Some writers are drawn, almost as if hexed, to pronounce on matters of state, politics, and, occasionally, economic policy. Margaret Atwood is one such writer. Her book Payback suffers from its aspiration to create an idealistic and implausible world to take the place of the one we have. This imaginary world would adopt all currently attractive ecological and friendly principles. In positing such a utopia, Atwood puts aside the admirable acuity she has when investigating the real world of literature and (...) veers away into the world of politics, economics, and social life, where she reveals herself a romantic. In so doing, she takes her place, a modest one, in the ranks of twentieth-century writers (Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Brecht) who also ventured into the construction of unworkable social visions that would supplant what they saw around them. Her adventure, while less ambitious, is no less naive than theirs. (shrink)

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

It weighs in at a bit more than five pounds; its dimensions demand a cradle. Yet this book is a handsome and welcome achievement despite its bulk. Its reproduction of the 1922 text, its maps and photos of 1904 Dublin; its list of minor characters in Ulysses; its bibliography of scholarship, both old and new; its timeline of Joyce's life, and its exemplary detailed annotations of the text: everything, harvested from the best sources, has been brought together to create the (...) largest volume dedicated to Joyce scholarship ever produced—a book that celebrates the first printing of Joyce's masterpiece. Given its weight and size, its classroom utility is likely limited; given its monumentality, it is a proper hundred-year tribute.What is wholly original about the book's contents are the essays that preface each of the eighteen episodes of the masterpiece. That Joycean scholarship grows upon itself is amply demonstrated by the sophistication and weight of learning the eighteen writers can now display. Almost fifty years have passed since Clive Hart and David Hayman edited a volume with a similar aim. Each of the new essays reveals just how much more there is now to know and say about Ulysses, how much more there is to praise in how Joyce conceived the book, how much more there is to teach, and how unlikely it is that Joycean scholarship will ever be diminished in either its curiosity or its energy. Given the increasing complexity and density of such accumulated knowledge, it is a pleasure to witness the economy and precision shown by so many of the writers. In particular, Robert Spoo's writing about “Nestor,” Maud Ellmann's writing about “Lotus Eaters,” and Vicki Mahaffey's writing about “Nausicaa” demonstrate how concision can make for valuable illumination.But there is a problem with where these essays are positioned. Coming before each of the episodes they introduce, they might condition the mind of a reader new to Ulysses to look upon those episodes as no more than demonstrations of what the scholars think. Catherine Flynn, the book's editor, emphasizes the need of such professional interpretation when she describes the plight of anyone “struggling through Ulysses” and “the key challenges facing the reader.” She is right about how hard it is for any new reader to “get” the book, but the placement of the essays is at odds with her claim that “grappling with the novel's challenges, the reader is pushed toward one of the most important rewards of reading Ulysses: thinking independently.” The prefaces may well impede the reader from thinking independently.Professor Flynn's focus on challenge and difficulty is widely shared throughout the Joycean community and has become a fundamental preoccupation in Joyce scholarship. Taking Joyce's mastery as a given, many Joyceans assume a Talmudic stance in believing, to quote Spinoza, that “the intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.” Facing the formidable Joyce, they turn and turn again to explication. They subscribe to the dictum that the youthful Joyce himself, perhaps self-mockingly, set down: “A man of genius makes no mistake. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” But is Ulysses free of error?Fritz Senn, writing about “Ithaca,” does not put himself in opposition to Joyce but in opposition to the presumed inerrancy of Joyce. He argues that the episode displays a troubling disjunction between what Joyce intended to do in the episode and what he did. Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that in the episode “not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.” But readers do not, indeed, get to know all they should, or see all they should see. Senn notes that they “learn next to nothing about Bloom's mother, his birthday, or the exact nature of his father's suicide, although they do learn a lot about such things as the junk in a drawer, the Dublin water supply system, and the addresses of Dublin shops.” Senn asks: “What does the meeting of the two characters amount to? Will it change Stephen so that he might become the author of the book he is in? Does Bloom find a son? Does he become the father that Stephen is supposed to be looking for? The impassive episode does not seem to answer, or to care.” But these are questions about which many a reader might care.Joyce named “Ithaca” as his favorite among the episodes. Senn demonstrates by his care and attentiveness that he too admires it. But by not limiting himself to dutiful reverence, he instead critically examines the Joycean text. His tribute to Joyce is both unsparing and generous.Equally attentive and yet incisive is Katherine O'Callaghan in her examination of “Sirens.” She recognizes the experimental daring of Joyce's strategy of “conveying music through language” in that episode. But her analysis, as penetrating as it is learned, does not leave the reader persuaded that the episode is entirely successful. As she observes, “the reluctance of the musical art to bend to the critical written voice” is a “stumbling block.”Another problematic experiment, “Oxen of the Sun,” which Joyce himself described as “the most difficult episode... both to interpret and to execute,” presents its commentator, Sarah Davison, with the task of explaining how its grandiose mixture of parody, plagiarism, and sheer celebration of myriad English prose styles over the centuries can function without, as she says, “wrongfooting and dissatisfying readers” who assume that the episode “enacts a historical progression only to find themselves disorientated by so many different echoes and cadences.”Were Joycean scholars more devoted to critical judgment than to explication—even when they are faced with the spectacular imposition of genius—the common reader would more likely find fellowship, and less intimidation, when reading a book that is not a sacred text but a human document, written with the extraordinary self-imposed challenges, as well as the problematic results, that only a most extraordinary human could make. (shrink)

This guest column, written by a former president of Emory University, examines arguments made by Jonathan Cole, a former provost of Columbia, in his book The Great American University. Cole illustrates his history of the modern American research university with a vivid comparison between two eminent academic leaders of the last century, Jacques Barzun of Columbia and Frederick Terman of Stanford. Employing data generated by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute for Higher Education and Times Higher Education, Cole shows that (...) universities are today ranked in order of prestige and eminence on the basis of their wealth and the magnitude of the support they receive for research activities. American universities, richer than all others, have greater resources to deploy and therefore are considered “the best.” Among them, Columbia and Stanford are among the very best. But, for Cole, Stanford has lately become superior to Columbia because Terman was more forward-looking, more ambitious in securing external support from government and industry, and more interested in building the strength of disciplines close to industry, commerce, and practical results. Barzun was more traditional, interested in supporting and encouraging the humanities, and “stuck in the historical past.” Cole reports that where Terman saw opportunities in the future, Barzun saw threats. Cole's book leaves many questions unanswered. In universities increasingly funded externally, what stance should academic administrators take toward professors more interested in their disciplines than in their employer? What is the fate of the underfunded humanities? What can be done about the stunning increase in tuition prices? Transfixed by Terman's definition of eminence, Cole ignores these difficult realities. (shrink)

In seventeen secular sermons, composed in a style at once grave, elegant, and concise, Ignatieff offers us his digest of the wisdom—the wisdom of consolation—that he has sought to find in writings as old as the book of Job and as recent as some of the letters of Václav Havel. Concluding the book, Ignatieff says of the authors he has surveyed that the “consolation they offer, it seems to me, lies in their example, in their courage and lucidity, and in (...) their determination to leave something behind that might console us.” Reduced to its basic argumentative structure, then, the book is about the ways in which the desire to find consolation could itself be consoling.This self-reinforcing rhetorical maneuver, not wholly reassuring, is undermined by what some of the selected writers actually believed. Michel de Montaigne, for instance, came in his later years to think that, provided we have the consciousness of simply being alive, “we would have no need for consolation at all.” David Hume, noting the debilities of reason and seeing much of the world as beyond the grasp of human understanding, concluded that “we should abandon the ground of consolation altogether.” Karl Marx, his mind fixed on a post-revolutionary world, envisioned a “utopia beyond the need for consolation.” Abraham Lincoln, whom Ignatieff presents in the most saintly and tragic of colors, had “no secure footing in faith,” but turned to biblical traditions calling for us “to forswear vengeance and judgment.” And what is consoling about such traditions? “That we are not condemned to live imprisoned in the rhetoric, foolishness, and mendacity of the present.” But that is where Lincoln lived, inconsolably, and where we too live.Ignatieff begins his book, and his most complex of sermons, with Job. Rendered truly miserable by God—his crops and animals destroyed, his family annihilated, his body burning with pain—Job never wavers in his faith. The God who had made him suffer is the God in whom Job places all his trust. Despite advice from friends to confess his wrongs, Job admits of nothing. He wants only to understand, and from God himself, why he suffers. The answer he gets is that he has no right to ask, for to ask is to challenge the almighty authority of God. Ignatieff writes that “God demands absolute obedience as the condition of consolation,” but the text nowhere has God offering consolation of any kind on any terms to Job. His lands and animals are returned to him and he is given a new family, but his inquiries to God go unanswered. Negotiation is out of the question. Compensated, he is not consoled.Wherever he looks—and he looks far and wide in his reading—Ignatieff wants to find consolation. But when in this book he comes to the heroic figure of Primo Levi, who saw with utmost clarity the power of humankind to do evil, Ignatieff at last acknowledges the elusiveness of consolation: “History has no consolations to offer because it never ends and its meaning is never settled.” Nonetheless, he goes on to say, of the writers he has presented, that “we should keep faith with them and defend the truths they bequeathed to us.” Alas, that legacy leads us again and again to see, despite Ignatieff's valiant efforts, just how much of life is inconsolable. (shrink)

The nature of consciouness or human awareness is one of the problems of perennial concern to philosphers and psychologists alike. Here is a systematic critical and comparative study the nature of human awareness according to the most influential school of classical Indian thought. After introducing the Advaita Philosophical system and indicating the place of consciouness in this system the author presents a detailed discussion of the Advaitin`s unique non-dual understanding of man`s basic intelligence. He continues with and analysis of the (...) Advaitin`s hierarchical vision of waking dream and dreamless sleep experience and compares this analysi,. (shrink)

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

Socrates (469-399 BC) is one of history's most enigmatic figures. Our knowledge of him comes to us second-hand, primarily from the philosopher Plato, who was Socrates' most gifted student, and from the historian and sometime-philosopher Xenophon, who counted himself as a member of Socrates' inner circle of friends. We also hear of Socrates in one comic play produced during his lifetime (Aristophanes' Clouds) and in passing from the philosopher Aristotle, a student of Plato. Socrates is a figure of enduring interest. (...) He is often considered the father of Western Philosophy, yet the four most famous accounts we have of him present a contradictory, confusing picture. Just who was Socrates? A brilliant philosopher, at times confounding and infuriating, morally serious and yet ironic; the ever-worldly man, sometime mystic, and uncommon martyr depicted by Plato? Or did Plato conflate Socrates' views with his own startling genius, as Aristotle suggests? Was So rates instead the less impressive, more mundane man whose commonsense impressed the laconic Xenophon? Or was Socrates the charlatan, the long-winded phony of Aristophanes' play? The Socratic works of Diogenes Laertius (3rd century AD), Libanius (AD 314 -- c. 393), Maximus of 'Tyre (2nd century AD), and Apuleius (born c. AD 125) add important dimensions to the portrait of Socrates: Diogenes Laertius' Life of Socrates emphasizes Socrates' deep ethical nature and his extraordinary personality; Libanius' Apology of Socrates is based on sources now lost to us; Maximus of Tyre's Whether Socrates Did the Right Thing When He Did Not Defend Himself makes the star ling claim (against testimony of Plato and Xenophon) that Socrates never spoke athis own trial; from Apuleius' On the God of Socrates we hear at length of Socrates' infamous daimonion: the "divine sign" only mentioned elsewhere, the sign that warned Socrates against certain courses of action. In short, from these four texts we are reintroduced to Socrates, and new wrinkles are added to an already intriguing historical figure. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen two significant trends emerging within the philosophy of science: the rapid development and focus on the philosophy of the specialised sciences, and a resurgence of Aristotelian metaphysics, much of which is concerned with the possibility of emergence, as well as the ontological status and indispensability of dispositions and powers in science. Despite these recent trends, few Aristotelian metaphysicians have engaged directly with the philosophy of the specialised sciences. Additionally, the relationship between fundamental Aristotelian concepts—such (...) as "hylomorphism", "substance", and "faculties"—and contemporary science has yet to receive a critical and systematic treatment. _Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science _aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together essays on the relationship between Aristotelianism and science that cut across interdisciplinary boundaries. The chapters in this volume are divided into two main sections covering the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of the life sciences. Featuring original contributions from distinguished and early-career scholars, this book will be of interest to specialists in analytical metaphysics and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

The movement called Experimental Philosophy (‘x-Phi’) has now passed its tenth anniversary. Its central insight is compelling: When an argument hinges on accepting certain ‘facts’ about human perception, knowledge, or judging, the evoking of relevant intuitions by thought experiments is intended to make those facts seem obvious. But these intuitions may not be shared universally. Experimentalists propose testing claims that traditionally were intuition-based using real experiments, with real samples. Demanding that empirical claims be empirically supported is certainly reasonable; though experiments (...) are not necessarily the only means available. When experiments are conducted, adequately interpreting their results requires understanding the study’s design (and possibly flaws) that produced them. Experiment-based reports should document the design clearly. If Plato, writing his Meno, replaced accounts of Socrates demonstrating geometry to a slave-boy, with a survey of 100 real boys—some grasping his demonstrations, others not—what conclusions could be reached? Before answering, the reader needs details on key design questions, including (among others): (a) What population are these samples intended to represent? (E.g., ‘all slave boys’?; ‘math-ignorant people’?; ‘everyone’?) (b) What statistical tests were conducted, on what assumptions? (c) How was ‘significance’ of results determined? (d) Was the test instrument’s validity established? For readers wishing to explore x-Phi’s potentials, as contributors or as interpreters of their findings, this paper offers some cautionary considerations. Throughout their literature, examples can be found casting doubt on some experimentalists’ findings, due to design-related issues. Increased awareness of methodological questions would tighten the x-phi literature, going forward . (shrink)

Called the “greatest philosophical essayist of his time,” Rorty is both famous and notorious in academic philosophy for his uniquely engaging writing style. While his fellow analytic philosophers look askance at his flamboyant prose, suspicious that it lacks the care and precision that their discipline demands, literary intellectuals who champion the essay genre can have their qualms about Rorty as well: his work is too professional and specialized to be properly called essays. I argue not only that Rorty's work fits (...) into the essay genre, but also that his use of the essay form is integral to his rhetorical project of advancing his ideal of pragmatic liberalism. Rorty writes essays because the essay is a pragmatic literary genre: it is anti‐essentialist, conversational, and experimentalist and provocatively aims at “breaking the crust of convention,” in Dewey's phrase. Using the essay, Rorty “joshes” us to becoming more pragmatic and, therefore, better liberals. (shrink)

Experiments may contribute to understanding the basic processes of cultural evolution. We drew features from previous laboratory research with small groups in which traditions arose during several generations. Groups of four participants chose by consensus between solving anagrams printed on red cards and on blue cards. Payoffs for the choices differed. After 12 min, the participant who had been in the experiment the longest was removed and replaced with a naı¨ve person. These replacements, each of which marked the end of (...) a generation, continued for 10 – 15 generations, at which time the day’s session ended. Time-out duration, which determined whether the group earned more by choosing red or blue, and which was fixed for a day’s session, was varied across three conditions to equal 1, 2, or 3 min. The groups developed choice traditions that tended toward maximizing earnings. The stronger the dependence between choice and earnings, the stronger was the tradition. Once a choice tradition evolved, groups passed it on by instructing newcomers, using some combination of accurate information, mythology, and coercion. Among verbal traditions, frequency of mythology varied directly with strength of the choice tradition. These methods may be applied to a variety of research questions. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Rosa Calcaterra has written an extremely learned and thoughtful book about Richard Rorty’s controversial neopragmatism. It is a worthy addition to the growing number of works that offer a more generous and balanced assessment of Rorty’s thought, in contrast to the scores of highly critical treatments it received during his career. But, as Calcaterra insists, her book is “not an apology for Rorty” (Calcaterra 2019: ix); she critically approaches what she calls Rorty’s philosophical “provocatio...

Virtue liberalism holds that the success of liberal politics and society depends on the citizenry possessing a set of liberal virtues, including traits like open-mindedness, toleration, and individual autonomy. Virtue liberalism is thus an ethically demanding conception of liberalism that is at odds with conceptions, like Rawlsian political liberalism andmodus vivendiliberalism, that attempt to minimize liberalism’s ethical impact in order to accommodate a greater range of ethical pluralism. Although he claims to be a Rawlsian political liberal, Richard Rorty’s pragmatic liberalism (...) is best understood as a version of virtue liberalism that, in particular, recommends a controversial civic virtue of irony for good liberal citizenship. Indeed, Rorty ultimately joins Dewey in conceiving of liberal democracy as a “way of life,” rather than merely a set of political relations that have a minimal effect on our characters or on the shape of our private commitments and projects. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to get clearer on what eliminative materialism actually does and does not entail. I look closely at one cluster of views that is often described as a form of eliminativism in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science and try to show that this characterization is a mistake. More specifically, I look at conceptions of eliminativism recently endorsed by writers such as Edouard Machery, Paul Griffiths, Valerie Hardcastle and others, and argue that although these views do (...) endorse the elimination of something, they offer only what I will call a sort of category dissolution, and should be treated as something altogether different from traditional eliminativism. Spelling out the main contrast between eliminative materialism proper and this alternative view, and defending the need to keep them distinct, is my primary objective. As I show, a central irony is that proponents of the problematic outlook often insist that divergent things should not be classified together under a single label. By characterizing their own views as a form of eliminativism, they commit a fundamental error that they themselves argue should not be made. While my focus here is on eliminative materialism, the error I intend to highlight appears across various discussions about alleged eliminativism of all sorts of things. (shrink)

Emily Carroll and Parker Crutchfield propose a new inconsistency argument against abortion restrictivism. In response, I raised several objections to their argument. Recently Carroll and Crutchfield have replied and seem to be under the impression that I’m a restrictivist. This is puzzling, since my criticism of their view included a very thinly veiled, but purposely more charitable, anti-restrictivist inconsistency argument. In this response, I explain how Carroll and Crutchfield mischaracterize my position and that of the restrictivist.