if he were the last one who knew so little. Give me something that I can cancel against then I can prepare myself for it. The reward is that I may continue with what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This has nothing to do with everything remaining the same if I say that I no longer want anything else. I wouldn’t be able to say in which one and the other occur in a way that I if I knew something to cancel that one against it wouldn’t be possible now. The stars above my head and being able to say what belongs to what if I’ve let them in. FOLLOWING MY HEART WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES Observing the rules without observing the rules by going where the rules no longer apply. I could also observe the rules there by applying them to what at great distance may resemble what the rules are about. But why would I do that, not to confuse someone who is seeing me from a great distance? Behind this morning the morning prepares itself when the rules are everything I have. IF I BORROW ENOUGH MONEY THE BANK BECOMES MY SLAVE A bank lends me money, if I don’t pay it back they tell my boss that he has to pay them my salary. But they have to leave me enough to eat and sleep and an umbrella when it’s raining. They can also empty my house, the furniture isn’t worth a lot, but every little helps. Each morning I leave for work, if I don’t start early they’ll soon get someone else, no bank will lend me money when the sun is shining. My boss has given me a cat to raise as a dog. Of course I know that it won’t work out, but I’ve asked for a week—maybe the cat gets lucky, maybe I get lucky. My hands around a cup of coffee, before I leave for work, warm-empty, cold-empty, as if hidden in the mist over a lawn. What I make when there’s no work left for me, I’m ashamed to say how little it is. Once I’m outside I check it, if they watch out of the window they can see me doing it. Suppose it is so much that I’d stay counting for hours, it’s getting dark and I’m still there. They stay watching for a while once they’ve finished their work, but have to go home, I get that, sure, I could also go home and continue counting there. If it’s too little running back immediately won’t help, because nobody’s there anymore, and if I come back tomorrow I may have spent what’s missing tonight. Going somewhere where it’s warm enough to walk around without clothes during daytime, it helps me to know that something’s more there than here. For someone like me there’s work anywhere, it shouldn’t take a week to find work for me there. Three times work and a home close to work, I may choose one and try for a week whether I want to stay there. If at the end of the week I don’t want to stay I’m back on the next day, then it was a week’s holiday. RULES If that’s against a rule, it’s yet another one that I cannot observe, or only so briefly that I cannot re- member it later. Anyways the rules are only there to help me remember what I need in order to do better what I do. In that respect there’s no difference between the rules that I find in a book and the rules that I think of early in the morning. I know that because I’ve made a rule just now nothing has yet to observe it. CAUSE, SIGN A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate something only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this down myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I could to say more about it. If something is taken away from me I consider how it would be if the opposite had been taken from me. That is what causes or signifies what is farthest away from what is caused or signified by what has been taken away from me. note: For the translations of “The life of Kant, of Hegel” and “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” I was able to consult David Colmer’s wonderful translations. (shrink)

The Existentialist's Guide to Death, the Universe and Nothingness is an entertaining philosophical guide to life, love, hate, freedom, sex, anxiety, God and death; a guide to everything and nothing. Gary Cox, bestselling author of How to Be an Existentialist and How to Be a Philosopher, takes us on an exciting journey through the central themes of existentialism, a philosophy of the human condition. The Existentialist's Guide fascinates, informs, provokes and inspires as it explores existentialism's uncompromising view of human reality. (...) It leaves the reader with no illusions about how hard it is to live honestly and achieve authenticity. It has, however, a redeeming humour that sets the wisdom of the great existentialist philosophers alongside the wit of great musicians and comedians. A realistic self-help book for anyone interested in personal empowerment, The Existentialist's Guide offers a wealth of profound philosophical insight into life, the universe and everything. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strange Death of British IdealismEdward SkidelskyIIn 1958, the Oxford philosopher G. J. Warnock opened his survey of twentieth-century English philosophy with some disparaging comments on British Idealism. It was, he writes, "an exotic in the English scene, the product of a quite recent revolution in ways of thought due primarily to German influences." Analytic philosophy, by contrast, represents a return to the venerable lineage of British empiricism, as (...) Bertrand Russell "symbolically joins hands" with his godfather John Stuart Mill. "Hume and Berkley would have been sadly puzzled by the pages of Bradley, to say nothing of Hegel's. But either might have conversed quite naturally with Moore, and with Russell too, at least in his less technical moments."1All this is rhetoric rather than history. Russell can be called the inheritor of Mill only with respect to his political and social attitudes; his main philosophical endeavour—the establishment of mathematics on a priori foundations—ran diametrically opposed to Mill. And Hume and Berkley would have been just as sadly puzzled by Moore's analysis of language—an activity they both regarded as the defining vice of scholasticism—as by anything in Bradley.Warnock's error has proved remarkably persistent. Only recently, thanks largely to the work of Peter Hylton, has the anti-empiricist, Platonist character of Russell's early thought been properly appreciated.2 I do not intend, in what follows, to retrace these philosophical arguments. My question is historical. It concerns the role of national feeling, first in the demise of Idealism after the First World War, and later in the interpretation of that demise after the Second. With regard to first question, I argue that the rejection of Idealism in Britain was in no sense [End Page 41] a reassertion of national tradition. The opposite is closer to the truth; the change in philosophical fashion was primarily a consequence of a widespread revulsion against nationalism following World War I. That this was later misinterpreted owes largely—and this is my second claim—to the very different climate prevailing in Britain after World War II. If in the twenties the British reserved their scorn for "Prussian militarism," in the fifties everything associated with Germany, its philosophy included, was viewed as irredeemably tainted. Analytic philosophy tried to present itself as a home-grown product, with deep roots in the English empiricist tradition. This partly accounts for the change in style from the highly technical scientism of Russell and the logical positivists to the concern with "ordinary language" characteristic of post-war Oxford philosophy. The fact that most of analytic philosophy's continental exponents were forced by Hitler into British or American exile assisted in the process of its naturalisation. Within a decade, it was possible to regard "analytic" and "Anglo-Saxon" philosophy as synonyms.Warnock's mistake now becomes easier to understand. He has interpreted the early twentieth century in the light of the post-war period, coming to the conclusion that Moore and Russell's rejection of Idealism was a reassertion of English national tradition. He has condensed fifty years of history into a single moment. I intend in what follows to pull apart the stages that Warnock has concertinaed together, demonstrating that national feeling played a far more complex and contradictory role in the history of British philosophy.IIOn one point Warnock is correct: Idealism did not perish of refutation. "Metaphysical systems do not yield...," he writes, "to frontal attack. Their odd property of being demonstrable only, so to speak, from within confers on them also a high resistance to attack from outside.... Such systems are much more vulnerable to ennui than to disproof" (Warnock, pp. 10–11). The claim of Russell and Moore to have "refuted" Bradley is regarded with scepticism by most recent commentators. Idealism, they point out, rested on something more substantial than a mere failure of logic or common-sense, and was therefore not vulnerable to the kind of simple knock-down arguments advanced by Russell and Moore. The causes of its decline must be sought elsewhere, in the broader cultural and political tendencies of the age.Had Russell and Moore's arguments been truly knock-down... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent years, debates on same-sex marriage and the recognition of transwomen as women have been raging. These debates often seem to revolve around the meaning of, respectively, the word ‘marriage’ and ‘woman’. That such debates should take place might be puzzling. It seems that if debates on gay and transgender rights revolve around the meaning of these words, then those in favor of same-sex marriage and of the recognition of transwomen as women have no room left to maneuver. (...) However, prima facie, the pro – and anti-, in both cases, have genuine disagreements over the meaning of these words: though the analyses of revisionary theorists are revisionary, they are analyses. Sally Haslanger and other philosophers in her wake have appealed to an anti-descriptivist externalist view of meaning to provide the conceptual foundations of this practice of revisionary theorizing: revisionary analyses bring to light what, unbeknownst to us, these words mean. In this paper, I argue that a descriptivist externalist view should be preferred instead. My argument rests on the thesis that what is contested in these debates is the meaning of the words ‘marriage’ and ‘women’ as used in the law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

The past several decades have seen a frenzy of philosophical focus on artifacts, spawning numerous theories of artifacts. Most proposals understand being an artefact as being a member of a particular artifact kind; to be an artifact is to be a chair or a pencil or a crank shaft or flatbed truck or whatever. Despite the many theories of artifacts, no one has asked what makes a kind an artifact kind, specifically. While the artifact literature has yet to (...) address this issue, the philosophy of art has already been addressing a parallel question about art by asking what kinds are the art kinds, if being an artwork requires belonging to an artkind. Michel Xhignesse has proposed that the artkinds are those kinds governed by the social norms of the art world which constitute an artistic practice. In this paper, I argue that Xhignesse’s answer can be extended to artifacts generally. I argue that artifact kinds like cabinet, cellphone or sedan chair are constituted by the social norms which govern the associated artifact practice. These social norms determine what features are constitutive of the kind, how the kind should be used, treated, and regarded and by whom and in what context. Crucially, these social norms are often arbitrary and always contingent—there’s nothing necessary about the artifact kinds that happen to be at the center of our current artifact practices. I call this the social practice view of artifact kinds. To illustrate the social practice view, I consider two cases. First, the historical case of chopines—elevated shoes associated with Venetian prostitutes during the Renaissance—illustrates how a distinct social practice arose in a particular historical context, simultaneously giving rise to a new kind of shoe constituted by its attendant norms which differentiated the chopine from the similar clog and high heel, and which eventually fell out of fashion. There was nothing necessary about the chopine being a distinct kind of footwear from clogs or high heels. Rather, the kind arose and developed as a result of distinct social practices and in response to various competing social values. Similar considerations hold for all other artifact kinds—e.g. chairs and stools, pens and pencils, laptops and tablets. Second, is the case of Jaffa cakes, a British confection where there’s debate about whether they’re cakes or biscuits because if they’re the latter they will be subject to an additional tax. Here there’s disagreement about the artifact kind a given artifact belongs to because there is heavy overlap between the social norms and concomitant social practices. Where our practices are indeterminate, we are deciding that Jaffa cakes are or are not biscuits, that is, we are stipulating what social practice Jaffa cakes should be subject to. In many cases, an informal answer is sufficient since people will treat them however they want, but sometimes what kind an artifact belongs to requires more formal. (shrink)

The Tang Dynasty is renowned for its cultural richness and openness to external influences, which significantly impacted the aesthetics of its costume designs, as depicted in contemporary murals. This paper explores the intricate clothing patterns and shapes featured in Tang Dynasty murals, utilizing high-definition microscopic analysis to uncover the profound artistic and symbolic significance embedded within these garments. The study reveals that the clothing patterns are predominantly linear and elongated, with wide cuffs and streamers, while the shapes primarily encompass triangular, (...) rectangular, and oval forms. These elements are executed in a palette of predominantly white, red, blue, and brown, using predominantly lightweight materials like silk, indicative of both aesthetic appeal and functional design. This research delves deeper into the philosophical and religious symbolism of these designs, examining how these ancient motifs influence modern fashion clusters and contribute to contemporary clothing design. The findings suggest that Tang Dynasty apparel exhibits a sophisticated interplay of form and function, enriched with philosophical and religious connotations that resonate with modern design principles. This historical continuity not only deepens the cultural and symbolic dimensions of contemporary fashion but also enhances brand identity and competitive edge in today's global fashion markets. By tracing the lineage of these artistic characteristics from ancient murals to modern clothing collections, this paper highlights the enduring influence of Tang Dynasty aesthetics on modern fashion, suggesting that ancient art forms can provide significant insights into contemporary design practices, especially in the context of enhancing philosophical and religious expressions within the fashion industry. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 60–63 Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. From the forthcoming book Post-History , Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013. It is not necessary to have a keen ear in order to find out that the steps we take towards the future sound hollow. But it is necessary to have concentrated hearing if one wishes to find out which type of vacuity resonates with our progress. There are several types of vacuity, and ours must be compared to others, if the aim (...) is to understand it. The incomparable is incomprehensible. If we affirm that our situation is incomparable, we give up the effort to grasp it. The comparison that imposes itself is to the vacuity of the Baroque. There are innumerable traces in the present that evoke the Baroque. We bear the mark of the same somber rationalism (logics, informatics, cybernetics), and of the same magic and fanatic irrationalism (mass media, phantastic ideologies). But there is a decisive difference. Humanity advanced over a stage during the Baroque. All of its gestures, even the most sincere, were marked by theatricality. The vacuity that resonated under its feet was of the void under the stage. Baroque man represented. 1 For example he represented faith in waging religious wars. Baroque vacuity was the consequence of a medieval loss of faith in dogmas . Our vacuity is different. We do not represent anything. Our world is not a stage. We are not actors, and if we act, it is not to represent a drama, but to divert the audience's attention and our own from the subjects that really matter. We act like criminals that try to hide their tracks. We pretend. Our progress is a farce. The vacuity under our feet is not Baroque. We have not lost our faith in dogmas: we have lost faith in ourselves . We are as counter-reformists as was the Baroque (we want to cover up the recent revolution with warm cloths), but for different reasons. Although comparable with the Baroque, in certain aspects, our situation is in fact incomparable to any other. That is because an incomparable, unheard of, never before seen event happened recently, which emptied the ground we tread. Auschwitz . Other posterior events; Hiroshima, the Gulags, are nothing but variations of the first. Therefore every attempt to grasp the present leads to the following questions: how was Auschwitz possible? How can we live after this? Such questions relate not only to the ones directly or indirectly responsible, and not only to those who were directly or indirectly hit by it: they relate to everyone who takes part in our culture. Because what is so incomparable, unheard of, never before seen and therefore incomprehensible in Auschwitz, is that it was there that Western culture revealed one of its inherent virtualities. Auschwitz is a characteristic realization of our culture. It is neither the product of a particular Western ideology, nor of specific “advanced” industrial techniques. It springs directly from the depths of culture and of its concepts and values. The possibility to realize Auschwitzes is implicit within our culture from the very start: the Western “project” already harbored it, although as a remote possibility. Auschwitz lies within the initial program of the West, which progressively realizes all of its virtualities as history unfolds. That is why the question that Auschwitz poses before us is not: how did it happen? It serves no purpose to “explain” Auschwitz. The fundamental question is: how was it possible? Because what is being questioned is not the extermination camp, but the West. Thus one other question: how to live within a culture henceforth unmasked? Everything that happened afterwards resonates with such a question, with such vacuity. Every economic, social, political, technical, scientific, artistic, philosophic event is corroded by such an undigested question. The distance that separates us from the event does not mitigate the abyss, it erodes it even deeper. Because the distance progressively dissolves the aura of the horror that envelops the event, and it progressively opens up a vision of the scene. It progressively reveals that there all of our categories, all of our “models”, suffered an irreparable shipwreck. Auschwitz was a revolutionary event, in the sense that it overthrew our culture. Insofar as we seek ways to cover up such revolution with trips to the moon or with genetic manipulations, we are counter-revolutionaries: we are inverting the course of history in order to cover up the past. The unspoken in Auschwitz is not the mass murder, it is not the crime . It is the ultimate reification of people into amorphous objects, into ashes. The Western tendency towards objectification was finally realized and it was done so in the shape of an apparatus . The SS were functionaries of an extermination apparatus, and their victims functioned in function of their own annihilation. The extermination camp's program, once it started functioning, developed in an automatic fashion, autonomous from the decisions of the initial programmers, even if, as it effectively did, it contributed to the defeat of the programmers. The SS and the Jews functioned one in function of the other like cogwheels. The models for such functionality were provided by the highest of Western values: the SS behaved like “heroes” and the Jews like “martyrs”. This is an apparatus that functions at a borderline situation: objective even beyond death. What has just been said is intolerable. We cannot accept it and so we mobilize arguments against it. Good arguments. The SS behaved like criminals: they removed the gold teeth from the cadavers. The Jews behaved like victims: they rose up in the Warsaw ghetto. Such arguments are true, but they do not reach the nucleus, the “ eidos ” of the phenomenon: they do not grasp it. Although there was “normal” behavior: (theft, murder, revolt, heroism), there was also “abnormal” behavior: functionality during a borderline situation. And this is what counts. There, for the first time in the history of humanity, an apparatus was put into operation that was programmed with the most advanced techniques available, which realized the objectification of man, together with the functional collaboration of man. The previous horrors committed by Western society against other societies and against itself (and there are many) were crimes . They were violations of Western models of behavior: anti-Christian, anti-human, irrational. So that it is possible to condemn them and continue to be Western, even if the horror is so colossal, such as the enslavement of Africans. However, it is not possible to condemn Auschwitz and continue to adhere consciously to the West. Auschwitz is not a violation of Western models of behavior, it is, on the contrary, the result of the application of such models. Our culture allowed its mystifying mask to fall and must be rejected in toto if we admit that the purpose of every culture is to allow for the convivial existence of men that recognize each other mutually as subjects. However: it is not possible to reject one's own culture. It is the ground we tread . Those who seek to reject their own culture (as Nietzsche did in rejecting Judeo-Christianity), fall victim to madness. Those who reject their culture's models, are incapable of grasping the world in which they live. Cultural models are traps to catch the world. Those who seek to substitute their own models for other's (for example by shouting “Hare Krishna”) will find that such exotic models have already been caught by the very models to be substituted. There is no exit: we are condemned to use our models and to serve such models, even after they have been unmasked, if we wish to continue living. The only alternative would be to commit suicide. That is: we must continue our economic, political, scientific, artistic, philosophic activities despite Auschwitz. We must continue progressing despite everything . That is why there are those who recommend that we should seek to forget what happened, that we should repress the event. They sustain that enough has already been said and written about the subject and that it is time to “overcome” it. But such an ostrich strategy reveals itself disastrous. Because the result is that Auschwitz transfers itself from Poland of the 1940s to the post-industrial society of the future. What characterizes the extermination camp is precisely that it is not an event that can be “overcome”, because it is the first realization of an inherent virtuality within the Western project, which will repeat itself in other formats unless we become totally conscious of it. The advantage (if this is an appropriate term) that Auschwitz offers us, is to give us a concrete example of the West’s tendency towards the apparatus. For the first time in our history it is possible for us to experience concretely the utopia inherent in our culture. For the first time in our history we have the experience that utopia, no matter in what form, towards which we progress, is the extermination camp. Everywhere we can observe, as of now, the emergence of variations on the theme “Auschwitz”. Everywhere apparatus spring, just like mushrooms after a Nazi rain, from the ground that has become rotten. Certainly: such new apparatus are not externally similar to the Nazi extermination camps. Their labels are different, as are the ideologies that pretend to inspire them. Even the apparatus that admittedly envision extermination, such as the Gulags, the ones of a future nuclear war, or the ones that functioned in Vietnam, claim to be different from Auschwitz. Others claim to be “friends of mankind”, such as the scientific, technical and administrative apparatus. But such labels and such ideologies are deceptive and serve only to cover up the essence of apparatus. They are all just like Auschwitz, black boxes that function with complex inner-workings in order to realize a program. They all function according to an inertia that is inherent to them and such functionality escapes , from a certain point, the control of their initial programmers. In a final analysis such apparatuses function, all of them, towards the annihilation of all their functionaries, including their programmers. Exactly because they objectify and dehumanize man. Thus Western culture reveals itself as a project that seeks to transform itself into an apparatus. What characterizes the West is its capacity for an objectifying transcendence. Such transcendence allows for the transformation of all phenomena, including the human phenomenon, into an object of knowledge and manipulation. The space for such transcendence opened up thanks to Judeo-Christianity and resulted, in the course of our history, in science, technique and recently, in Auschwitz. The ultimate objectification of the Jews into ashes is the ultimate victory of the spirit of the West. It is social technique taken to the extreme. Certainly: the transformation of men into ashes is primitive, incipient social technique that progressively refines itself. It will be followed by less brutal objectifications, such as the robotization of society. But it does not matter which form it will assume: it will always be an objectifying manipulation of mankind. Although the apparatus of the immediate future are not necessarily incineration ovens, all will be, and not only the nuclear ones, apparatus for the annihilation of man. The Western program contains several virtualities, not only apparatus. Numerous virtualities have not yet been realized. In this sense the “history of the West” has not ended yet, the Western game continues. But all not-yet realized virtualities are infected by apparatus. That is why it has become currently impossible to engage ourselves in the “ progress of culture .” As it would be to engage ourselves in our own annihilation. We have lost our faith in our culture, in the ground we tread. That is: we have lost faith in ourselves. It is this hollow vibration that follows our steps towards the future. What remains is for us to analyze the event “Auschwitz” in all its details in order to discover the fundamental project that realized itself there for the first time, so that we may nurture the hope to project ourselves out of that project. Out of the history of the West. This is the “post- historical” climate in which we are condemned to live from hereon. NOTES 1. In Portuguese representar (to represent) also means “to act” or “to play a role.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of SpiritAndy R. GermanRobert B. Pippin. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 103. Cloth, $29.95.If Hegel's system cannot be understood without the Phenomenology of Spirit, it is certainly impossible to understand the Phenomenology without understanding its famous transition, in chapter 4, to self-consciousness and the (perhaps (...) all-too-famous) master-slave dialectic. In these published lectures, then, Robert Pippin has compelling reasons for seeking the heart of the Phenomenology in two of its crucial assertions: that "Self-Consciousness is desire itself" and that "Self-Consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness" (¶¶167 and 175 in Miller's translation).Pippin's Hegel is essentially Kantian, concerned with the apperceptive nature of self-consciousness, i.e. not as mere receptivity to sensory or intellectual form, but as an activity, a judging or "taking" the world to be such and so. For Kant, this activity is transcendental or purely formal, the unification of the spatio-temporal manifold by a continuous, apperceptive "I" (31). Pippin argues that Hegel jettisons Kantian formality in favor of a broader question: how, rather than being subject to my desires, am I the subject of my desires? (32). An answer is possible only if self-consciousness is neither observational nor an immediate self-presence but instead (i) a practical achievement (15) that (ii) requires other self-conscious subjects (19). Unlike Platonic erōs, then, which points away from human life, self-conscious desire is constant self-examination of the reasons for our actions or beliefs. This is Hegel's version of Kant's insight that reason is the desire for justification, ultimately before "all others" (56–57).Thus we pivot to the claim that the successful or "satisfying" achievement of self-consciousness involves recognition by others. "Our answerability to the world," as Pippin writes, "is inextricably bound up with... our answerability to each other" (61). Unlike John McDowell's interpretation of the master-slave dialectic as an analogy for the struggle between the passive and active elements within one mind (42), Pippin argues that self-consciousness is social all the way down. It is "something like having a position," i.e. avowing a practical commitment or making a normative claim (65), which implies the presence of another self-conscious subject who recognizes my right to such claims, or challenges that right, even to the outermost—a struggle to the death over recognition and authority. Self-consciousness, then, is "not... a reflection of some substantive or metaphysical nature but... a social achievement... bound up with... social conflict" (75). On the decisive point, Pippin agrees with Brandom's neo-pragmatism: "[S]elf-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories" (68), specifically, the history of struggle and reconciliation among rational, mutually recognizing subjects.But what, then, does recognition mean and how does it "satisfy"? And in what does our "answerability to others" consist if there is no "non-question begging... standard" (83) by which to judge our answers? Hegel, Pippin writes, "has a ‘pragmatic' or a ‘historicized' or ‘dialogical' view of what counts as the appeal to reasons.... He understands practical reason as a kind of interchange of attempts at justification among persons... " (84). Justification, however, cannot mean an appeal to nature. Indeed, in the struggle for recognition, self-conscious freedom means indifference to mere natural life or desire. Nature no longer points to philosophical wholeness, as our love of seeing does in Aristotle's Metaphysics. To paraphrase Pippin's titles, he shows with superior clarity that Hegel's idealism really is modernism: i.e. the most thoroughgoing rejection of the Greek link between eleutheria and eudaimonia.But when Hegel writes of "the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself... where Concept corresponds to object and object to Concept" as the necessary "goal" of knowledge (¶80), this suggests that the "interchange of justifications" reaches an end. Even if this end is the socio-political order of mutual recognition among rational persons, it is surely not the mere fact of recognition that satisfies us... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” by Benson MatesDavid K. GliddenBenson Mates. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 335. Cloth, $55.00, Paper, $22.95.Benson Mates’s translation and commentary of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism appears nearly half a century after Mates first began his pioneering work on Sextus and Hellenistic philosophy. This publication coincides with another (...) new translation of the Outlines by Annas and Barnes, who provide only an abbreviated commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1994). After decades when the only available English translation was by Bury from the Loeb, there are now choices available which allow Sextus to be taught to different sorts of English readers.In comparing the two translations, this reader found the Annas and Barnes version more mellifluous. Mates is not as sweet. His style is plain-spoken, but this approach has merits when the arguments get going. The Annas and Barnes version uses footnotes for commentary, along with a brief introduction. Their notes cite parallel passages in other works by Sextus, provide brief guidance for interpretation when it is most needed, and connect the reader with a focused list of bibliographical references, inviting readers themselves to turn toward scholarly debates over certain controversial passages. Consequently, Annas and Barnes opens out to a wide audience of classicists, historians, students of literature, general readers interested in scepticism, as well as philosophers of whatever ideology. [End Page 460]The Mates edition is directed toward philosophers alone. It is much less oriented toward historical scholarship, preferring to read Sextus as a contemporary professional philosopher might. In this way, Mates will approach a passage from the Outlines in terms of a passage in Hume or Berkeley, even though, of course, these latter-day philosophers derived their views from reading Sextus. Mates employs philosophese with ease, constructing a version of Sextus from the professional philosopher’s interpretive stance, in the language of propositions and Fregean intensions. The audience Mates is writing for and the viewpoint he is writing from more or less correspond to the “analytical” faction of the American Philosophical Association. Postmodern Foucaultians, contextualist historians, and Hellenistic scholars might find this approach unhelpful, even irritating. But busy, mainstream American philosophers could find Mates’s approach sufficiently sympathetic to actually read some Sextus, in the way Chisholm once had done, finding a passage on the Cyrenaics in Sextus which led to the reinvention of “adverbial appears locutions” and which, in turn, played for decades in the epistemological arcades.Mates begins his edition with a systematic introduction to the Outlines and follows his translation with another hundred pages of narrative, reflecting primarily what Mates finds interesting about certain selected passages. Although, like Annas and Barnes, he provides parallel passages, ancient references, and highly abbreviated accounts of scholarly disputes, his own narrative line dominates both his introductory essay and his commentary. Mates writes in a somewhat chatty style prone to the blunt Cephalean confidence that comes with considerable experience and success as a professional philosopher. His narrative line is clear, connected, often compelling, as for instance when he argues that for Sextus “dogmatizing and believing turn out to be one and the same” (61).Fashion has returned to favor Pyrrhonism in the late twentieth century, just as the cycle had come around before, toward the end of the sixteenth century, sparking a philosophical renaissance. This time around the import may be different. Both Annas and Barnes as well as Mates find Sextus worth reading as serious philosophy. This is a considerable improvement in the fortuna of the Outlines. For decades Sextus was banned in American philosophy departments, as no philosopher at all. He was not taught, he was not read. One highly prominent American philosopher was expressly forbidden to write a dissertation on him, around the time Mates and Chisholm had the courage to publish on him. Sextus is now welcome in the Canon.If Sextus now is one of us, a serious philosopher, then the dogmatists (Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, etc.) he ridiculed were merely failures. The game continues. So, Mates, Annas and Barnes can embrace Sextus as ours. His readers won’t... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary FormDavid SiderCharles H. Kahn. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxi 1 431 pp. Cloth, $64.95.An enduring question in Plato studies is whether—and if so how—Plato developed as a thinker. A simple positive answer, as argued by Taylor and Burnet, has Plato starting out his philosophical (...) life as an associate of Socrates who adopted and portrayed his teacher’s ideas in the early dialogues (some few of them, in this reviewer’s opinion, perhaps antedating Socrates’ death). Then, upon further and continual reflection, of a Socratic sort no doubt, Plato slowly or quickly (some would mark the spot at Symposium 210a) began to espouse views never held by his rabbi. Or—as, e.g., Shorey and Cherniss would hold—Plato knew his own mind, if not at the very first then at least in his earliest published writings, holding to these same beliefs throughout his life.Neither position is intrinsically impossible or even unlikely. But faced with the various literary devices and philosophical ploys with which Plato shapes his dialogues, it is not surprising that developmentalists predominate over unitarians in Plato studies, each side generally content to leave the other alone in its ignorance. Now comes Charles Kahn to show how both sides may be right: while Plato the thinker behind the dialogues had firm views from which he rarely deviated throughout his life, he planned years in advance how these ideas would best be presented to the public, and in what order. It is, then, [End Page 624] only the dialogues that develop, according to a prearranged scheme that constitutes, as the subtitle has it, Plato’s “philosophical use of a literary form.” (Kahn’s review of the history of the dialogue form in chapter 1 is excellent, with especially valuable remarks on Antisthenes, but is not strictly necessary for his thesis.) This intriguing idea is worthy of Kahn, whose writings on pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and beyond always command immediate attention and frequently become standard entries in later bibliographies. It is particularly noteworthy that in an earlier attempt at a different sort of reconciliation, Kahn—when all the rest of us believed that Empedocles wrote two major works, one “scientific” and the other “religious”—showed how these apparently different works in fact complemented each other. Now, after Osborne’s argument that Empedocles wrote but one poem has been proved correct by the Strasbourg papyrus, Kahn’s paper holds up remarkably well. Kahn’s own bibliography in the present volume also contains articles written as far back as 1983 (“Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias,” OSAP 1:75–121) that not only maintain and develop the idea he is considering but also illustrate how a thinker can space out his already fully formed thesis in well-articulated units—just as Kahn argues Plato did over a large portion of his own oeuvre, specifically the eighteen dialogues from Apology to Phaedrus.It is not that there is no Socratic period, rather that it would now be limited only to the four dialogues Apology, Crito, Ion, and Hippias Minor (93). Hard-core developmentalists and unitarians will want to see whether Kahn can convince them to alter long-held views about so important an aspect of Plato’s dialogues and thought. To convince them, however, Kahn, like the developmentalists, should ideally present a case for the chronological order of composition and publication that depends solely upon external criteria, so as not to beg the question of how, in his own view, the dialogues were made to develop. (The unitarian view would remain theoretically unaltered were it to be proved that, say, Parmenides was written before Laches.) It must be said, however, that on this most essential point, Kahn has not altogether managed to avoid circularity. In part, this is because external evidence tells us very little about Plato’s intellectual development: the Seventh Letter is fascinating but short on details, and Aristotle’s account “is not historically reliable” (41 n. 10, developed further in chapter 3, where, amazingly, an account explicitly... (shrink)

Professor Kenneth Inada, State University of New York at Buffalo, writes: "There is no ordinary volume. It is a well crafted work containing brilliant reactions to traditional Chinese philosophical thought." -/- Ninian Smart, President, American Academy of Religion, Rowney Chair of Philosophy, The University of California, Santa Barbara, in a review of Understanding the Chinese Mind in Philosophy, East and West, writes: "This is an important book ... Robert E. Allinson is to be congratulated on putting together this thoughtful (...) and reflective volume." -/- Professor Mary Bockover, Humboldt State University, writes: "Understanding the Chinese Mind is an intriguing book that crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries to probe various issues in the Chinese philosophical tradition. In taking philosophy to be a kind of mirror of the mind, this book uses Western philosophical tools to provide an understanding of the Chinese mind through its philosophy." -/- Currently in its 11th impression, Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, was first published in 1989. Impressions of the work have been made in 2000, 1999, 1998, 1996, 1995, 1993, 1992, 1991, 1990, 1989: 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1989. These essays represent an attempt to understand the Chinese mind through its philosophy. The first volume of its kind, the collection demonstrates how Chinese philosophy can be understood in light of techniques and categories taken from Western philosophy. Eight philosophers, each of whom is a recognized authority in Western philosophy as well as in some area of Chinese philosophy, contribute chapters from perspectives that indicate the uniqueness of the Chinese way of thinking in categories adapted from Western philosophy. The book covers a wide range of topics including metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and western parallels and non-parallels of philosophical development. (shrink)

This study aims to substantiate the general ancient ‘scientific’ interest of the natural phenomena and popular beliefs Plutarch discusses in his physical problems. Plutarch does not intend to verify these mirabilia in an empirical fashion. He is not so much looking for the ὅτι but more for the διὰ τί in nature. It remains to be seen whether he investigates and ‘believes’ these natural phenomena only for reasons of intellectual exercise, then. They at least receive Plutarch’s benefit of the (...) doubt, which ties in closely with his ‘sceptical’ stance in natural scientific affairs, mediating between unreasoned belief and disbelief of natural mirabilia. The idea that wonder remains immanent in nature is an essential aspect of Plutarch’s general world view and (natural) philosophy. This view is based on a philosophical conviction that nature has a divine teleology. In connection with Platonic ontology and epistemology Plutarch generally accepts, moreover, that no firm knowledge can be attained from natural phenomena, because they are immanently obscure and uncertain, and cannot grant any evident cognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave TradeStephen Auerbach (bio)Christopher L. Miller. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008. xvi + 571 pp.Over the last decade scholars have shown a new interest in reconstructing the history of the French slave trade and slaveholding Atlantic. A scholarly consensus is slowly emerging around the notion (...) that the history of French slavery and colonialism is central to any understanding of the larger themes in French and Francophone history from the seventeenth century to the present. Christopher Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle is a welcome contribution to this important subject. Miller rightly argues that France, Africa, and the Caribbean are tied together in a shared history of colonialism, slavery, and the slave trade. His goal in The French Atlantic Triangle is to reconstruct this history and illuminate its impact on modern French and Francophone cultural life.The French Atlantic Triangle is a fascinating example of research that combines methods employed in history and Francophone literary studies in order to discuss the triangular slave trade that condemned 2 million Africans to slavery on France’s Caribbean sugar islands and an untold number to their deaths during the Middle Passage. Miller’s central interest here is exploring the ways in which the slave trade and its afterlife were represented in literature and in film from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. In the absence of any extant Francophone slave narratives, Miller persuasively argues that fiction and later film allowed writers and filmmakers to pour their “speculations and reflections” (92) into that void. French and Francophone writers separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years were united by the desire to construct slave narratives and stories that played on the reader’s sense of pity and shame, or desire for adventure, or to convey a powerful longing for home. The result is an ambitious and substantive work. Miller clearly succeeds in demonstrating a legacy of slavery and the slave trade in France and Francophone literature, yet the picture that emerges is a muddled one; the reader is left to make sense of competing, diverse, and sometimes divergent claims. In the end, The French Atlantic Triangle is more suggestive than persuasive.The book is organized into fourteen chapters, divided into four sections, arranged chronologically and geographically. Part 1 (chaps. 1–4) is largely synthesis. Drawing heavily on the work of historians of slavery and the slave trade, Miller outlines the details of the triangular trade from its inception in the mid-seventeenth century to its first abolition in 1794, and final suppression in 1848. Chapters 1 and 2 will be a review for anyone familiar with the history of this period. Chapter 3 focuses on the Enlightenment and the slave trade. Miller rightly notes that the Enlightenment coincided with the height of French slaving activity. Examining works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and [End Page 59] Voltaire, Miller argues that the philosophes were never much interested in the plight of African slaves, and when they did speak out on the issue it was with heavy irony or wit that only diluted their message. Miller’s analysis is convincing, though he seems unjustified in suggesting that Voltaire remained mostly quiet on the issue because he was heavily invested in the slave trade. There is no evidence for that assertion.Part 2 (chaps. 5–8) covers the period from the French Revolution to the Bourbon Restoration during which time France experienced complete upheaval from the slave rebellions in Martinique in 1789 and Saint Domingue in 1791, to the abolition of slavery in 1794 and its reimposition under Napoleon. Focusing on the writings of Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, and Claire de Duras, Miller labels the three as abolitionists because in their works they created sympathetic black characters, critiqued racial prejudice, and instilled pity in their readers. Miller brings a fresh analytical eye to well-known texts like Duras’ Ourika, and shines new light on little-known (or unknown) works like Gouge’s play Zamore et Mirza.Miller’s task here is not only to demonstrate the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking by Daryn LehouxJohn M. OksanishDaryn Lehoux. What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xii + 275 pp. 10 black-and-white figs., 2 tables. Cloth, $45.“Have we ever been modern?” Thus author Daryn Lehoux expresses one of the fundamental questions underlying the book under review, which seeks to (...) present a historicizing account of the various lenses through which elite Romans in the late Republic and early Empire understood and, importantly, expressed their understanding of our world. I say “our” world because, as Lehoux makes clear from the beginning of this fascinating, if sometimes challenging, monograph, continuity with our scientific forebears is as fundamental a key to accessing their ambitions, limits, and scope, as are our divergences from them. In this sense, What Did the Romans Know? provides a kind of study in the reception of Roman sciences, whose plurality, interdependence, and context-specific viability are emphasized throughout. For although (1) physical realities have per se not [End Page 343] changed since antiquity, and (2) how we regard and describe them has, Lehoux insinuates that our own laws of nature remain limited by specific ontological and rhetorical constraints—“blind spots”—that render our modern science in some ways comparable with the sciences that operated in antiquity. By first emphasizing various contexts (epistemological, ontological, etc.) and showing readers how the ancient sciences operated within them, Lehoux effectively shows us that ancient sciences did indeed work, even astrology. However, Lehoux ultimately reveals himself as a scientific realist: the contextual viability of the ancient sciences notwithstanding, he does not believe in a Lucretian “swerve” but in atoms, electrons, and other phenomena that he has never seen directly. That he waits until the ninth chapter (200) for this admission to materialize fully is surely purposeful, but it can sometimes make for disorienting reading. Equally disorienting is the book’s tendency to present ancient scientific terms with little or no explanation (e.g., equant, 68; synodic anomaly, 69), while terms whose specific valences will be well-known to many readers of this journal (e.g., religio, 26; pietas, 27) are glossed, sometimes simplistically. Despite this and a few other caveats, however, Lehoux has broadly succeeded at a very difficult task, i.e., presenting ancient science in a manner that is accessible and interesting to Classicists of various stripes, while simultaneously delivering classical texts to historians of science through an essentially new historicist lens.The first three chapters provide examples from and discussions of selected texts that show the Romans making links between nature and law in science, religion (especially divination), and in legal theories. We quickly learn that Lehoux’s is not a book about Romans who merely applied Greek theories in the interest of technology or about the ways in which slave-power made an ancient industrial revolution unnecessary at Rome (the so-called blocage question, discussed by Serafina Cuomo in Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity [Cambridge, 2007]). Rather, this is a book about science as a reflection of, and participant in, the creation of Roman ideology and society. Any good discussion of Roman-ness at the end of the Republic inevitably involves a good deal of Cicero, who conveniently, and thus perhaps problematically, provides ample discussion of the kinds of topics in which Lehoux is interested, especially divination. Cicero’s apparently contradictory positions on the practice (Leg. 2.32 and Div. 2.74) are noted, as is the movement in the past thirty years away from the “naive” reading of De Divinatione as a “vigorous rationalistic protest” against a national superstition. Divination, for Lehoux’s Cicero, is neither an intellectual offense nor a politically expedient fiction; rather, it is a thoroughly Roman way of both seeing the world and doing business. Some of what is found here will not be new to classicists, and the chapter overall seems less interested in breaking new ground than in establishing, in deliberate fashion, the book’s foundational interest in seeing nature, law, and religion as legitimately connected. Divination and other phenomena reflect a Roman interest in a kind... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek HistoriansJohn WalshPeter Hunt. Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xiv + 246 pp. Cloth, $59.95.Put briefly, the theses of this book (a revised Stanford dissertation) may be stated as follows. (1) The role and importance of slaves in warfare of the Classical period were greater than is generally believed to be (...) the case. This misapprehension exists because Greek historians of the Classical period (most notably Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon) routinely underestimate, even suppress, the contributions made by slaves to a city's success in war, whether in strategy or on the field, because of reluctance to face the fact that then slaves would be operating on the same level as was fitting for their free, and presumably better, masters. (2) Modern historians too have been unwilling to face squarely the extent of involvement by slaves in some of the most important campaigns and battles of the Classical period. Hunt attempts to rectify this situation through a thorough review of slaves' participation in Greek warfare [End Page 313] from the Persian Wars down to Xenophon. (The book concludes with a chapter of a comparative nature, on the Volones, slaves who fought for Rome in the Second Punic War; Islamic Mamluks; and slaves who fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War.)It is certainly true that historians of the Classical period do not present us with anything close to a complete account of slaves' participation in Greek warfare. But all modern historians of the ancient world complain about the same thing: the lack of ancient sources for matters in which they are most interested. In fact, as I was reading this book, I developed an impression quite different from Hunt's concerning the extent to which slaves in war are discussed by the historians under question. I was surprised by the considerable attention which these writers paid to the issue. Were Hunt's thesis about the reluctance of Greek writers to discuss the issue so obviously correct, I would have expected far less material than Hunt has managed to discover and collect.Hunt's accounting is taken from the fifth century and is selective even at that. We are told about slaves' participation in battle at Thermopylae, Plataea, Pylos, Decelaea, Sphacteria, during Brasidas' campaign in the Thraceward region, and at Mantinaea and Arginusae. We know from Pausanias that slaves fought at Marathon. Herodotus does not mention them, and Hunt's suspicions (42) are representative of his position throughout the book: "The omission of these slaves is so striking one is tempted to call it suppression." The participation of slaves at Salamis is very likely, though not certain. Admittedly, many of these mentions are sketchy and most probably do not do justice to the role played by slaves, whether in combat or otherwise. But it may be more a matter of the glass being either half empty or half full, depending upon one's point of view. Consider the following conclusion: "Thucydides puts the Messenians and Athens' support of them in the background as he does all slave involvement in the Peloponnesian War" (63). Now, this may or may not be true for Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, but it is certainly not the case in his Pentecontaetia. The defining moment in Thucydides' understanding of the importance of the Pentecontaetia for the Peloponnesian War is the course of events which led up to and followed the "open split" between Athens and Sparta (1.102.3). Given the brevity of his account of these years, the amount of space and depth of detail which he allows the Helots' revolt at Ithome and its aftermath is striking. Thucydides at times did concentrate on slaves' involvement in Greek warfare, presumably when he thought that its importance warranted such treatment. Similarly, slaves serving as rowers in the Athenian fleet at the battle of Arginusae most certainly did make a major contribution to the victory, and it is for this reason that their role is mentioned by no fewer than three contemporary sources: Hellanicus, Aristophanes, and Xenophon.Hunt is skeptical about Herodotus' account of the Helots... (shrink)

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three (...) questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Elizabeth Gould, “Nomadic Turns:Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band Directors” Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band Directors”Julia Eklund KozaClimate and its impact on women in instrumental music education is a tremendously important subject, and I thank Liz Gould for her thoughtful analysis. Rather than offering a critique of her work, I will respond as one might answer in a call and response. Gould has sung a (...) call that articulates a definition of feminism and invites us to explore climate in the professions, specifically in instrumental music education; I will answer in affirmation, confirmation, and extension. The nomadic metaphor, which is central to her paper, has been appropriated by a number of postmodern [End Page 187] theoreticians, including, among others, Baudrillard, Grisoni, Deleuze and Guattari, and of course, Braidotti.1 I have decided not to talk about this metaphor, however, principally because the complexities of any analysis of Western constructions of nomadism—constructions that are rife with exoticism, fascination, revulsion, and fear—are multiplied at this moment, as my country wages war against Iraq, a land of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, after having recently engaged in military action in Afghanistan, which is similarly home to nomads. An incisive discussion of postmodern use of nomadic metaphors appears in Caren Kaplan's book Questions of Travel, which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject.2My response has two goals: first, to forward another, not necessarily competing, postmodern understanding of feminism and power; and second, keeping this understanding in mind, to expand Gould's project of examining professional climate. According to my working postmodern definition, feminism is a constellation of dynamic political positions, which address and attempt to change the unequal power relations and material conditions that are produced and supported by a normative regulatory ideal called sex. In speaking of a constellation of political positions, I acknowledge the existence of a multiplicity of modern and post-modern feminisms, and by calling these positions dynamic I acknowledge their fluidity. In asserting that sex is a regulatory ideal, I rely on the work of feminist theorist Judith Butler, who posits that sex and sexual difference are discursively constructed; distinguishing herself from feminists who draw a distinction between gender, which is assumed to be socially constructed, and sex, which is theorized as a pre-social given or surface, Butler not only questions such a distinction by arguing that both sex and gender are culturally produced, but also theorizes about how materializations of bodies are accomplished. Drawing on the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, she maintains that sex is a regulatory norm, "part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs,"3 and she claims that this materialization is accomplished through a reiterative process called performativity. A performative, according to Butler, is a "discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names."4 Butler claims that "the regulatory norms of 'sex' work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body's sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative."5 She provides an example of how this reiterative process works: when a particular child is born, the child is cited as a girl at birth and many times afterward; each citation helps to constitute that child as a girl and also to reinforce the discursive formation "girl."6 To summarize, Butler asserts that sex is "a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies,"7 and she posits that materiality is a productive effect of power.8She also theorizes that subject formation necessitates both an "identification with the normative phantasm of 'sex,'" and the creation of a zone of abjection.9 Bodies relegated to this abject zone, according to Butler, can be a valuable and "critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility."10 She maintains that disidentification can be a fruitful way to mobilize feminist and queer politics.11 Collective disidentifications, Butler states, can facilitate a "reconceptualization of which bodies matter," which bodies count.12 [End Page 188]Finally, my definition of feminism relies on several Foucauldian assumptions about... (shrink)