Discusses the gulf between the individual and collective experience, and the way the gulf is bridged in two of Malraux's novels.

The Battle for the American Mind brings together religion, politics, economics, science, and literature to present a compelling history of the American people. In this brief and entertaining book, noted historian Carl J. Richard argues that there have been three worldviews that have dominated American thought—theism, humanism, and skepticism. By clearly explaining what Americans believed, exploring why they did so, and showing how that impacted the nation's development, Richard presents a unique portrait of the United States—past and present.

This paper explores the manner in which educational and political conservatives attempted to control the content and purposes of the history curriculum in English schools during the period 1987-1994. It focuses upon this particular coalition because, since the late 1970s, it has set the agenda for the debate and dominated the race to produce a history curriculum designed to help produce a particular kind of society. The paper argues that the New Right's claim to be engaging in an (...) educational debate is spurious. Rather, its concern is primarily ideological and only educational in terms of its use of history education as a vehicle through which to disseminate a specific set of values and beliefs. (shrink)

This paper explores the manner in which educational and political conservatives attempted to control the content and purposes of the history curriculum in English schools during the period 1987-1994. It focuses upon this particular coalition because, since the late 1970s, it has set the agenda for the debate and dominated the race to produce a history curriculum designed to help produce a particular kind of society. The paper argues that the New Right's claim to be engaging in an (...) educational debate is spurious. Rather, its concern is primarily ideological and only educational in terms of its use of history education as a vehicle through which to disseminate a specific set of values and beliefs. (shrink)

Why battles matter -- Accepting the wager of battle -- Laying just claim to the profits of war -- The monarchical monopolization of military violence -- Were there really rules? -- The death of pitched battle.

In _Battling to the End _René Girard engages Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theoretician who wrote _On War_. Clausewitz, who has been critiqued by military strategists, political scientists, and philosophers, famously postulated that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." He also seemed to believe that governments could constrain war. Clausewitz, a firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, understood the nature of modern warfare. Far from controlling violence, politics follows in war's wake: the means of war have (...) become its ends. René Girard shows us a Clausewitz who is a fascinated witness of history's acceleration. Haunted by the French-German conflict, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the development that would ravage Europe. _Battling to the End _pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Human violence is escaping our control; today it threatens the entire planet. (shrink)

How does a person become Hitler's enemy number one? Not through espionage or violence, it turns out, but by striking fearlessly at the intellectual and spiritual roots of National Socialism. Dietrich von Hildebrand was a German Catholic thinker and teacher who devoted the full force of his intellect to breaking the deadly spell of Nazism that ensnared so many of his beloved countrymen. His story might well have been lost to us were it not for this memoir he penned in (...) the last decades of his life at the request of his wife, Alice von Hildebrand. In My Battle Against Hitler, covering the years from 1921 to 1938, von Hildebrand tells of the scorn and ridicule he endured for sounding the alarm when many still viewed Hitler as a positive and inevitable force. He expresses the sorrow of having to leave behind his home, friends, and family in Germany to conduct his fight against the Nazis from Austria. He recounts how he defiantly challenged Nazism in the public square, prompting the German ambassador in Vienna to describe him to Hitler as 'the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria.' And in the midst of all the danger he faced, he conveys his unwavering trust in God, even during his harrowing escape from Vienna and his desperate flight across Europe, with the Nazis always just one step behind. Dietrich von Hildebrand belongs to the very earliest anti-Nazi resistance. His public statements led the Nazis to blacklist him already in 1921, long before the horrors of the Third Reich and more than twenty-three years before the famous assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. His battle would culminate in the countless articles he published in Vienna, a selection of which are featured in this volume. 'It is an immense privilege,' writes editor John Henry Crosby, founder of the Hildebrand Project, 'to present to the world the shining witness of one man who risked everything to follow his conscience and stand in defiance of tyranny'. (shrink)

With armed conflict in the Persian Gulf now upon us, Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc takes a long-term view of the nature and roots of war, presenting a controversial thesis: The notion of the "noble savage" living in peace with one another and in harmony with nature is a fantasy. In Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage , LeBlanc contends that warfare and violent conflict have existed throughout human history, and that humans have never lived in (...) ecological balance with nature. The start of the second major U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf, combined with regular headlines about spiraling environmental destruction, would tempt anyone to conclude that humankind is fast approaching a catastrophic end. But as LeBlanc brilliantly argues, the archaeological record shows that the warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years. Constant Battles surveys human history in terms of social organization-from hunter gatherers, to tribal agriculturalists, to more complex societies. LeBlanc takes the reader on his own digs around the world -- from New Guinea to the Southwestern U.S. to Turkey -- to show how he has come to discover warfare everywhere at every time. His own fieldwork combined with his archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research, presents a riveting account of how, throughout human history, people always have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment, which has led to war. Ultimately, though, LeBlanc's point of view is reassuring and optimistic. As he explains the roots of warfare in human history, he also demonstrates that warfare today has far less impact than it did in the past. He also argues that, as awareness of these patterns and the advantages of modern technology increase, so does our ability to avoid war in the future. (shrink)

By the mid-1600s, the commonsense, manifest picture of the world associated with Aristotle had been undermined by skeptical arguments on the one hand and by the rise of the New Science on the other. What would be the scientific image to succeed the Aristotelian model? Thomas Lennon argues here that the contest between the supporters of Descartes and the supporters of Gassendi to decide this issue was the most important philosophical debate of the latter half of the seventeenth century. Descartes (...) and Gassendi inspired their followers with radically opposed perspectives on space, the objects in it, and how these objects are known. Lennon maintains that differing concepts on these matters implied significant moral and political differences: the Descartes/Gassendi conflict was typical of Plato's perennial battle of the gods and giants, and the crux of that enduring philosophical struggle is the exercise of moral and political authority. Lennon demonstrates, in addition, that John Locke should be read as having taken up Gassendi's cause against Descartes. In Lennon's reinterpretation of the history of philosophy between the death dates of Gassendi and Malebranche, Locke's acknowledged opposition to Descartes on some issues is applied to the most important questions of Locke exegesis. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Battle Battle: Engaging Diversity in the American Liberal Arts College examines the production of an Asian American hip-hop musical, directed by the author, at a private liberal arts college in the US. This article demonstrates how the production process was determined by the complex history of racial formation and relations in America. Those who were extremely attached to standardized Eurocentric practices of control in education could only read this complexity as disorder and found the process to be out of (...) control or anarchic. The author claims, however, that the process was necessarily anarchic insofar as the production was undertaken as a decolonizing project; an attempt to undermine structures of domination and employ an ethical and democratic way of working that directly conflicted with the violent constraints of White hegemony that are present in elite educational institutions. (shrink)

This book analyzes crucial episodes in the history of American higher education in order to discover the best way to rescue the humanities. It urges apologists to stop focusing on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of poorly defined skills and envisions a globalized approach to education based on humanistic masterworks.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act is a unique initiative in the history of social security-it is not just an employment scheme but also a potential tool of economic and social change in rural areas. This volume presents the first comprehensive account of the 'battle for employment guarantee' in rural India. Staying clear of the propaganda and mud-slinging that has characterized much of the NREGA debate so far, the book presents an informed and authentic picture of the ground realities.The (...) essays are based on field studies of NREGA by a team of researchers who have been actively involved in the campaign for the right to work. They examine a wide-range of issues such as entitlements, corruption, people's perceptions of NREGA, women's empowerment, mobilization of unorganized workers, and socio-economic impact of NREGA. They also provide a comparative analysis of the challenges and successes in the implementation of NREGA in different states including Orissa, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan. (shrink)

Europe is at war and does not know it. She is overrun by invaders from the Global South, who seek to replace those who have inhabited her lands for at least the last 30,000 years. She is subject to an American overlord, whose world system dictates her de-Europeanization and globalization. She is mismanaged and betrayed by EU technocrats, corrupt politicians, and plutocratic elites. Without a revolutionary mobilization in her defense, the thousand-year-old civilization that grew out of the medieval Respublica Christiana (...) and that we today associate with 'Europe' - along with the unique genetic heritage of her peoples - will forever cease to exist. Guillaume Faye - doctorate from one of France's most prestigious Ècoles, social philosopher, author of numerous books and articles - is the Cassandra warning Europeans of their approaching extinction, and the need to prepare for the impending Battle of Europe. Michael O'Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ècoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and modern European history at the University of California. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (2004). (shrink)

Among the problems of ancient history of which no solution has yet been generally recognized as definitive is that of the battle-field where the struggle between Pompey and Caesar was decided. Colonel Leake's exposition was rejected by von Göler and Sir William Napier; and the paper in which he endeavoured to vindicate it produced little effect. Napier and von Göler constructed theories which were vitiated by the misleading maps on which they worked. M. Léon Heuzey, the chief of the (...) Macedonian mission which collected information for the contemplated final volume of Napoleon the Third's Histoire de Jules César, performed a valuable service by preparing, with the aid of an engineer officer, M. Laloy, the first trustworthy survey of the Pharsalian region; but his dissertation on the battle, published in 1886, was bitterly derided by Colonel Stoffel, who, however, appropriated his predecessor's maps without acknowledgment. About the same time Mr. Perrin published in the American Journal of Philology a valuable article, which, although it convinced many that the battle had been fought, as von Göler, Napier, and Long maintained, on the northern bank of the Enipeus, was necessarily written without any knowledge of the works of Heuzey and Stoffel. (shrink)

In this collection of previously unpublished essays Jean-Jacques Nattiez applies his theoretical foundations of musical semiotics to theorists such as Levi-Strauss, Hanslick, and Brailoiu; novelists such as Proust; and poets such as Baudelaire. The author treats problems which musicologists and music lovers alike need to address: the artistic product in music of oral tradition, the nature of musical facts, and questions of fidelity and authenticity in performance practice. Nattiez tackles these perennial issues with an originality born out of his focus (...) on the status of time in the works considered. This approach allows him to take sides, sometimes in a provocative manner, in the ongoing debates which pit adherents of modernity against apologists of postmodernism. (shrink)

This article asks whether there were, in post-dictatorship Chile, limitations of the autonomy of cultural and artistic production addressing the memory of traumatic events. In particular, the article analyzes the content and history of the production of some relevant sections of the mural painting Memoria Visual de una Nación by the Chilean artist Mario Toral. The article demonstrates that public art was an arena of struggle for the meaning of democracy during the postdictatorship period. To do this, he uses (...) concepts from post-structuralist political theory, cultural studies, the philosophy of memory, and memory studies. The article also offers an interpretation of cultural production as an open and contingent process. It concludes that the transition via transaction in Chile had a negative influence on the field of artistic production, reducing its autonomy and divergence from the dominant political discourse in the period. (shrink)

Mercy killing in battle is an illegal activity, yet, the evidence suggests, it happens on battlefields the world over and it has probably done so throughout human history. This may be a ?silent? part of the battlefield that few survivors wish to remember or to report subsequently. The practice is illegal, yet it raises difficult, perhaps sometimes impossible, ethical problems. A framework derived from the ethos of the just war tradition is developed here to analyse and to evaluate such (...) battlefield killings. (shrink)

Using Aristotle's well-known sea battle as our example, we offer a precise, intelligible analysis of future contingent assertions in the presence of indeterminism. After explaining our view of the problem, we present a picture of indeterminism in the context of a tree ofbranching histories. There follows a brief description ofthe semantic bases for our double-time-reference theory of future contingents. We then set out our account. Before concluding, we discuss some ramifications of, and alternatives to, a double-time-reference approach to the problem (...) of future contingents. There are some technical ideas at the foundation of our analysis, ideas of which most philosophers are largely ignorant; on our view, in the absence of mastery ofthese ideas it is quite impossible to speak responsibly about either indeterminism or free will. (shrink)

History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History , an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's (...) power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis--gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning--Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends. With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture. (shrink)

The influence of Aśvaghoṣa on the later tradition of kāvya was largely passed over in the South Asian tradition, even though the debt to his influence is clear in processional scenes developed by Kālidāsa and the attempted seduction of Arjuna developed by Bhāravi in his Kirātārjunīyam. We know from the testimony of the Chinese pilgrim Yijing that the Buddhacarita was a revered object of study in the Sumatran capital Śrībhoga near the close of the seventh century CE. It thus perhaps (...) comes as no surprise that three tropes or themes developed by Aśvaghoṣa were developed by several important composers of kakawin, the Old Javanese literary genre comparable to the kāvya of South Asia. This paper looks at the development of the themes of processions, divine battles and attempted seductions in a long history beginning with Aśvaghoṣa and closing with the work of the Javanese author Mpu Tantular, who completed the Buddhist kakawin Sutasoma c. 1365–1389 CE. This paper is partly based on a revised perspective on the history of the Shailendra and Sañjaya dynasties of central Java developed by examining the role of the “Shailendra royal preceptors” in bringing Sanskrit learning to Central Java in the period 778–847 CE. (shrink)

The Eleatic stranger in Plato's Sophist characterizes philosophy as an unending battle between two camps. It is, he says, a battle "between the Gods and the Giants" over the nature of reality. The Giants here are the materialists who attempt to explain everything in terms of underlying material mechanisms. The Gods, on the other hand, are the Friends of the Forms who find that material reality can only be explained by grounding it in a world of immaterial intelligible ideas. Clearly, (...) Plato had in mind here his own dispute with the Sophists. Nonetheless, the stranger's words can, with some validity, be taken as indicating a fundamental division running throughout the history of philosophy. One is reminded of the Aristotelians' dispute with Democritean atomists or more recent debates among philosophers of science over reductionism. (shrink)

Since Plato’s massive critique of the Sophists rhetoric’s ill repute runs through the history of western philosophy denunciating methods of rhetoric as in large part dishonest persuasion strategies which are at most marginally interested in dealing with truths. This judgement falls way too short insofar as it distorts the historically grown stock labeled “rhetoric” not only in the Aristotelian work. With reference to Olaf Müller’s philosophical book addressing the “controversy” between Goethe and Newton about the nature of light, I (...) will study the different rhetorical models and methods used by Newton and Goethe and also Müller himself. It becomes apparent that even works attempting to decide who was right in the long run do far more than trying to evoke true “representations” of facts or truths in the reader. The specific use of language patterns provides deeper insight into an author’s mindset towards the subject area discussed in his work and generally speaking the investigation of the rhetoric of science and philosophy leads to a better understanding of different epistemic cultures both in philosophy and science. (shrink)

When one considers the protracted and continuing struggle of the citizens of Oregon to include physician-assisted suicide among the panoply of measures available to dying patients and the physicians who care for them, the depth and breadth of the issue becomes inescapable. The potential intractability of the dispute is illustrated by the very fact, noted in the preceding parenthetical phrase, that consensus eludes us on even the most basic of semantic points—how we are to most aptly characterize the conduct in (...) question? The case featured in this issue's The Caduceus in Court must be examined as the latest battle in a long war of attrition waged by opponents of physician-assisted suicide against the Oregon Death with Dignity Act. After briefly reviewing that history, I will then consider the details of Oregon v. Ashcroft and the implications of the litigation not only for the care of dying patients but also for the regulation of medical practice in the United States and, more broadly still, the search for resolution of serious medical disputes in a democratic society. (shrink)

What decides the outcome of a Homeric battle? This may sound like one of those arcane problems only a devoted Homer-specialist would care to raise, but in fact the question strikes at the root of major issues in archaic Greek history. The orthodox answer is that Homeric battles were decided by single combats between champions, with the rest of the warriors only marginally influencing the fighting. It is added that these champions were aristocrats, ‘knights’. On this interpretation many (...) have argued that the political dominance of archaic Greek aristocrats was largely based on their military dominance, and that their power was seriously impaired when, in the seventh century B.C., military prominence shifted to the mass, the ‘commoners’; this change in the balance of power contributed crucially to the rise of the polis and the emergence of tyrannies. In outline the theory derives from Aristotle and is firmly entrenched in modern works. (shrink)

For the winter semester of 1942-1943, Heidegger announced a lecture course at the University of Freiburg on Parmenides and Heraclitus. In Heidegger’s collected works, volume 54, the lecture course was published under the title Parmenides, since Heidegger never actually discussed Heraclitus in the course. I may add that he barely discussed Parmenides either. The lecture course proceeds in circles. The lecturer seems to introduce new themes again and again, quickly digressing from each, only to return to some, but not all, (...) of them. Allow me to list the main themes in order of their appearance in the lecture notes: originary thinking, aletheia, goddess, translation, conflict, the Greek word pseudos and its translations, how the Romans mistranslated the Greeks, the Greek word methodos and its misunderstanding, lethe, the translation of zoon logon ekhon, the word, pragma, techne, physis and how it is not natura, unconcealing and concealing, the history of being, the polis, the daimon, the essence of the Greek gods, politeia, adike, what philosophy is, to think on something or about something, metaphysics, the subject/object relation, I-ness, egoism, metaphysics as the essence of technology, to think being, the essence of truth, the fate of the Occident, to rethink originary thinking, the foundation/less and so on. As one can see from this brief, and by no means full enumeration, Heidegger’s lecture course on Parmenides contains a small encyclopedia of the so called “basic words” of his philosophical turn. There is nothing in his famous Letter on Humanism that was not already present during the Parmenides course in the winter semester of 1942-1943. (shrink)

By Carl Gillett, Illinois Wesleyan University. Ontological reductionism has long dominated the sciences and intellectual life more broadly. It holds that a ‘final theory’ in physics would, in principle, suffice to explain all natural phenomena and that, ultimately, the entities of such a theory, like quarks with their properties of spin, charm and charge, are all that actually exists. Recently, however, a mounting challenge to this hegemonic reductionism has been focused around ‘emergent’ entities. On one hand, philosophers and a range (...) of writers in Science and Religion have provided new theoretical resources in anti-reductionist, ‘emergentist’ views of the structure of nature. Whilst on the other hand, a parade of eminent scientists, from disciplines as varied as condensed matter physics, evolutionary biology, the sciences of complexity, and cognitive science, have all argued that their empirical findings provide actual examples of ‘emergence’ in nature. (shrink)

The article illustrates the different meanings of the term “logic” in Weber's work and then proceeds to discuss his approach to the explanation of historical events and in particular to counterfactual analysis. Weber's epistemology is first situated within the neo-Kantian debates of his time as well as legal positivism and historical jurisprudence. The article then focuses on this author's conception of science as a value sphere, on the aims and methods of explanation in the social and historical sciences and on (...) the key concepts of possibility judgements and adequate causation. The central role played by counterfactuals and modal logic is illustrated through the example of the battle of Marathon, which Weber himself saw as the starting point of a causal chain leading to the rise of Western rationalism. The article concludes by highlighting the pioneering role of Weber's counterfactualism for the subsequent development of possible worlds theory and its use in the causal analysis of singular historical events. (shrink)