A preeminent scholar of American studies explores the American literary and philosophical traditions, and the connections between them, by investigating, first, Emerson's thought and its influence on American writing and, second, the pluralistic and radical ways in which American modernists engaged the world.

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and Otto Neurath (1882-1945) decisively determined the development of the scientific world view of logical empiricism. The contributions to this volume illuminate from different perspectives the intricate relations between these two key thinkers.

A referral was made to our Cardiac Transplant Program for a patient who was in the New Jersey Prison System. The Medical Director of the New Jersey Department of Corrections called regarding a 39-year-old inmate who was being treated in a New Jersey hospital that has a unit for prisoners from a nearby cor- rectional facility. The referring physician described the patient to our Medical Director of heart transplantation as a “murderer” who had been incarcerated since 1987 and sentenced to (...) prison for 30 years without eligibility for parole before completion of his 30-year sentence. The patient was being treated in the CCU of the facility and according to preliminary studies, was suffering from a possible dilated cardiomyopathy. There was evidence of a prior cerebrovascular accident (etiology unknown) with a dense hemiplegia of the left side. The patient was alert but unable to care for himself. There were a number of specific tests necessary to evaluate the patient's candidacy for heart transplantation before actually placing him-on a waiting list. However, the transplant director was uncertain about having the patient brought to our facility for further testing and called some members of the Transplant Selection Committee team to discuss the case. (shrink)

Friedl had us drawing what we like to do, what we dream about . . . She transported us to a different world. In his State of the Union address on January 25, 2011, United States President Barack Obama gave praiseworthy preeminence to education and to his “Race to the Top” program. However, he deemed only two fields of education worthy of note, namely, math and science. He mentioned these areas of knowledge several times during his speech but omitted (...) any reference to educating children in the arts. This is a regrettable oversight, as arts education nationwide and perhaps worldwide has been progressively undervalued and underfunded. Yet, as one of America’s finest poets, James Weldon Johnson .. (shrink)

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human (...) dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’. (shrink)

29 o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL t996 J. Burnet, Oxford, 19oz ) is excluded, as are influential works in foreign languages. Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. I is included 077); it was later translated into German . The converse does not hold: P. Friedl~inder's Platon 049-43) is included, but its English translation is not. F. Solmsen's Plato's Theology is not included, nor is his "Plato and the Unity of Science,"s although it was (...) reprinted in Solmsen's Kleine Schriften4 and Soimen's German articles reprinted there are included. As the international Plato Forschungsberichte of Ritter5 demonstrate even for the Germany of the early decades of this century, the world of scholarship knows no national bound- aries. The present attempt to impose them on Platonic studies results in a highly artificial work of bibliography. 6 RICHARD McKIRAHAN Pomona College Carl A. Huffman. Philolaus of Croton, Pythagorean and Presocratic: A Commentary on the Fragments and Testimonia with Interpretive Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xix + 444- Cloth, $1oo.oo. Pythagoreanism used to play a major role in accounts of Presocratic philosophy. Follow- ing the testimony of ancient Platonists, the Pythagoreans were seen as Plato's precur- sors in cosmology, on the soul, and on Ideas and numbers; and attempts were made to reconstruct the systematic philosophy of the Pythagoreans, or even of Pythagoras himself. Now, however,.. (shrink)

Book Reviews K. Robb, Literacy and Paideia in Ancient Greece. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. x + 13o. Cloth, $45.oo. Robb's book can perhaps best be viewed in the context of previous studies of orality and literacy in the ancient Greek world, especially those of E. A. Havelock: Preface to Plato , The Literate Revolution and Its Cultural Consequences , and The Muse Learns to Write . Havelock's work has stimulated much discussion, some of it still very polemical (...) , and insofar as Robb shares some of Havelock's beliefs about the influence of alphabetic literacy on Plato and other representatives of the so-called "Literate Revolution," he is vulnerable to similar criticisms. And yet Robb claims not only Havelock among "oralist pioneers" , but also such diverse scholars as P. Friedl/inder, J... (shrink)

Book Reviews James c. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. ~8o. Cloth, $65.oo. The modern debate about how to interpret Plato and his dialogues has been going on at least since Schleiermacher argued for the interpretive importance of literary and dramatic characteristics, against the prevailing practice of reading Platonic doctrines directly out of the texts as if they were disguised treatises (...) 9 Important contributions to the discussion earlier in the twentieth century were made by Schaerer and Gold- schmidt, Friedl~inder, Stefanini, Woodbridge and Randall, Strauss, Kr~imer and Gaiser, and the disciples of these scholars, although you would hardly know it from the present volume. For those who are new to the discussion, and especially for those who come from the.. (shrink)

Book Reviews James c. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. ~8o. Cloth, $65.oo. The modern debate about how to interpret Plato and his dialogues has been going on at least since Schleiermacher argued for the interpretive importance of literary and dramatic characteristics, against the prevailing practice of reading Platonic doctrines directly out of the texts as if they were disguised treatises (...) 9 Important contributions to the discussion earlier in the twentieth century were made by Schaerer and Gold- schmidt, Friedl~inder, Stefanini, Woodbridge and Randall, Strauss, Kr~imer and Gaiser, and the disciples of these scholars, although you would hardly know it from the present volume. For those who are new to the discussion, and especially for those who come from the... (shrink)