This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The (...) notion of 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy was born from philosophic reflection on logic and mathematics. It has been at its strongest in these and related domains of reflection, domains that are friendly to definition and analytic clarity. From time to time, analytic philosophers, some very distinguished, have produced fine work on literature and the arts. But these areas remain underexplored in the analytic tradition. This volume is focused upon language that does not fit within the usual analytic paradigms. It's highlights include two pieces (...) of original poetry on philosophic subjects (by philosophers who are also published poets), and philosophic reflection on poetry, literature more generally, metaphor, and related subjects. (shrink)

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XXIV, Life and Death: Metaphysics and Ethics is an important contribution to the literature on the intersection of issues of metaphysics and issues of ethics. In the Midwest Studies tradition, twenty of the more important philosophers writing in this area have contributed original papers that extend the boundaries of philosophical discussion of issues that are of both theoretical and practical concern to a wide-ranging audience. Topics considered include the concept of human life, the relationship (...) between the concept of personal identity and the understanding of death, normative appraisals of death, capital punishment, euthanasia, the postponement of death and the impact of a theory of death and afterlife on one's ethical perspective. (shrink)

This Volume illuminates the notion of meaning in the arts-in literature, painting, music, and dance. Specific topics include theory in the arts; interpretations of meaning; objectivity in meaning; and the consumer as a participant in art. Brings together articles from prominent philosophers and practitioners of the arts, which illuminate the notion of meaning in the arts. Addresses meaning in literature, painting, music, and dance. Explores the relationship between authorial intentions and the viewer's interpretation of meaning; the possibility of (...) objective meaning; and the role of the consumer as a participant in the work of art. (shrink)

Although generally philosophers have put a high valuation on reason, increasingly the role of emotions in motivating action is being recognized. The essays in this volume explore the emotions from a variety of perspectives, ranging from Aristotelian views of the passions to the new findings of cognitive science, and from such diverse starting points as medieval literature and psychological studies.

Self-blaming expressions are common. For example, “I blame myself for missing the deadline;” “I’m the only one to blame for my alcoholism;” “I can’t stop blaming myself for what he did to me;” “Bless me Father, for I have sinned;” “My bad, I’ll pay for it;” “I’m so ashamed of having done that;” and, “Damn me, I’ve done it again!”Self-blame occupies a sizable chunk of what is published in academic psychology, but there is not that much on the topic in (...) philosophy. My intent is to offer some thoughts and explorations about self-blaming in the context of a wider view of negative responsibility ascriptions that are not uttered at the time of the untoward action, and to use a distinction drawn in a piece from the psychological literature to suggest a link between a certain kind of self-blame, repentance, and acts of atonement.PreliminariesSelf-blaming is a form of holding oneself responsible, a way of expressing a negative self-reactive attitude subsequent to the performance of an action. .. (shrink)

Presents essays (previously unpublished) by prominent philosophers on topics such as rationality and alien cultures, moral realism and social science, human sciences in the case of literature, Foucault's genealogical method, Vigotsky and artificial intelligence. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The healthcare environment is knowledge driven and knowledge and human resource dependent. Despite the paucity of evidence on which to shape and evaluate organizational change, health‐care in Canada has undergone many changes in the last 15 years. In the pursuit of enhanced productivity, healthcare administrators have turned to industrial and engineering models. Using available Canadian research and policy reports, and where necessary, American literature, this paper describes the impact of re‐engineering on nursing and on the relationship between nursing and (...) patient outcomes. It also identifies emerging trends and ways forward. (shrink)

In recent years, substructural approaches to paradoxes have become quite popular. But whatever restrictions on structural rules we may want to enforce, it is highly desirable that such restrictions be accompanied by independent philosophical motivation, not directly related to paradoxes. Indeed, while these recent developments have shed new light on a number of issues pertaining to paradoxes, it seems that we now have even more open questions than before, in particular two very pressing ones: what (independent) motivations do we have (...) (if any) for restrictions on structural rules, and what to make of the plurality of new logics emerging from these restrictions, i.e. how to ‘choose’ among the different options. In this paper, we address these two questions from the perspective of a dialogical conception of logic that we've been advocating in recent years. We will argue that dialogical interpretations of structural rules, that is, as rules determining specific properties of the dialogues in question, provide a conveniently neutral framework to adjudicate between the different substructural proposals that have been made in the literature on paradoxes. (shrink)

** Named a Best Book of 2007 by Ready Steady Book, an independent book review website, working in association with The Book Depository, which is devoted to reviewing the best books in literary fiction, poetry, history and philosophy. "An invaluable guide to new literary territory, Taylor is equally good in discussing writers whom the reader already knows." -- Raphael Rubenstein, Rain Taxi "The paths that John Taylor invites us to walk in this book are inviting ones: fifty-five luminous essays devoted (...) to the broad avenues and the seductive byways of contemporary writing in France. John Taylor is opinionated but his opinions are rigorously argued ones. He strikes a canny and productive balance among a variety of competing concerns: the will to instruct his readers, the desire to share with them some very real pleasures, the imperative to interpret critically, and so forth. What emerges here is the image of a rare reader, one who is always willing to engage literature on its own terms, and that of a literature that is mobile, ambitious, provocative and deeply invested in the process of becoming. -- Warren Motte, Review of Contemporary Fiction "In this great introduction to some 50 French writers and poets little known outside of France, Taylor (The Presence of Things Past; The World As It Is), winner of the Three Oaks Prize for Fiction, invites his readers on an interesting journey."--Library Journal "Here it is under one cover: a deeply informed, delightful, and provocative stroll' through the literature of postwar France. From the chroniques of Cingria to the mythologies of Barthes, John Taylor introduces us to the prose and poetry of dozens of French authors, many of them regrettably never translated into English. Taylor is a skillful and witty guide, able to locate a writer between the traditions of Catullus and Pavese or to identify a style borrowing equally from Hlderlin and Hemingway. Working across every genre from autobiography to poetry to fiction to travelogue to the essay, these French authors, well known and obscure, have plumbed the quintessential French problem' of subjectivity. Tired of the culture wars? The language-lyric debate? The post-game analysis of post-structuralism? I suggest you dive into any one of John Taylor's Paths' for a reminder of the astonishing breadth and depth and complexity of which literature is capable."--Erica Funkhouser, author, Pursuit "Here we have vast erudition revealed in graceful, arresting sentences, writing that provides confidence and pleasure. John Taylor's writing strongly evokes Henry James' writing about French literature in his own day. Like James, Taylor is both generous and astute, never relinquishing admiration for the intricate process of analysis, analysis that he does so penetratingly and eloquently. However brilliant Taylor's observations, behind them rests a deep esteem for the writer, for his or her work, and for the tradition from which it comes. This is critical writing that is satisfying at every single level."--Richard Goodman, author, French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France "As they stroll through forgotten quartiers of Paris, wander in memory through the fields of a Norman childhood, reflect on a poem's resemblance to the salt marshes of the Breton coast, mourn the death of a beloved young wife, or look for answers in questions to which the only answers are more questions--France's most celebrated and, in some cases, still uncelebrated contemporary writers are exquisitely captured by John Taylor in a prose both limpid and lapidary and through a host of finely wrought essays, each a small jewel of critical insight, poetic sensitivity, and meticulous interpretation. Like a message in a bottle cast up on the shore, this work offers the English-speaking reader an original and poetic way to understand, appreciate, and love French. (shrink)

There is a large body of literature by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, usually referred to as Autopoietic Theory. This theory describes the dynamics of living systems; dealing with cognition as a biological phenomenon. The theory, however, has found far wider application than may be suggested from its biological roots. This is because the theory builds from its cognitive base to generate implications for epistemology, communication and social systems theory. Since, in essence, there is no discontinuity (...) between what is social and what is human, from the perspective of their biological roots. This paper presents some of the key elements of autopoietic theory and explores their application to organisations and their management. The topics considered are: i) the epistemological qualities of our knowledge and its relevance in understanding organisation; ii) human enterprises as autonomous selforganising systems; iii) the meaning of communication and the role of language in organisations. The paper also describes a new approach to organisational inquiry. This brings together, in a co-determinate fashion, a pragmatic attitude to human experience and language, and the value of theoretical insight. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval EnglandEdward E. FosterThe French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England, by William Calin; xvi & 587pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.Probably not many people will read all of this book, because it is very long. That is too bad, because it is also very good and its length is necessary (...) for its double purpose: to reconceptualize the connections between French and English literature in the Middle Ages and to provide sensitive interpretations both of familiar and of ignored Medieval narratives. The doubleness is neatly reciprocal: the readings grow into the revisionist definition of influence, and the notion of influence informs the individual readings.The innovative and persuasive argument that orders the whole book is that the impact of the French tradition has been too narrowly defined. Rather than simply retracing the influence of the classics of French fin amour, like Chrétien, on the corpus of Middle English literature, Calin sinuously argues the influence of Anglo-Norman and thirteenth and fourteenth century Central French works on the literature of the high English Middle Ages. From Anglo-Norman, Calin draws, predictably, on the lais of Marie de France. Less predictably, he draws on Beroul and Thomas of England and on romances like Ipomedon, Amadas et Ydione, and Gui de Warewic. Least predictably, he draws on the tradition of saints’ lives as formative of later Medieval moral narrative. From Central French, he draws, predictably, on the Roman de la Rose. Less predictably, but very convincingly, he draws on material frequently slighted even by French critics: Guillaume de Digulleville, the Prose Lancelot, Machaut, Froissart, and Chartier. But even more than influence, in the traditional sense, Calin persuasively demonstrates an enlivening intertextuality. He rescues Anglo-Norman classics from their stodgy reputation and late Central French texts from inattention and makes both relevant to the development of the English narrative tradition in court poetry and in popular romance.The power of Calin’s overarching argument depends heavily on the critiques of individual works. Without forgetting Chrétien and the earlier French tradition, he traces in Marie, Beroul, and Thomas, the formation and complication of fin amour which were present and available to English writers. He describes the narrative force of Anglo-Norman saints’ lives on the fictional techniques of English romance. His acute treatment of interlace in the Prose Lancelot reveals the treasure trove that English romancers could draw on, for technique as well as themes. In addition, he shows both how de Digulleville served up the “dream vision” and Machaut and Froissart served up the limited, even bumbling, narrator for fourteenth-century England.It could be argued that Calin’s method of doing very modern or postmodern analyses of early French poetry and prose is misleading. And it is true that some of the readings of French texts seem eccentric. For example, the relentless imposition of Freud on Marie is perplexing even when plausible. One wonders [End Page 400] whether this is the best way to approach the Lais. And Calin moves on to feminist, and old and new historicist readings of other texts. Each is well done, but it is sometimes hard to tell which way the winds of theory are blowing and why. While it must be granted that the interpretations of Middle English romances, like Ywain and Gawain, Amis and Amiloun, and William of Palerne, are not profoundly different from what other scholars have come to, there is no denying that embedding them in their French contexts gives them a richness they ordinarily lack. Even more laudable is the way in which influence is elaborated not just as a matter of themes but as a transformation of techniques and even sensibility.My greatest reservation is the treatment of Chaucer, especially “The Franklin’s Tale.” Calin does recognize Chaucer’s debts to the classics (though mostly through the Ovid Moralisé) and to the Italians. Yet Chaucer is the one author for whom the weight of French intertextuality seems less a determinant than a stimulant. In “The Franklin’s Tale,” the French burden leads to a reading that too easily dismisses both ironic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We all love with the same part of the body, don’t we?”Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist TheoryYelena Furman (bio)Starting out as a poet who eventually turned to fiction, Iuliia Voznesenskaia was also one of the main figures of the Soviet feminist movement, a fact that makes her biography both unusual and courageous. In the 1970s, Voznesenskaia’s involvement with the dissident movement in (...) Leningrad resulted in several arrests, imprisonment, and time in the camps.1 Although she was not initially interested in women’s issues, her incarceration in all-women’s camps and prisons convinced her that “the situation of women in our country demands special attention” (“Zhenskoe dvizhenie v Rossii” [“The Women’s Movement in Russia”] 41). Along with several other women dissidents, she founded the Soviet feminist movement, putting out the samizdat women’s journal Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), which precipitated immediate reprisals from the KGB. A women’s club, Mariia, and a journal by the same name followed, as did more KGB reprisals. For her feminist activity, Voznesenskaia was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, settling in West Germany.2In 1985, in West Germany, Voznesenskaia wrote her first and best-known novel, Zhenskii Dekameron (The Women’s Decameron). The novel is set in a Leningrad maternity ward containing ten new mothers from different backgrounds with different life experiences: Larisa, Emma, Natasha, Nelia, Galina, and Valentina are educated and all have careers except Galina, whose occupation, admittedly strange for a feminist novel, seems to be a dissident’s wife; Ol’ga works in a shipyard; Irishka is a secretary; Al’bina is an Aeroflot flight attendant doubling as an escort on the KGB’s payroll; Zina is homeless and has served time in the camps; Valentina is a Party worker, whereas Galina is part of the dissident community. Quarantined together for ten days because of a spreading infection and inspired by Emma’s reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the women begin to tell each other stories to pass the time. As its title makes clear, Voznesenskaia’s novel is heavily indebted to Boccaccio’s, borrowing its structure and many of its themes, such as an emphasis on storytelling and sexual explicitness. The humor and poignancy of the women’s stories make it a highly enjoyable read, and the focus on female sexuality and the author’s play with the narrative set this novel apart from other Soviet writers’ works.3 The novel also features what is surely a unique occurrence in Russian and Soviet literature: an openly feminist character (Larisa), referred to by the authornarrator as “zhenshchinoi vpolne emansipirovannoi, mogushchei ukrasit’ soboi liuboe zapadnoe feministicheskoe obshchestvo” [“a completely emancipated woman, capable [End Page 95] of adorning any Western feminist group”] (13), who is moreover depicted in a wholly positive light.4Yet despite enjoying a modicum of success, including being translated into several languages and staged as a play, Zhenskii Dekameron remains an under-read and underrated work.5 The reasons for its relative obscurity are closely allied with Voznesenskaia’s political activities in the 1980s. Exiled abroad for being politically undesirable to Soviet authorities, she could not have her work published in the Soviet Union; rather, the novel came out in Russian in Israel in 1987 (Curtis 186n2).6 The lack of visibility from which she suffered in her native country changed only in the (post)glasnost’ period: in 1991, the novel was published in Russian in Tallinn, and in 1992, in Moscow.7 Despite being able to be published, however, Zhenskii Dekameron seems not to have made a strong impact on either readers or critics, and there does not appear to be any discussion of it in Soviet/ Russian literary journals.The novel likewise suffers from a lack of familiarity in the West. The interest Voznesenskaia generated among Western European and American feminists in the early 1980s was for her feminist activism in the Soviet Union, which preceded her novel writing. Zhenskii Dekameron seems to have made a modest impact on readers; scholars, too, discuss it only occasionally. The most comprehensive treatment of the work to date has been Jerzy Kolodziej... (shrink)

Taking to heart Massaro's [(1988) Some criticisms of connectionist models of human performance, Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 213-234] criticism that multi-layer perceptrons are not appropriate for modeling human cognition because they are too powerful (i.e. they can simulate just about anything, which gives them little explanatory power), Regier develops the notion of constrained connectionism. The model that he discusses is a distributed network but with numerous constraints added that are (more or less) motivated by real psychophysical and neurophysical (...) constraints. His model learns static prepositions of spatial location such as in, above, to the left of, to the right of, under, etc., as well as dynamic prepositions such as through and the Russian iz-pod, meaning out from under. The network learns these prepositions by viewing a number of examples of them. Very importantly, this book tackles-and goes a long way towards resolving-the problem of the lack of negative exemplars (i.e. we are only very rarely told when something is not above something else), which should lead to overgeneralization, but does not. This book is a significant contribution to connectionist literature. (shrink)

This collection of essays, on French and francophone prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt and shame in relation to structures of ...

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Alain Badiou revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger's famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the "age of the poets," from Holderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, "The Autonomy (...) of the Aesthetic Process," Badiou also offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology. (shrink)

Starting with the hypothesis that analogical reasoning consists of a search of semantic space, we used eye-tracking to study the time course of information integration in adults in various formats of analogies. The two main questions we asked were whether adults would follow the same search strategies for different types of analogical problems and levels of complexity and how they would adapt their search to the difficulty of the task. We compared these results to predictions from the literature. Machine (...) learning techniques, in particular support vector machines (SVMs), processed the data to find out which sets of transitions best predicted the output of a trial (error or correct) or the type of analogy (simple or complex). Results revealed common search patterns, but with local adaptations to the specifics of each type of problem, both in terms of looking-time durations and the number and types of saccades. In general, participants organized their search around source-domain relations that they generalized to the target domain. However, somewhat surprisingly, over the course of the entire trial, their search included, not only semantically related distractors, but also unrelated distractors, depending on the difficulty of the trial. An SVM analysis revealed which types of transitions are able to discriminate between analogy tasks. We discuss these results in light of existing models of analogical reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women (...) Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Steven Fuller A FRENCH SCIENCE (WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES) It is of no news to anyone with even a passing interest in the theoretical wranglings of literary critics that deconstruction is on the defensive. This is of special interest to an historian and philosopher of science such as myself because (with the notable exception of Frank Lentricchia's revisionist history of contemporary critical trends) ] most of the recent salvos (...) launched against deconstruction have been supplied by analytic philosophy.2 Indeed, some analytic philosophers have felt bold enough to enter the fray themselves. And as with other Anglo-American incursions into theoretical debates of continental origin, whatever is lost in subtlety and sheer ingenuity is made up for in clarity and commonsense. If there is one theme common to adi analytically inspired attacks on deconstruction, it is that critical method ought to be a systematic articulation of the intuitions of the average reflective reader. To be a literary critic is not to achieve esoteric insight into the uncommunicative nature of texts; rather, it is to become more fully aware of the many ways in which texts do communicate. While such advice may be reassuring, it is certainly not very "philosophical" in the sense of "deeply problematic" that deconstructionists would claim for the nature of texts. And the deconstructionists are right — so I believe. At least, I will try to show that the case for deconstruction, in all its radicalness, can be made with something of the clarity desired by analytic philosophers. A contentious critic might wonder, at this point, why the deconstructionists were not clear in the first place (thereby rendering this article superfluous). The reason, contrary to what certain "friends of deconstruction" in the analytic tradition would have us believe, is that there are few precedents in the recent history of philosophy for claims made by deconstructionists.3 It would indeed be faint praise to find, as Hacking and Rorty have maintained, that the theses of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida were anticipated in the limpid prose style of a Quine, a Goodman, or a Kuhn.4 Why is the latter set of writers so clear, while the former set is so obscure? Our contentious critic might conclude diat clarity of style reflects a clarity of thought, and likewise for obscurity of style. In any case, both friends 2 Philosophy and Literature and foes of deconstruction tend to agree diat whatever is of value in the French texts may be derived with less effort by reading the American ones. The friends want to place deconstruction among several strains oftwentieth-century thought that would dissolve classical philosophy into a critical history of ideas, while the foes (more ingenuously perhaps) want to resume the business of practical criticism as usual and its attendant function (à la F. R. Leavis) of preserving Western Culture. Since the analytic devil can (and will) cite deconstructionist scripture for his own purposes, it is not clear that explicating Derrida will settle matters, especially since deconstruction gives an ironic twist to the search for what an author "had in mind" when he composed a particular text. It is, however, interesting to note that when one analytic philosopher recently presented a paradigm of literary criticism that allegedly compensated for the excesses of deconstruction, he resorted to Kantian talk about the intentions of the author being a "regulative ideal" toward which all responsible practical criticism aspires.5 This paradigm claims to owe to deconstruction the idea that, once an author is separated from his text, die reader becomes unable to verify any hypotheses about what the author meant by what he wrote. However, the evidence surrounding the text's composition (as well as the text itself) may be reconstructed so as to suggest a model of the audioes intentions. In that case, the explanatory adequacy of such a model would be relative to the evidence and methods available to the critic. And so, while the text certainly had a real audior who possessed a set of determinate intentions at the time ofwriting, mere is no reason to think that the most plausible model of the currendy available evidence picks out those intentions. What we have here is the first of two species of... (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the foremost French philosophers of the 20th century; a mystic, activist, and writer whose profound work continues to intrigue and inspire today. -/- Mirror of Obedience collects together Weil's poetry and autobiographical writings translated into English for the first time. It offers a rare glimpse into a more personal and introspective Weil than we usually encounter. She was writing and re-working her poems until the end of her life and in a letter from (...) London to her parents, dated 22 January 1943, she expressed the wish for her verses to appear together in print in chronological order, a wish which this volume honours. -/- Weil was a thinker who wrote with discipline and spareness and cherished the poetic form for its power to compress language and distill meaning. In these poems and literary writings, we see her own efforts to craft poems as essential expressions of thought, bringing into view another aspect of Weil's quest for beauty and truth. (shrink)

Are the words that a novelist uses adequate to his or her elusive subject&—the human condition? Are they pertinent, accurate, invariably fair, unflinchingly honest? Or do the novelist's words execute essentially formal maneuvers, engaging our interest through their patterns rather than their reach? And what about a possible third, synthesizing option? Robert W. Greene discovers that the two apparently divergent intentions in question (metalinguistic vs. moralistic) often paradoxically coexist in French fiction. Also, no doubt because it is more consistently (...) self-conscious than that of any previous era, the fiction of twentieth-century France seems to illustrate this convergence with special brillance. From L'lmmoralist (1902) to L'Usage de la parole (1980) Greene explores combinations and permutations of moralistic analysis and metalinguistic commentary in a particular sequence of prose narrative. Along the way, he observes Gide, Proust, Malraux, Camus, Duras, and Sarraute, each in his or her own fashion, moving ceaselessly back and forth between soundings of the heart and diagnoses of the tongue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning FrenchPatrick HenryThe Philosopher’s Demise: Learning French, by Richard Watson; 133 pp. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995, $22.50.An internationally known expert on caving and the life and works of Descartes, Watson writes traditional philosophical criticism as well as novels like The Runner (1981) and Niagra (1993). The Philosopher’s Demise, however, is the final part of a very loosely woven trilogy that is neither (...) traditional philosophical discourse nor fiction. These are certainly lighter texts than the ones on Cartesian metaphysics—indeed, they are all funny—but they also contain a good deal of practical philosophy.The Philosopher’s Diet. How To Lose Weight and Change the World (1985), for example, deals with the issue of fat, tells you how to get it off and keep it off but, in very lean prose, it also probes deeply into the form of commitment. It contains chapters on fat, food, and roughage but others entitled “Running,” “Sex,” “How to live,” and “How to die.” Fat functions here as a metaphor—it is “what clutters the unexamined life” (p. 26)—representing “the nagging triviality, the utter banality, and the inevitability of ordinary reality that separate us from what we think we want to be” (p. 145).With an occasional nod to Sartre (We are what we eat as we are what we do.) and Pascal (By altering our behavior, we can alter our beliefs.), Watson writes to provoke his readers to make a commitment to get the fat out of their lives, to take control of their actions and, perhaps, by changing themselves, to change the world. If we can, for example, “control [our] own eating habits apart from the norm imposed by society” (p. 75), we can begin to act as individuals in all other matters and completely transform our lives and, possibly, those of others. Watson, who contributed a chapter to World Hunger and Moral Obligation (1977) and who, during the 1960s, wrote a still unpublished volume entitled Sex and Revolution in which he claims that if people could revolt sexually against the [End Page 420] taboos of America, they could then perhaps be convinced to take control of the world’s food production, now remarks here, as if in passing, that if we fast for a day or two to make up for binges, we will get “a gut comprehension of what hunger really is for as many as a third of the world’s people” (p. 129). At its deepest level, The Philosopher’s Diet unveils an entire world obsessed with food—“the rich are worried about eating too much and the poor too little” (p. 56)—and underscores the immorality of not trying to change a system of food production and distribution in which we are overfed while millions are starving.The Philosopher’s Joke (1990) is a tougher book to get a handle on. It contains five chapters written in the dominant styles of philosophical writing popular in each of the last five decades. Two additional chapters complete the volume: “How to Die” which appeared almost verbatim in The Philosopher’s Diet and “A Pig’s Tail (The End of the Second Millenium).” As the book’s cover warns us, it is not always easy to ascertain the author’s position vis-à-vis the opinions reached in the specific essays. The first two chapters, though, are clearly parodies of purely formalistic writing, while the third is a skeptical but straightforward and serious attempt to establish that all interpretation is subjective. The fourth deals with deception in Kierkegaard and the themes of innocence sullied and human entrapment in Western culture. The main joke here has been played on Kierkegaard by God, “the original con man” (p. 87). Chapter six examines recent novels and films that treat the relationships between humans and apes and asks, seriously, what it would mean regarding animal rights and the place of human beings in the cosmos, if it could be shown that apes and humans can interbreed. Chapter seven brings the volume full circle. It shows how form carries content in its examination of the circular form, multiple circles, and epicycles of... (shrink)

Certainly the most elaborate single extant monument of Renaissance French prose literature, Michel de Montaigne's "Essais" presents a subject matter that often discusses and analyzes concepts of language in general as well as language as a vehicle of its own expression. This study addresses the author's exploration of the dedalus of language as he ambles and rambles its roads, streets, and alleys; draws the portrait of his philosophy of language or philology; and concludes his affirmative and positivistic (...) attitude toward language and its literary application or the art and artistry of literature. The great Renaissance humanist's depiction of language in the "Essais" is analyzed in this book on the basis of its division among intellectual, moral, and aesthetic aspects. This threefold reduction, finding its derivation in the critical work of Aristotle, Auerbach, and Bowen, is also related to the few particular and the important general critical studies of Montaigne and his vision and use, creation and re-creation of language. (shrink)

Situates Weil’s writing within the French literary tradition, and recognizes her as a master stylist.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning FrenchPatrick HenryThe Philosopher’s Demise: Learning French, by Richard Watson; 133 pp. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995, $22.50.An internationally known expert on caving and the life and works of Descartes, Watson writes traditional philosophical criticism as well as novels like The Runner (1981) and Niagra (1993). The Philosopher’s Demise, however, is the final part of a very loosely woven trilogy that is neither (...) traditional philosophical discourse nor fiction. These are certainly lighter texts than the ones on Cartesian metaphysics—indeed, they are all funny—but they also contain a good deal of practical philosophy.The Philosopher’s Diet. How To Lose Weight and Change the World (1985), for example, deals with the issue of fat, tells you how to get it off and keep it off but, in very lean prose, it also probes deeply into the form of commitment. It contains chapters on fat, food, and roughage but others entitled “Running,” “Sex,” “How to live,” and “How to die.” Fat functions here as a metaphor—it is “what clutters the unexamined life” (p. 26)—representing “the nagging triviality, the utter banality, and the inevitability of ordinary reality that separate us from what we think we want to be” (p. 145).With an occasional nod to Sartre (We are what we eat as we are what we do.) and Pascal (By altering our behavior, we can alter our beliefs.), Watson writes to provoke his readers to make a commitment to get the fat out of their lives, to take control of their actions and, perhaps, by changing themselves, to change the world. If we can, for example, “control [our] own eating habits apart from the norm imposed by society” (p. 75), we can begin to act as individuals in all other matters and completely transform our lives and, possibly, those of others. Watson, who contributed a chapter to World Hunger and Moral Obligation (1977) and who, during the 1960s, wrote a still unpublished volume entitled Sex and Revolution in which he claims that if people could revolt sexually against the [End Page 420] taboos of America, they could then perhaps be convinced to take control of the world’s food production, now remarks here, as if in passing, that if we fast for a day or two to make up for binges, we will get “a gut comprehension of what hunger really is for as many as a third of the world’s people” (p. 129). At its deepest level, The Philosopher’s Diet unveils an entire world obsessed with food—“the rich are worried about eating too much and the poor too little” (p. 56)—and underscores the immorality of not trying to change a system of food production and distribution in which we are overfed while millions are starving.The Philosopher’s Joke (1990) is a tougher book to get a handle on. It contains five chapters written in the dominant styles of philosophical writing popular in each of the last five decades. Two additional chapters complete the volume: “How to Die” which appeared almost verbatim in The Philosopher’s Diet and “A Pig’s Tail (The End of the Second Millenium).” As the book’s cover warns us, it is not always easy to ascertain the author’s position vis-à-vis the opinions reached in the specific essays. The first two chapters, though, are clearly parodies of purely formalistic writing, while the third is a skeptical but straightforward and serious attempt to establish that all interpretation is subjective. The fourth deals with deception in Kierkegaard and the themes of innocence sullied and human entrapment in Western culture. The main joke here has been played on Kierkegaard by God, “the original con man” (p. 87). Chapter six examines recent novels and films that treat the relationships between humans and apes and asks, seriously, what it would mean regarding animal rights and the place of human beings in the cosmos, if it could be shown that apes and humans can interbreed. Chapter seven brings the volume full circle. It shows how form carries content in its examination of the circular form, multiple circles, and epicycles of... (shrink)

(1997). An inside‐out story: Verbal image and pictorial image in the french prose lancelot. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 191-198.

I recently taught an upper-division Honors class in Medicine and Literature with students ranging from a pre-physician’s assistant student and nursing student to English, French, History, and Technical Writing majors. The common thread connecting these students initially was their self-described fear of and helplessness with poetry. However, as the semester drew to a close, their class discussion and journals revealed not only increased comfort with poetry but also a preference for it. The information and insight they got from (...) poetry, they said, were the reason they took a medical humanities course in the first place and commented that the poetry we read provoked more substantial “medicine and literature” discussions than prose. Poetry provides a good starting place to analyze complex human relationships, and the focus on language and form levels the intellectual playing field: students are all unfamiliar with how to do it and are learning a new skill together. This could be accomplished, of course, with a literary short story, but for the diverse population of students in this class, the brevity of poetry made it all the more appealing. (shrink)

Why do artists, poets, philosophers, writers, and others who are usually classified as intellectuals leave the ivory tower to "dirty their hands" in the political arena? In an effort to illuminate the intellectual's struggle to come to grips with the issues raised by political involvement, David Schalk examines the life and thought of five intellectuels engagés in France during the period between 1920 and 1945. From communist to fascist, these figures—Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Mounier, Julien Benda, and Robert Brasillach—cover (...) the full political spectrum, and Professor Schalk studies their diverse reactions to the social, political, and economic tensions of the interwar period. Broadly defining "engagement" as political involvement that is voluntary, conscious, and freely chosen, usually by intellectuals, the author poses the intellectual's dilemma in the following terms: "When we are engagé," he writes, "we fear that we are debasing our highest values; when we are not, we worry that we have become, in Paul Nizan's trenchant phrase, mere chiens de garde [watchdogs]." He then investigates the origins and the popularization of the concept of engagement in the early 1930s, the arguments used to denounce it and to defend it, its different manifestations, and finally its effects on the socio-political actuality of the world. Originally published in 1979. 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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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)

Dans les années 1760, l'atelier du baron d'Holbach est, avec Ferney au temps de Voltaire, le principal lieu de diffusion des idées hétérodoxes qui permettent la radicalisation des Lumières en France. L'activité de traduction d'Holbach, plus importante en quantité que son activité d'auteur, est étudiée ici pour la première fois de manière systématique. En comparant les ouvrages clandestins traduits et publiés par Holbach avec leurs vrais ou prétendus originaux (majoritairement anglais), Mladen Kozul analyse les manipulations énonciatives, thématiques et éditoriales qu'Holbach (...) opère dans les textes anglais pour en légitimer le discours et les transformer en livres clandestins français. Il montre qu'Holbach, fidèle aux procédés d'une culture rhétorique qui brasse et recycle textes et discours, s'appuie sur les stratégies des encyclopédistes qu'il perfectionne en employant les méthodes de la librairie clandestine. Les textes traduits par Holbach orientent d'une manière décisive la perception qu'a le public des correspondances entre les idées des Lumières en France et celles provenant d'autres cultures de l'Europe occidentale, et notamment d'Angleterre. Les figures d'auteurs anglais qui se dégagent du livre clandestin apparaissent comme des constructions qui installent, aux yeux du lecteur français, le mirage d'un front philosophique transculturel radical, uni et solidaire. Les pratiques du baron nous permettent ainsi d'interroger le rapport complexe du public cultivé des Lumières à l'altérité culturelle. En repensant les notions de traduction et d'auteur, Mladen Kozul invite à voir en Holbach l'inventeur d'une des premières manipulations médiatiques d'envergure en Occident. (shrink)

Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon's works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This volume aims to help remedy this (...) by bringing to English-language audiences the first collection of his moral and political writings in translation. By so doing it hopes to make more widely available the riches of one of the leading voices of resistance to the absolutism of Louis XIV. Fénelon's political thought will thus be of particular interest to students and scholars of French history, as well as to those today engaged in questions of political resistance and reform. But Fénelon's reach also extends to fields well beyond politics and ethics. In the Enlightenment, Fénelon came to be celebrated not only as a humanitarian political reformer but also as a pioneering theorist of education, a prescient student of economics and international relations, and a key voice in contemporary philosophical debates-not to mention his fame as one of the seventeenth-century's most preeminent theologians and spiritualists and masters of French prose. As such, his work will be of interest to students and scholars in fields ranging from philosophy and political science to economics, education, literature, French history, and religion. (shrink)

Fénelon may be the most neglected of all the major early modern philosophers. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet today even specialists rarely engage his work directly. This problem is particularly acute in the Anglophone world, for while Fénelon's works have been published in several excellent modern French editions, only the smallest fraction of his vast and influential corpus has appeared in modern English translation. This volume aims to help remedy this (...) by bringing to English-language audiences the first collection of his moral and political writings in translation. By so doing it hopes to make more widely available the riches of one of the leading voices of resistance to the absolutism of Louis XIV. Fénelon's political thought will thus be of particular interest to students and scholars of French history, as well as to those today engaged in questions of political resistance and reform. But Fénelon's reach also extends to fields well beyond politics and ethics. In the Enlightenment, Fénelon came to be celebrated not only as a humanitarian political reformer but also as a pioneering theorist of education, a prescient student of economics and international relations, and a key voice in contemporary philosophical debates-not to mention his fame as one of the seventeenth-century's most preeminent theologians and spiritualists and masters of French prose. As such, his work will be of interest to students and scholars in fields ranging from philosophy and political science to economics, education, literature, French history, and religion. (shrink)

Drawing on the classical concept of rhetorical _dispositio_, this study gives new interpretations of a number of literary texts of the French Renaissance. The often problematic ordering of these texts is studied from a variety of perspectives, historical, theoretical and cultural.

ArgumentThe argument of this paper is to situate The Interpretation of Dreams within an historical context. It is, therefore, impossible to believe Freud entirely when he staged himself in his letters to Fliess as a mere discoverer. In reality Freud also felt he belonged to a learned community of dream specialists, whom I call “dreaming scientists” and “scientific dreamers.” Instead of speaking, as Ellenberger does, in terms of influence, I will be offering as an example a portrait of Freud as (...) a reader of two French authors, Maury, and indirectly, Hervey de Saint-Denys. I will analyze how Freud staged himself as replacing Maury and dreaming sometimes like Hervey de Saint-Denys. My premise in this work is that we must forget Freud, in order to adventure into a learned dream culture peculiar to the nineteenth century. Only afterwards can we come back to Freud and place him in this context as a creative heir. (shrink)