Showing papers on "Eudaimonia published in 1998"

Mind, Value, and Reality

Abstract: Part 1 Greek ethics: the role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle's ethics some issues in Aristotle's moral psychology virtue and reason. Part 2 Reason, value and reality: are moral requirements hypothetical imperatives? might there be external reasons? aesthetic value, objectivity, and the fabric of the world values and secondary qualities projection and truth in ethics two sorts of naturalism non-cognitivism and rule-following. Part 3 Issues in Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein on following a rule meaning and intentionality in Wittgenstein's later philosophy one strand in the private language argument intentionality and interiority in Wittgenstein. Part 4 Mind and self: functionalism and anomalous monism the content of perceptual experience reductionism and the first person.

The cultural turn : selected writings on the postmodern, 1983-1998

Abstract: Designed as a short introduction to Fredric Jameson's thought for both the student and the general reader, this reader gives accessible coverage to his writings on postmodernism. The book includes: "Postmodernism and Consumer Society", Jameson's analysis of postmodernity; "Marxism and Postmoderism", in which he responds to his critics; "Theories of the Postmodern", his survey of alternative approaches; "The Antinomies of Postmodernity", an extract from his recently published work, "The Seeds of Time", in which he surveys the philosophical tensions embedded in the postmodern; and "End of Art" or "End of History?" and "Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity", two pieces hitherto unpublished in English, on art and the image in the postmodern epoch. Fredric Jameson is also the author of "Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of Dialectic" and "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism".

England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism

Abstract: The year 1819 was the "annus mirabilis" for many British Romantic writers, and the "annus terribilis" for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound", "The Cenci", and "Ode to the West Wind." Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, "Peter Bell", and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of 1819, in particular the great movement for reform that came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men, women, and children in St Peter's Field, Manchester, a massacre that journalists dubbed "Peterloo". But the year of Peterloo in British history is notable for more than just the volume, value, and topicality of its literature. Writing from 1819, as the author argues, was acutely aware not only of its place in history, but also of its place "as" history - a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism, such as the shared tendency to seize a single dated event as both important on its own and as a "case" testing general principles. To animate these issues, Chandler offers a series of cases of built around key texts from 1819. Like the famous sonnet by Shelley from which it takes its name, this book simultaneously creates and critiques its own place in history. It sets out to be not only a crucial study of Romanticism, but also a major contribution to an understanding of historicism.

Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity

Abstract: Preface. 1. Authenticity and Validity 2. Postmetaphysical Phronesis 3. From Kant to Kant : A Normativity Without Principles 4. Reflective Authenticity and Exemplary Universalism 5. Postmodern Eudaimonia : Dimensions of an Authentic Identity 6. The Fulfilment of collective Identities 7. Authenticity, the Text and the Work of Art 8. Rethinking the Project of Modernity. Notes, References, Index

Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays

Abstract: Forthright and wryly humorous, philosopher Susan Haack deploys her penetrating analytic skills on some of the most highly charged cultural and social debates of recent years. Relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action, pragmatisms old and new, science, literature, the future of the academy and of philosophy itself all come under her keen scrutiny in "Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate." "The virtue of Haack's book, and I mean "virtue" in the ethical sense, is that it embodies the attitude that it exalts. . . Haack's voice is urbane, sensible, passionate the voice of philosophy that matters. How good to hear it again." Jonathan Rauch, "Reason" "A tough mind, confident of its power, making an art of logic . . . a cool mastery." Paul R. Gross, "Wilson Quarterly" "Few people are better able to defend the notion of truth, and in strong, clear prose, than Susan Haack . . . a philosopher of great distinction." Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "National Review" "If you relish acute observation and straight talk, this is a book to read." "Key Reporter" (Phi Beta Kappa) "Everywhere in this book there is the refreshing breeze of common sense, patiently but inexorably blowing." Roger Kimball, "Times Literary Supplement" "A refreshing alternative to the extremism that characterizes so much rhetoric today." "Kirkus Reviews""

Ethics: Some issues in Aristotle's moral psychology

Abstract: 1. Action that displays the ethical character of its agent does so by virtue of the purposiveness that is operative in it. ( See Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 1111b5–6.) The category of purposive behaviour, behaviour that can be explained by giving its end, extends to brutes as well as human beings. But human beings are special among animals in having a capacity for articulable thought. Purposive behaviour in brutes is an immediate response to an opportunity for gratification of non-rational motivational impulses: its explanation draws only on those impulses and unconceptualised perception. The peculiarly human capacity for thought allows for purposiveness without that immediacy; thought can mediate gaps between project and execution. Thought that bridges such gaps is what Aristotle calls ‘ bouleusis ’ (‘deliberation’): see EN 111.3. Deliberation as Aristotle discusses it seems to be a process of thinking engaged in before acting. But we can sometimes make sense of human behaviour in an importantly similar way, even though the agent did not actually deliberate. The form of deliberation is a form into which we can cast an explanation by reasons, and such an explanation can be appropriate for actions that did not issue from prior deliberation. And it is the nature of an agent's reasons, whether explicitly thought through or not, that reveals his ethical character.

Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness And Duty

Abstract: Part I. Deliberation and Moral Development: 1. Deliberation and moral development in Aristotle's ethics John McDowell 2. Making room for character Barbara Herman Part II. Eudaimonism: 3. Kant's criticisms of Eudaimonism T. H. Irwin 4. Happiness and the highest good in Aristotle and Kant Stephen Engstrom Part III. Self-Love and Self-Worth: 5. Self-love, self-benevolence, and self-conceit Allen W. Wood 6. Self-love and authoritative virtue: Prolegomenon to a Kantian reading of Eudemian Ethics VIII 3 Jennifer Whiting Part IV. Practical Reason and Moral Psychology: 7. From duty and for the sake of the noble: Kant and Aristotle on morally good action Christine M. Korsgaard 8. Aristotle and Kant on morality and practical reasoning Julia Annas Part V. Stoicism: 9. Eudaimonism, the appeal to nature, and 'Moral Duty' in Stoicism John M. Cooper 10. Kant and Stoic ethics J. B. Schneewind.

Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time

Abstract: A selection of Martin Jay's recent writings on contemporary thought and culture, this is a book about ideas that matter - and about why ideas matter. Borrowing from Flaubert's notion of a dictionary of "received ideas" and Raymond Williams's explorations of the "keywords" of the modern age, Jay investigates some of the central concepts by which we currently organize our thoughts and lives. His topics range from "theory" and "experience" to the meaning of "multiculturalism" and the dynamics of cultural "subversion." Among the thinkers he engages are Bataille and Foucault, Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Christa Wolf. By looking closely at what "words do and perform, " Jay makes us aware of the extent to which the language we use mediates and shapes our experience. By helping to distance us from much that we now take for granted, he makes it difficult for us to remain comfortably certain about what we think we know.

Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s

Abstract: Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. In "Disowned by Memory," David Bromwich connects the accidents of Wordsworth's life with the originality of his writing, showing how the poet's strong sympathy with the political idealism of the age and with the lives of the outcast and the dispossessed formed the deepest motive of his writings of the 1790s. "This very Wordsworthian combination of apparently low subjects with extraordinary 'high argument' makes for very rewarding, though often challenging reading." Kenneth R. Johnston, "Washington Times" "Wordsworth emerges from this short and finely written book as even stranger than we had thought, and even more urgently our contemporary." Grevel Lindop, "Times Literary Supplement" "[Bromwich's] critical interpretations of the poetry itself offer readers unusual insights into Wordworth's life and work." "Library Journal" "An added benefit of this book is that it restores our faith that criticism can actually speak to our needs. Bromwich is a rigorous critic, but he is a general one whose insights are broadly applicable. It's an intellectual pleasure to rise to his complexities." Vijay Seshadri, "New York Times Book Review""

Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 1

Abstract: Preface by Douglas Kellner, "The Unknown Marcuse: New Archival Discoveries.", Introduction by Douglas Kellner, "Technology, War, and Fascism: Marcuse in the 1940s", 1. "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology", 2. "State and Individual Under National Socialism" with supplement on "Sex and Art Under Nationalism Socialism", 3. " A History of the Doctrine of Social Change" (with Franz Neumann), 4. "A Theory of Social Change" (with Franz Neumann), 5. "The New German Mentality" with supplemental memoranda, 6. "Description of Three Major Projects", 7. "Some Remarks on Aragon: Art and Politics in the Totalitarian Era", 8. "33 Theses", 9. Letters to Horkheimer, 10. Letters to Heidegger.

Virtue and Eudaimonism

Abstract: The two most important and central concepts in ancient ethical theory are those of virtue (aretē) and happiness (eudaimonia). This is well-known by now, as is the way that many scholars and philosophers have in recent years investigated the structure of ancient ethical theories, at least partly in the hope that this would help us in our modern ethical thinking by introducing us to developed theories which escape the problems that have led to so much frustration with deontological and consequentialist approaches. And there has indeed been considerable interest in developing modern forms of ethics which draw inspiration, to a greater or lesser extent, from the ancient theories. However, there is an asymmetry here. Modern theories which take their inspiration from Aristotle and other ancient theorists are standardly called virtue ethics, not happiness ethics. We have rediscovered the appeal of aretē, but eudaimonia is still, it appears, problematic for us. This has an important consequence for us, for in ancient theories virtue is not discussed in isolation; it is seen as part of a larger structure in which the overarching concept is happiness. If we focus on virtue alone and ignore its relation to happiness, we are missing a large part of the interest that study of the ancient theories can offer.

The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract--Film and Literature

Abstract: Clyde Taylor exposes the concept of "art" as a tool of Ethnocentricity and racial ideology. He challenges the history of Aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism, and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin. Aestheticism, he says, is a party to the establishment of whiteness as cultural norm. "The aesthetic experience" is revealed to be the stylistic/structural contribution to the Western master narrative which dominates historical interpretation. Areas such as cinema studies, the avant garde, Marxist and feminist criticism are seen as seriously compromised by this aesthetic reasoning. Examining various texts including "The Birth of a Nation", Taylor demonstrates how rationales of "art" are used to mask personal, class, and cultural biases. Taylor offers a "critique of representation" as one alternative to aestheticism. "Imitation of Life", "The Cotton Club", and "The Marrow of Tradition" are read as "doppelganger discourses" where the values of one social group are mobilized as the narrative double of a more powerful group. Taylor's innovative analysis of the semantics of unequal power refers to these doublings as "ironies of discourse". Novels and films by Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ousmane Sembene, Spike Lee, Souleymanne Cisse, Victor Masayesva, and Julie Dash, and the Vietnam Memorial design of Maya Lin are scrutinized in terms of resistance to the reign of the dominant system of aesthetics. According to Taylor whatever was once gained through this narcissistic "aesthetic gaze" has long since been exhausted. Liberation from its narrow assumptions will open richer resources to human imagination and creativity.

Political participation and Eudaimonia in Aristotle's Politics

Abstract: Current debates surrounding Aristotle's Politics involve attempts to explain the role of political participation in the pursuit of Aristotle's human telos, eudaimonia. Many argue that political participation is crucial to eudaimonia, equating the good man with the good citizen. Often this argument is based on Aristotle's labelling of humans as zoon politikon, or �political animal�, and the misleading translation of eudaimonia as �happiness�. We provide supported explanations of eudaimonia and zoon politikon which do not force us to equate the good man and the good citizen. We illustrate Aristotle's analogy between the eudaimon man and the eudaimon polis and emphasize the role political participation sometimes plays in the pursuit of eudaimonia. On the basis of this evidence, we argue that Aristotle did not equate the good man with the good citizen necessarily, nor did he find political participation essential to eudaimonia. We then demonstrate that even without political participation, the polis plays a unique role in the pursuit of eudaimonia.

Rousseau's Socratism

Abstract: Rousseau is one of the greatest of modern writers to strike a "Socratic" stance, thus forging a link between his own project and that of the founder of political philosophy. In the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the work that established his reputation, Rousseau appeals to Plato's Apology and Socrates' alleged defense of virtue-"the sublime science of simple souls"-against the pretensions of "Enlightenment" Upon examination, however, Rousseau's endorsement of Socrates proves so ambiguous as to imply the replacement of the Platonic version by a Rousseauan one Rousseau's presentation of the role of the philosopher in society is at the same time more "populist" and more "elitist" than that of Plato It is more populist in its vindication of "ignorance" as the basis of virtue and more elitist in its suggestion that even the defense of ignorance must rest with an avant-garde of philosophers.

Less Is More: Economic Consumption and the Good Life

Abstract: When it comes to economic consumption, less is more. Not always, and not beyond a certain minimum level. Sometimes more really is more, and less really is less. But often, less is more; especially for the middle and upper class members of wealthy societies. This essay argues that we should judge economic consumption on whether it improves or detracts from our lives, and act on that basis. It seeks to place the issue of consumption in the context of living a good life, in order to discuss its justifiable limits. Environmental Virtue Ethics Many writers in the ancient eudaimonist or "virtue ethics" tradition argued that human lives could be improved through decreasing consumption, and indeed decreasing economic activity generally: consuming less food, avoiding ostentatious building or entertaining, thinking less about money. For Plato and Aristotle, Seneca and Epicurus, the good life was equally a life devoted to right thinking and a life not devoted to wealthgetting or sybaritism.1 These two positions supported each other. They were held to be key to achieving eudaimonia, that complex term usually translated as "happiness," but often better thought of as "well-being," or "flourishing."2 A leading issue in ancient ethical debate was whether the pursuit of the good life entailed limiting and harshly disciplining our natural desires and acquisitiveness, or providing for their moderate fulfillment. This question in turn was related to the role that pleasure and physical satisfaction were thought to play in a good life: whether defining of it, irrelevant to it, or a more or less important part of it. A wide variety of positions were staked out on these issues which I will not attempt to summarize here. My main point is that almost all of the ancient writers argued for limiting material acquisition and limiting our attempts to satisfy our physical desires through consumption. This was true for those who thought pleasure the greatest human good and for those who declared physical pleasure irrelevant to questions of how humans should live their lives. It was true for those who argued that people should set moderate goals and accept moderate successes in life, and for those who advocated the pursuit of perfection. The major philosophical schools all preached limited consumption and disciplining appetite, because they all accepted the idea that the proper level of consumption was a function of its role in furthering good human lives. In what follows, I attempt to show that such economic restraint remains in our self-interest today. If our goal is to live well, we should consume less. Such restraint has a further benefit, for those worried about the fate of the many non-human beings with whom we share our planet. Individuals focused on developing their better selves and on fulfilling their true needs, would demand less of Nature. We would demand less as a matter of course in the West, where we already have a surfeit of money and material goods, and more ofthe same will not improve our lives. And we would actively protect nature in our own self-interest, because pursuing our higher goals demands it. Environmental pollution and the transformation of wild nature into managed natural resources, are primarily the result of human economic activities. More benign forms of production and lower levels of consumption are therefore typical goals of environmentalists, in addition to the direct preservation of wildlife and wild places. These goals reinforce each other. For example, less paper consumption allows for less wood-pulp production. This in turn lessens the pressure to log previously unlogged lands, or to convert natural forests into more productive, managed tree farms. One type of argument for such economic reforms builds upon the intrinsic value of wild nature.3 If there is a value or integrity to individual non-human organisms, wild species, or wild places, then our right to use, modify or destroy them is called into question. …

The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions

Abstract: It is notoriously difficult for philosophers to explain, to people unfamiliar with their discipline, what it is that they do. "I teach." "What do you teach?" "Philosophy." If we were to say "physics" or "history" or even "psychology," our interlocutors would think they had no problem in understanding our profession, but the answer "philosophy" almost always provokes incomprehension and unease. We can evade the issue by saying that as philosophers we study and explain the works of writers like Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes, but this clarification merely puts off the reckoning by one step; what is it that those people have written about? One reason for this difficulty is that philosophy does not have an identifiable, partial domain as its subject matter. It attempts to think about the widest context, that which is not differentiated as one part from other parts. If it were a partial discipline, it could at least be vaguely comprehended as being something other than, say, mathematics or sociology, something that studies this domain as opposed to that. Philosophy does not define itself by such partialization, however. It leaves nothing out, and hence leaves us without the contrasting foil that would allow us to say what it is. People who are unfriendly to philosophy suspect that it is inflated, presumptuous, and nonrigorous; this feeling is an inadequate but understandable way of recognizing the fact that philosophy is not defined by being partial. A second reason for the difficulty in saying what philosophy is lies in its method. The method of philosophical thinking is not obvious; we think we have some idea of the manner in which, say, physicists or linguists proceed in their inquiries, but how do philosophers proceed in theirs? It is hard to say; philosophy appears to be an arcane intellectual discipline, a form of thinking whose ways are esoteric and obscure. How does it come to know what it thinks it knows? I wish to help clarify what philosophy is by discussing its method. I will suggest that the form of thinking proper to philosophy is extremely simple: philosophy is the intellectual activity that works with distinctions. Its method is the making and the questioning of distinctions. Philosophy explains by distinguishing. This does not mean that philosophy just asserts distinctions and lets it go at that; rather, it works with distinctions, it brings them out and dwells on them, dwells with them, showing how and why the things that it has distinguished must be distinguished one from the other. Furthermore, since it essentially works with distinctions, philosophy sometimes will show that a certain distinction that has been proposed or taken for granted is unreal or invalid. Philosophy sometimes obliterates distinctions. Such rejection of distinctions, however, is the negative and refutational aspect of philosophy's work; its positive success consists in achieving a distinction that clarifies a situation or a controversy, a distinction that brings out the nature of a thing. Furthermore, even when denying a distinction, philosophy proceeds by making other distinctions that allow it to deny the one in question. Let me give some illustrations before proceeding to my argument. My claim is that philosophy does not just discuss and define, say, human freedom; rather, it will examine how responsible action is to be distinguished from the nonresponsible. It does not just talk about politics; it will distinguish the political from the economic and from the familial. It does not just examine the nature of numbers; it will show the distinction between the mathematical and the physical, between the mathematical and the logical, between the numerical and the merely collected. Philosophy does not just investigate substance; it develops the difference between the substantial and the coincidental. It does not simply investigate what propositions are; it clarifies the distinctions between propositions and states of affairs, and between propositions and the mental activities that grasp them. …

Hebrews between Cultures: Group Portraits and National Literature

Abstract: Hebrews Between Cultures: Group Portraits and National Literature, by Meir Sternberg. Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. xxiii + 730. $59.95 (cloth). Having gratefully grappled years ago with Meir Sternberg's magisterial The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), the length of which matched the scope of its subject, I could barely imagine how the inquiry of the book under review, the referent of the thirty-odd appearances of the term "Hebrews" in the Hebrew Bible, could generate a tome of seventy pages, much less seven hundred. I ought to have known better. After working through this difficult volume twice (made more difficult by its prose style), I can testify that the seeming narrowness of the subject affords Sternberg the opportunity not only for engaging in even deeper analysis than in The Poetics but also for exploring the wide-ranging implications of the subject for biblical poetics and comparative cultural studies. The heart of this study is the workings of the "Hebrewgram," Sternberg's shorthand for the grammar, or poetics, of the biblical deployment of the ethnicon "Hebrew." Neither a synonym for "Israelite" (what Sternberg terms the "unicultural" explanation) nor the biblical form of the extrabiblical sociopolitical designation Hab/piru (the "crosscultural" solution), the word "Hebrew" signals foreign or foreign-like discourse about Israelites. This ironclad truth is expressed as the "Law of Intercultural (De)nomination," a complex of four patterns into one of which each appearance of the term falls: (1) "Hebrew" in the voice of a foreign speaker to express his superiority to and derision of an Israelite; (2) "Hebrew" used by an Israelite conversing with a foreigner in order to be perceived as sharing the foreigner's derisive perspective and thus assuming the role of an underdog; (3) "Hebrew" used by the narrator quoting the hidden, unarticulated perspective of foreigners; and (4) "Hebrew" used both in narrative and slave law as a "rhetoric of deterrence" against Israelites who would assume a foreign-like superiority or Hebrew-like inferiority with respect to their fellow Israelites. So stated, the Hebrewgram appears straightforward enough. But through the demonstration and analysis of these patterns Sternberg develops a poetics of intercultural rhetoric that runs canon-long and distinguishes biblical from extrabiblical discourses of cultural identity. Cracking the code governing the seemingly nonstandard and limited deployment of "Hebrew" turns out to be the linchpin for understanding the Bible's uniquely sophisticated rendering of national consciousness. Critical to Sternberg's argument is the identification of the "Hebrewers," those foreigners who employ the term against Israelites or in whose presence Israelites do, such as Hamites (Egyptians and Philistines mainly but also Jonah's sailors, for instance). The opposition between Shem and Ham set in Genesis 9 works itself out in the sexual predation of Ham's descendants from Pharaoh and Abimelech toward Sarah and Rebekah to Potiphar's wife, and in the slaver mentality attributed to both main groups. On linguistic ("Hebrew," "uncircumcised"), sociopolitical (sexual assault to enslavement), ethnological (Egyptians as a master race), and geographical (Hebrews as unwelcome settlers in Hamland) axes, the aforementioned law governs the representation of the relationship between Israelites and Hamites but does not apply to other foreigners. On the contrary, Sternberg argues that the non-Hamite nokhri ("foreigner") in general cannot be stereotyped as Other, because the Bible paints foreigners in many shades and gives even Hamites their own voices and consciousness. Sander Gilman's "high-level theorizing" about stereotypes comes in for especial attack (pp. 171-81) as an example of "package-dealing," opposed to the "Proteus Principle" that characterizes biblical representation in Sternberg's view. …

The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 by Caroline Walker Bynum (review)

Abstract: The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 By Caroline Walker Bynum. [Lectures on the History of Religions Sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, New Series, Number 15.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 368. $29.95 clothbound; $17.50 paperback.) This volume presents, in printed form and with careful scholarly elaboration, the ACLS Lectures on the History of Religions delivered by Caroline Walker Bynum, who is Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor at Columbia University and the author of several books that have decisively shaped the recent study of the Western Middle Ages, including Jesus as Mother and Holy Feast and Holy Fast. As those books and her other writings have documented, Professor Bynum has become a leading figure in "the new history of the body that is being written by historians such as Peter Brown, Danielle Jacquart, Lynn Hunt,Thomas Laquer, Roy Porter, Marie-Christine Pouchelle, and Claude Thomasset" (p. xviii). In choosing as her topic specifically the resurrection of the body, she emphasizes that "this book is not about eschatology or about soul but about body" (p. xvii). But it is "about body" in the sense that the resurrection of the body means "the continuity of the self" (p. 309); for "what was at stake was not finally fingernails. It was self" (p. 225). And though it is "not about soul" as such, it is obliged to pay much attention to soul, especially when the soul is "physicalized (p. 158) or, conversely, when the dominant tendency of the time is"packing body into soul" (p. 270), the "subsuming of [body] into soul" (p. 283). In Christian theology, the understanding of the term "body" is fundamental to the doctrine of the Incarnation, to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, to the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and "bodily" Assumption of the Virgin Mary, to the cult of relics, and to a host of moral issues including sexuality. In Christian art, the iconography of any age inevitably expresses its guiding presuppositions about "body," whether it be the body of Christ or of the Virgin or of the other saints; and in the monuments of Christian literature, such as the Divine Comedy, to which "any study of eschatology must come" (p. 291), the portrayal of bodies is the key to the poem's meaning. Despite its title, this is not a continuous history of the development of the idea of the resurrection of the body from "200 to 1336." Its terminus a quo is indeed 200, especially "the daring inconsistency of genius" (p. 38) in Tertullian and Irenaeus; and its terminus ad quem is the controversy over the beatific vision involving the hapless Pope John XXII, which was "really about body and resurrection" (p. 279), together with what Jacques Le Goff has called "the birth of purgatory" and other fourteenth-century phenomena. But between its terminus a quo and its terminus ad quem, the late patristic and the early-to-middle medieval periods receive far less than their share of attention; as the author herself acknowledges,"no one can be more keenly aware than I how much it loses by omitting the early Middle Ages" (p. xvii). She is also aware how much it loses by concentrating, almost but not quite exclusively, on what the title calls "Western Christianity." For in fact the Eastern Christian tradition-or traditions-do come into view: the Syriac writers Aphrahat and Ephraim (pp. 71-78), Gregory of Nyssa as her "final example of the Greek tradition" (p. 81), "visual tradition from the East" (pp.119-120) and "Byzantine iconography of the Last Judgment" (p. 192) including also Mount Athos (p. 195 n. 128), and above all Origen of Alexandria. In many ways, Origen emerges as the unacknowledged hero of the piece, or at any rate as the leitmotiv that recurs at almost every crucial juncture. The introduction to the discussion of his thought announces the leitmotiv: "In the first half of the third century, one of the greatest theologians of the ancient world, Origen of Alexandria, gave a highly satisfactory answer" (p. …

Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds

Abstract: Censorship of religious and philosophical speculation is as old as history and as current as today's headlines. Many of the world's major religious texts, including the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, and others, have been suppressed, condemned, or proscribed at some time. Works of secular literature touching upon religious belief or reflecting dissenting views have also been suppressed. "Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds, Revised Edition" profiles the censorship of many such essential works of civilization. The 14 entries new to this edition include extensive coverage of the "Harry Potter" series, which has been frequently banned in the United States on the grounds that it promotes witchcraft, as well as entries on two popular textbook series, "The Witches" by Roald Dahl, "Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran", and more. Also included are updates to such entries as "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie and "On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin. New and updated entries include: "The Advancement of Learning" (Francis Bacon); "The Age of Reason" (Thomas Paine); "The Analects" (Confucius); The Bible; "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution" (Roger Williams); "The Book of Common Prayer" (Thomas Cranmer); "Children of the Alley" (Naguib Mahfouz); "The Critique of Pure Reason" (Immanuel Kant); "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" (Galileo Galilei); "Discourse on Method" (Rene Descartes); "Don Quixote" (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra); "The Harry Potter" series (J. K. Rowling); The Koran; "The Last Temptation of Christ" (Nikos Kazantzakis); "On the Origin of Species" (Charles Darwin); "Popol Vuh"; "The Red and the Black" (Stendhal); "The Satanic Verses" (Salman Rushdie); "Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India" (James W. Laine); "The Talmud"; "Voyages to the Moon and the Sun" (Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac); and, "Zhuan Falun: The Complete Teachings of Falun Gong" (Li Hongzhi).

The archive, the native american, and jefferson's convulsions

Abstract: Trauma theory proposes that there are inscriptions that befuddle any clean divide between present and past, records that have been neither selected nor destroyed by evolutionary veto but remain in some kind of limbo, "in abeyance," as Jacques Lacan phrases it, "awaiting attention." In a typical maneuver, Lacan emphasizes a double meaning in the French-the "reality" awaiting attention is "en souffrance" [Lacan 56]. Lacan' s wordplay injects a note of pathos into what might otherwise seem a merely cognitive or epistemological question about how, or whether, we can adequately access the historical archive, whether of individuals or of cultures. At its most basic, the psychoanalytic concept of trauma insists on this ambiguous coupling between affect and event, feeling and knowing: trauma names a happening about which one never fully knows how to feel, or feels how to know. In trauma theory-as in its various avatars in current debates about canons, about historical memory and forgetting, about cultural identity as imperiled or reclaimed or repressed-this ambiguity about the relation between affect and event becomes codified as an entanglement between the ethical and the cognitive. In "Archive Fever," Jacques Derrida notes that the term "archive" itself harbors this ambiguity: the archive is at once the beginning and the authority, it puts into play two "orders of order," the "sequential" and the "jussive," "the commencement and the commandment" [9]. The divine fiat of creation is an image of the perfect coincidence of these two orders of order, while historical consciousness, in the West at least, might be understood as the progressive

Poe's "The Black Cat" as Psychobiography: Some Reflections on the Narratological Dynamics

Abstract: Published initially in the United States Saturday Post on 19 August 1843, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" remains one of his most mystifying and horrifying tales. The narrator's motive for murdering his wife, as one might expect, has elicited much commentary and speculation from critics. Few critics seriously accept the narrator's own dubious rationalizations for the cruel murder either of his pet cat or of his wife, that being what he has done, so he confesses, he attributes to the "spirit of PERVERSENESS ..., one of the primitive impulses of the human heart ..., to do wrong for wrong's sake" (Poe 852); or his claim at the end of the tale that the cat, which he calls "a hideous beast had seduced [him] into murder" (859). In short, the retrospective narrator, who is actually two personsaethe man who killed his wife and the retrospective teller of the taleae is an untrustworthy and unreliable authority. What J. Rea has observed about Montresor, the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado," also seems applicable to the unnamed narrator of "The Black Cat": Montresor reveals certain things to the reader, Rea states, "in order to divert attention from the real reason for the crime" (57). Kenneth Silverman has offered a similar observation, but with more psychological suggestiveness, indicating that tales like "The Black Cat" "dramatize failures of various defenses, the protagonists' futile attempts to conceal from themselves and others what they feel" (209). The narrator's motive for murdering his wife seems to be subconscious and, therefore, the crime is not consciously premeditated. Nor is the narrator able to understand rationally or to persuade convincingly why he has done this terrible deed, though he repeatedly offers explanations--actually untenable rationalizations--for his former actions. James W. Gargano, in what many Poe critics regard as the premier essay on "The Black Cat," may have been the first commentator to offer a cogently and logically convincing explanation to show that what the narrator "assigns" to the "spirit of perverseness" and the "Fiend Intemperance" (Poe 851) may, in fact, "be reduced to ordinary psychological and moral laws" ("Perverseness" 172). Viewing the narrator as a case study with an abnormal personality, Gargano perceives what he calls the narrator's "sentimental excesses, his extreme happiness in feeding and caressing his pets," as an indication of "an unhealthy overdevelopment of the voluptuary side of his nature" ("Perverseness" 173). And Poe's narrator does substitute this manner of behavior for normal relationships with human beings. Many of the subsequent critical views of "The Black Cat" have attempted to explain the narrator's bizarre behavior, especially his murder of his wife, within a psychological or psychoanalytical framework. (1) While details of Poe's life offer some fertile ground for examining probable autobiographical sources for "The Black Cat," we will heed the warning of James W. Gargano, who has cautiously advised the tale's readers to avoid the biographical pitfall of seeing Poe and the first-person narrator of "The Black Cat" as "identical literary twins" ("The Question" 165). (2) Instead, the emphasis here will be to focus on the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat" and to apply selected methodology of French critic Gerard Genette, whose book Narrative Discourse provides an engaging systematic study of narrative theory. (3) Before proceeding to the narratological dynamics of "The Black Cat," I would like to give a brief overview, describing some of Genette's concepts that will form the basis for my examination of the narratology as it relates to the psychobiography of the narrator of Poe's tale. Drawing on a notion addressed initially by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, that narrative, in contrast to dramatic depiction, is illusory because "no narrative can `show' or `imitate' the story it tells," Genette calls narrative the "illusion of mimesis" (164). …

A contradiction still : representations of women in the poetry of Alexander Pope

Abstract: Contradiction and "The Epistle to a Lady" contradiction, the double standard and its critics violence and representation in "Windsor Forest" the role of the poet in "An Essay on Criticism" and "The Epistle to Arbuthnot" Eloisa, the female philosopher female presence in "The Rape of the Lock" reflections and illusions in "The Rape of the Lock" "The Dunciad" - creativity and the question of gender.

Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments

Abstract: PrefaceCHAPTER 1 The Philosophical EnterpriseSection 1.1 Explaining the Possibility of the Impossible: Philosophical Problems and TheoriesPhilosophical ProblemsThe Stakes in Philosophical InquiryThe Mind-Body ProblemThe Problem of Free WillThe Problem of Personal IdentityThe Problem of Moral RelativismThe Problem of EvilThe Problem of SkepticismNecessary and Sufficient ConditionsSocrates and the Socratic MethodScience and the Scientific MethodLogical versus Causal PossibilitySection 1.2 Evidence and Inference: Proving your PointDeductive ArgumentsInductive ArgumentsInformal FallaciesSection 1.3 The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought ExperimentsHow Are Thought Experiments Possible?Criticizing Thought ExperimentsConceivability and PossibilityScientific Thought ExperimentsReadings:C. J. Ducasse, "The Place of Philosophy in a University Education"Brand Blanshard, "The Philosophic Enterprise"Robert Nozick, "Philosophy as an Art Form"CHAPTER 2 The Mind-Body ProblemSection 2.1 The Ghost in the Machine: Mind as SoulDescartes's DoubtI Think, Therefore I AmThe Conceivability ArgumentThe Divisibility ArgumentThe Causal Impotence of the MentalThe Causal Closure of the PhysicalThe Problem of Other MindsSection 2.2 You Are What You Eat: Mind as BodyEmpiricismLogical PositivismLogical BehaviorismThe Identity TheorySection 2.3 I, Robot: Mind as SoftwareArtificial IntelligenceFunctionalism and FeelingThe Turing TestIntentionalitySection 2.4 There Ain't No Such Thing as Ghosts: Mind as MythFolk PsychologySubjective KnowledgeSection 2.5 The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: Mind as QualityPrimitive IntentionalityMental DependenceDownward CausationReadings:Rene Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditations I and II"Richard Taylor, "Materialism vs. Dualism"Alan Turing, "The Imitation Game"David Chalmers, "The Puzzle of Concious Experience"Thomas D. Davis, "Strange Behavior"CHAPTER 3 Free Will and DeterminismSection 3.1 The Luck of the Draw: Freedom as ChanceHard DeterminismIndeterminismSection 3.2 The Mother of Invention: Freedom as NecessityTraditional CompatibilismHierarchical CompatibilismSection 3.3 Control Yourself: Freedom as Self-DeterminationThe Case for FreedomAgent-CausationReadings:Robert Blatchford, "The Delusion of Free Will"W. T. Stace, "The Problem of Free Will"Robert Nozick, "Choice and Indeterminism"Thomas D. Davis, "Please Don't Tell Me How the Story Ends"CHAPTER 4 The Problem of Personal IdentitySection 4.1 We Are Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On: Self as SubstanceAnimalismThe Soul TheorySection 4.2 Golden Memories: Self as PsycheThe Memory TheoryThe Reduplication ProblemSection 4.3 You Can't Step into the Same River Twice: Self as ProcessThe Brain TheorySplit BrainsClosest Continuer TheoriesIdentity and What Matters in SurvivalIdentity and What Matters in ResponsibilityExplaining the SelfReadings:John Locke, "Of Identity and Diversity"Thomas Reid, "On Mr. Locke's Account of Personal Identity"Derek Parfit, "Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons"Ray Kurzweil, "Live Forever"CHAPTER 5 The Problem of Relativism and MoralitySection 5.1 Don't Question Authority: Might Makes RightSubjective AbsolutismSubjective RelativismEmotivismCultural RelativismThe Divine Command TheoryAre There Universal Moral Principles?Section 5.2 The End Justifies the Means: Good Makes RightEthical EgoismAct-UtilitarianismRule-UtilitarianismSection 5.3 Much Obliged: Duty Makes RightKant's Categorical ImperativeRoss's Prima Facie DutiesRawls's ContractarianismNozick's LibertarianismThe Social ContractThe Ethics of CareMaking Ethical DecisionsSection 5.4 Character is Destiny: Virtue Makes RightThe Virtuous UtilitarianThe Virtuous KantianThe Purpose of MoralityAristotle on VirtueMacIntyre on VirtueVirtue EthicsReadings:W. T. Stace, "Are Ethical Values Relative?"Jeremy Bentham, "Of the Principle of Utility"Immanuel Kant, "Good Will, Duty, and the Categorical Imperative"John Rawls, "The Original Position and Justification"Ursula K. Leguin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"CHAPTER 6 The Problem of Evil and the Existence of GodSection 6.1 The Mysterious Universe: God as CreatorThe Traditional Cosmological ArgumentThe Kalam Cosmological ArgumentThe Teleological ArgumentThe Argument from MiraclesThe Argument from Religious ExperienceThe Ontological ArgumentPascal's WagerThe Meaning of LifeThe VerdictSection 6.2 When Bad Things Happen to Good People: God as TroublemakerThe Ontological DefenseThe Knowledge DefenseThe Free-Will DefenseThe Ideal-Humanity DefenseThe Soul-Building DefenseThe Finite-God DefenseThe Leap of FaithReligion Without GodReadings:St. Thomas Aquinas, "The Five Ways"David Hume, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion"B.C. Johnson, "God and the Problem of Evil"Michael Martin, "The Miracle Sleuth"CHAPTER 7 The Problem of Skepticism and KnowledgeSection 7.1 Things Aren't Always What They Seem: Skepticism about SkepticismCartesian DoubtCartesian CertaintyReasonable DoubtSection 7.2 Facing Reality: Perception and the External WorldDirect RealismRepresentative RealismPhenomenalismSection 7.3 What Do You Know? Knowing What Knowledge IsThe Defeasibility TheoryThe Causal TheoryThe Reliability TheoryThe Explanationist TheoryReadings:Rene Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditation IV"George Berkeley, "Of the Principles of Human Knowledge"Edmund L. Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"Thomas D. Davis, "Why Don't You Just Wake Up!"NotesCreditsIndex

Pragmatism and Truth: The Comparison Objection to Correspondence

Abstract: The well-known dictum that truth consists in an "agreement" or "correspondence" of thought with its object ... speedily leads to a hopeless impasse, once the question is raised: How are we to know whether or not our "truth" "corresponds" or "agrees" with its real object? For to decide this question must we not be able to compare "thought" with "reality," and to contemplate each as it is apart from the other? This, however, seems impossible.(1) How does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him to think? He cannot get direct sight of the absolute; and he has no means of guessing what it wants of him.(2) How can anybody look at both an object (event) and a proposition about it so as to determine whether the two "correspond"? And if one can look directly at the event in propia persona, why have a duplicate proposition (idea or percept, according to some theories) about it unless, perhaps, as a convenience in communication with others?(3) Despite its long and distinguised history, the correspondence theory of truth has recently had to weather a barrage of forceful objections advanced by Rorty, Goodman, Putnam, Kuhn, Davidson, Habermas, and others. In this paper I shall consider one such objection: the venerable "comparison argument," designed to demonstrate that the correspondence theory plays right into the skeptic's hands by making truth epistemically inaccessible. In general terms, we can formulate the argument as follows: If truth were a matter of correspondence with the facts, then we could verify our belief that p only if we could somehow confront p with the relevant portion(s) of reality and confirm that the two "fit" or "agree." Since we cannot possibly perform such a comparison, the intuitively appealing idea that truth is correspondence with reality ironically results in something virtually no-one wants to accept--namely, skepticism. Unless we are prepared to concede that knowledge of the external world is an impossibility, we must give up the correspondence theory in favor of some conception of truth that can do justice to our claims to know. My aim, in what follows, is twofold: first to determine what, if anything, the comparison objection tells us about the correspondence theory of truth; secondly, to explore the objection's relation to the tradition of pragmatism. I begin with the latter project. I The Comparison Objection and Pragmatism From Dewey to Rorty. Even if not peculiar to pragmatists,(4) the comparison objection has been absolutely central to their case against correspondence from the time of the classical pragmatists down to the present day. This is reflected in an obiter dictum of F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist In its logical aspect pragmatism originates in a criticism of fundamental conceptions like "truth," "error," "fact," and "reality," the current accounts of which it finds untenable or unmeaning. "Truth," for instance, cannot be defined as the agreement or correspondence of thought with "reality," for how can thought determine whether it correctly "copies" what transcends it?(5) Among the classical pragmatists, this emphasis on the epistemological consequences of correspondence is nowhere more salient than in the writings of John Dewey. His oft-repeated grievances(6)--that so called "copy" theories of truth make an unfathomable mystery of verification, turning it into an absurd "process of comparing ready-made ideas with ready-made facts"(7)--lies at the center of his exchange with Russell.(8) Dewey sees as fatal to the cause of correspondence the following problem, which he refers to as "a fundamental difficulty that Mr. …

Sceptical politics and idealistic historiography : Michael Oakeshott as a critic of Enlightenment positions

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to interpret Michael Oakeshott as a critic of Enlightenment positions. In so doing, the author's ambition is to go some way to fulfilling the lacuna in Oakeshott studies by concentrating on his notion of philosophy. Having introduced my project of study in the opening chapter, I begin chapter two with an examination of philosophical modernism in order to allude to the Enlightenment positions concerned: foundationalism in philosophy, formalism in ethics and naturalism in history. In the following chapters I turn to cope with Oakeshott's reflection upon philosophical modernity, liberal ethics and positivist historiography respectively. It is my view that Oakeshott's critique of philosophisme and Rationalism expresses a sense of the crisis of philosophical modernity and throughout his intellectual career he has never altered his analysis of these two themes: philosophy as the persistent re-establishment of completeness by transcending abstractness, and the modes of experience as self-consistent worlds of discourse. To apply this philosophy, in his moral and political writings Oakeshott has re-established a balance against the Enlightenment ethical position: "the sovereignty of technique", "demonstrative moral truth", "the politics of faith", or "enterprise association", by revitalising the importance of "traditional knowledge", "conversationally traditional intimation", "the politics of scepticism" or "civil association". Oakeshott is not a doctrinal liberal any more than a dogmatic conservative, but a sceptical philosopher who is the victim of thought. Moreover, Oakeshott's contribution to history not only lies in his effort to transcend the Enlightenment historiographical position by separating the historical from the naturalised conception of History on which the so-called "scientific history" rests, but also in his idealistic solution for the "temporal dilemma in history" and the "epistemic tension in history" that have long bothered philosophers.

The Double Truth, Ruth: 'Do the Right Thing' and the Culture of Ambiguity

Abstract: In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the famous first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois ascribes to the African-American consciousness what he perceives to be a fundamental "two-ness." This "double-consciousness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (3), is an effect of the contradictory positioning of African-American culture within the dominant social order of "white Americanism" (4). On the one hand, American democratic capitalism promotes to its ethnic constituents its promise of economic opportunity, material satisfaction, and social justice. On the other, it consistently fails to grant black Americans full and equal access to the socioeconomic structures upon which the fruits of this promise depend. As Du Bois describes it, this political condition, a consequence of pressures exterior to the black community, creates a corresponding interior dilemma for African-Americans who achieve authority in American culture despite its institutionalized racism. Which of two competing allegiances does one serve? One's loyalty to the black community, which would benefit profoundly from one's acquired expertise in engaging white America? Or one's duty to one's own future, ironically linked to the esteem of a majority culture violently inimical to the minority community of which one is a part? In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, composed some ten years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, James Weldon Johnson likewise identifies "a sort of dual personality" which "every coloured man" has "in proportion to his intellectuality," a "dualism" which persists both "in the freemasonry of his own race" and "in the presence of white men" (2122). And like Du Bois, Johnson's hero feels a dichotomy at the core of his ambition: "Was it more a desire to help those I considered my people, or more a desire to distinguish myself . . .?" (147). Du Bois calls this dilemma "the waste of double aims," a "seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals" (5) which can never be reconciled. The powerfully unitary pull of responsibility to community and responsibility to self, when configured as oppositional by a racist symbolic order, must inevitably become self-destructive. Thus, sublated in this polarized crisis of responsibility is an equivalently polarized crisis of identity. Cornel West has argued that it is precisely this perceived crisis of identity, this "sense of double-consciousness," which led "anxiety-ridden, middle-class Black intellectuals" such as Du Bois and Johnson to construe the African-American cultural experience in terms of "simplistic binary oppositions" that forced black attempts at personal and political liberation to "remain inscribed within the very logic that dehumanized them" (72). The implication of West's critique is that the cultural logic of "double-consciousness," as it was promulgated by the intellectuals of the modern black diaspora and as it has been inherited by contemporary African-American culture, consigns that culture to an untenable role within the American capitalist symbolic order. It dooms the African-American subject to a literally "entrepreneurial" purgatory, eternally situated between the oppositional terms of a complex hierarchy of antinomies which by definition can never be resolved. This weft of irreconcilable binarisms is constituted by the ideologies and oppositional counter-ideologies which govern the subject's relation to the hegemonic socioeconomic order, to the strategies of resistance conceived to combat this order, to the strategies of survival necessary when this resistance is compromised, and to the subject's own evolving sense of identity, inextricable as it is from this intricate fabric of relations. Do the Right Thing, produced in 1989, is director Spike Lee's attempt to explore the human particularity of this system of binarisms and the culturally entrepreneurial situation of the African-American subject within it. …

"In the Land of Cotton": Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's 'Cane.' (African-American Woman Author)

Abstract: Critics of Jean Toomer's Cane disagree about the text's relation to the economic and social realities confronting rural and small-town Georgia blacks in the early 1920s. Some scholars read the novel as a nostalgic celebration of a vanishing peasant existence close to the earth. If the text acknowledges the harshness of racism and poverty, it subordinates social protest to lyricism, the representation of the here and now to the search for prophetic truths beyond the limits of history. Bonnie Barthold, for example, noting that the text eschews "linear development," argues that "the achievement of Cane" is its "mythic portrayal of a mythic truth on the verge of destruction" (159). Bowie Duncan, reading the text as an "oracular" articulation of post-Einsteinian notions of space and time, remarks that "the meaning of [Cane's] oracle is its multiplicity and uncertainty of meaning" (329). Alain Solard reads "Blood-Burning Moon" as only incidentally the story of a lynching: As the narrative unfolds, the "outline of reality gives way to the haunting presence of a visionary world" (552). Catherine Innes stresses the influence upon Toomer of P. D. Ouspensky's idealist view of "a living universe in which the hidden meaning of all things will be realized and felt, and the unity of all things understood" (155); in this context, Innes reads the Lewis of the text's "Kabnis" section as "a man capable of the cosmic vision, of penetrating the world of appearances, and of fusing together past and present, anguish and joy, 'soil and the overarching heavens'" (163). All the critics who read Cane as subsuming history under myth do not necessarily applaud the political implications of its idealism. Robert Jones notes that "Toomer's reification of thought is evident in the way he consistently proposed idealism as the solution to racism and social problems, yet without the praxis of social activism" (17). Maria Caldeira chides Toomer for his "belief that he would be able to transcend or solve his conflicts with reality through Art" and charges that he "substituted mysticism for his craving for equality and harmony among people" (548). Edward Margolies contends that Cane achieves a specious unity by "celebrating the passions and instincts of folk persons close to the soil, as opposed to the corruption of their spirit and vitality in the cities." Even the text's representations of violence reflect Toomer's "primitivism" and "neoromantic attitudes": "Is Toomer unconsciously saying that beauty resides in the pain and suffering of black men? . . . Are passivity and withdrawal from life ultimate fulfillment?" (Margolies 39-40). Donald Gibson argues that, by "locating historical causation outside of time and space," Cane offers not "a revelation of the essence of black life" but a "politics of denial" (163, 155). Susan Blake observes that "the central conflict in Cane is the struggle of the spectatorial artist to involve himself in his material"; never fully resolving this conflict, the text "advocate[s] . . . [al retreat into mysticism" (196, 211). To these critics, Toomer's mythic ahistoricity does not enable transcendence of historical tragedy, but instead constitutes an ideological accession and accommodation to that tragedy. While many Toomer scholars stress Cane's efforts - successful or unsuccessful - to transcend concrete historicity, a number read the book as an intense engagement with the actualities of 1920s Georgia life. Arthur P. Davis, in an early appreciation of Cane, observed that "[u]nderneath all of [the] elusive meanings, . . . one finds a profound knowledge of the Southern scene. . . . There is no overt protest here, but Toomer was always aware of the South's cruelty" (49). Nellie McKay remarks that Cane is about not only "the intrinsic worth of black culture" but also "the pain and struggle wrung from the soul of a people" and the author's own "confrontation with the meaning of that awful reality" (177). Discussing the role played by music in Cane, Nathaniel Mackey notes that Toomer "celebrates and incorporates song but not without looking at the grim conditions which give it birth, not without acknowledging its outcast, compensatory character" (36). …

From Tea to Chloral: Raising the Dead Lily Bart

Abstract: "Gad! what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach - " - The House of Mirth (309) Much has been made of the "square envelopes" fashionable society "showered" upon the "hall-table" of young Lily Bart's New York home (44). Much has also been made of the consequent "oblong envelopes" - constant reminders of the price of fashion - that were "allowed to gather dust in the depth of a bronze jar" (44).(1) But the invitation and the bill are not the only envelopes tyrannizing Lily's society. Fashionable New York is equally subject to the "tyranny of the stomach," if less conspicuously so (309). Wharton's New York society in The House of Mirth is, without doubt, a consuming society, both figuratively and literally. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell and Elizabeth Ammons, among others, have noted, America's turn-of-the-century leisured class displayed its incomparable wealth by engaging in what Thorstein Veblen terms the "conspicuous consumption" of material goods (75). Appropriately, Wharton would have us imagine her consuming materialists through metaphors of food and digestion: George Dorset's "mournful dyspeptic" temper; Gus Trenor's "carnivorous head"; Carry Fisher's "general air of embodying a 'spicy paragraph'"; and Ned Silverton's tendency to be "critical of truffles" (85-87). Silverton even observes, with "Titanic pessimism" (we might add "naturalism"), that "a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe" (309). As it happens, his off-hand prediction rings true for Lily Bart, as Dorset's gastric distress signifies his more threatening marital distress, a distress whose ultimate relief requires that "a woman's life" - her own - be "ruined" (309). From Dorset's troubled marriage to Lily's struggle in the marriage market, The House of Mirth depicts characters whose psychological and physiological lives are consumed by a society with a voracious appetite for status. Lily Bart's pursuit of social status as an empowered consumer presents her with a paradox: in order to become a consumer she must first present herself as an item to be consumed. For Lily, this paradox becomes a seesaw of conflicting social and psychological needs that seem opposed to such a degree of inevitability that one begins to wonder about the role of literary naturalism in the novel.(2) Indeed, recent years have seen renewed interest in the influences of American and German naturalism on Wharton's writing. Donald Pizer observes that "it is now common" to view The House of Mirth in particular as "in the naturalistic camp" ("The Naturalism" 242). While he notes that studies of literary naturalism have in the past almost entirely neglected Wharton's novels, largely because she was not male and did not often write about the lower classes, he affirms those who have initiated the "rediscovery" of Wharton as a naturalist novelist ("American Naturalism" 127).(3) This rediscovery, in the case of The House of Mirth, has been based on abundant textual evidence suggesting that Wharton, fully conversant with the tenets and tropes of naturalistic philosophy and fiction, consciously depicted Lily Bart as a victim of her social environment. The naturalistic "language of imprisonment" is so pervasive, in fact, that in his most recent comments on the novel Pizer has offered only two exceptions to its seemingly ubiquitous law of social determinism - Nettie Struther and Lawrence Selden - one triumphing over her environment through pure strength of will, the other transcending it through faith, albeit unsubstantiated, in human possibility ("The Naturalism" 244-46).(4) But even those who find Wharton modifying conventional naturalism by offering occasional exceptions to the rule of social determinism might nonetheless pronounce Lily Bart's life and death clearly naturalistic.(5) After all, she dies a victim of her own lack of moral courage, which is to say, a victim of the social environment that created in her such a lack. …

Utilitarians and Religion

Abstract: Part 1 Religious advocates of the utility principle: "Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue and Morality" (1731), John Gay "On the Motives to Virtue and the Necessity of Religious Principle" (1751), John Brown "A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil" (1757), Soames Jenyns "The Light of Nature Pursued" (1768-78), Abraham Tucker "On Morality and Religion", "The Nature of Obligation of Man as a Sensible and Rational Being" (1781), Edmund Law "The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy" (1785), William Paley. Part 2 Secular utilitarian critics of organized religion: "An Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind" (1822), "Not Paul, but Jesus" (1823), "The Church of England Catechism Examined" (1824), Jeremy Bentham "The Church, and Its Reform", 'London Review' (1835), James Mill 'Utility of Religion' from "Three Essays on Religion" (1874), John Stuart Mill.

"The Sound of the Scythe Being Whetted": Gender, Genre, and Realism in 'Adam Bede.'

Abstract: Critical analyses of Adam Bede that take genre as their focus tend to treat the novel as essentially monogeneric: the realistic technique revises or modernizes whatever older generic form the critic has identified as the novel's structural or moral ur-text, and such hybrids as the "pastoral novel," the "unhistoric tragedy," the "rural epic," or the "tragicomedy" result.(1) Those critics who find generic conflict in the text (rather than "revision") locate this conflict within the project of realism itself--that is, within the tendency to sneak the "ideal" into the "real."(2) While such accounts acknowledge the competition between what could be considered different generic forms ("moral fable" vs. "historic moment"), they do not treat more than a dyadic or dialectical structure of two "genres" in competition. One recent reading of Adam Bede along these lines argues that the ending of the novel "conveys [Eliot's] final judgment on Hayslope's insularity," since the "purpose" of the novel is to "explode the falsifying myth of the pastoral" in order to "portray natural history" (p. 289).(3) While I agree with this general thesis, I would like to propose the idea that the "pastoral myth" is only one of several such narrative trajectories and that the novel's domestic closure is achieved by a conscientious appropriation or sacrifice of those trajectories by a realism that has been enriched or widened by the encounter. I would also like to propose a way to add gender to the study of genre and realism, in a reading that accounts for the particular descriptive tropes and plot trajectories assigned by generic convention to the "masculinity" and "femininity" that are each needed for closing scenes of stable domesticity. In Eliot's novels, these tropes and trajectories are often reversed, usually with a female character taking on a "masculine" role. Eliot seemed to find in such reversals a means to create a genuine female subjectivity and a field of action for this potential.(4) However, happy domesticity being the desired realistic closure, such characters must be rendered "marriageable"; the alternative genre and the possibility for female activity it offered must be expelled or contained by a process of disillusionment or demystification, so that the "female hero" can become "a wife." That Eliot understood this process and its cost can be seen clearly in Adam Bede, as I hope to demonstrate here. The novel has two openings: an indoor and an outdoor, a work scene and a landscape, a "realistic" and a "mythic," a masculine and a feminine. These openings provide a generic map of the novel, in which we can find not only the regions that threaten or support a realistic closure, but the system by which a coherent closing scene will be achieved. For the novel has only one ending--a marriage--in which the conflicting trajectories of the double beginning have been made to harmonize. We are conscientiously pointed away from the mythic and into the realistic by the opening paragraph, whose purpose is to focus our attention from the widest possible extent into a pinpoint of specificity, from "the past" to "the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799," from "far-reaching visions" to "the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder," by means of a "single drop of ink," whose transformation from the Egyptian sorcerer's magical "mirror" to literal liquid "at the end of [a] pen" enacts the shift from the world of visionary mythical past to the "real" world of material history.(5) The scene that this narrator presents is thus to be understood as a "real" scene of laborers working and chatting about the "real" things "real" laborers talk about. Ample work has been done that establishes Adam as the figure of ideal worker who embodies what are essentially middle-class ideals.(6) My reading, therefore, does not seek to establish Adam as middle-class realistic hero but to identify the particular pattern of associations with him and this ideology that is established in this scene, and later used by the narrator as the objective correlative of realism in other moments and characters in the novel. …