In _My Job My Self,_ Gini plumbs a wide range of statistics, interviews with workers, surveys from employers and employees, and his own experiences and memories, to explore why we work, how our work affects us, and what we will become as a nation of workers. _My Job, My Self_ speaks to every employed person who has yet to understand the costs and challenges of a lifetime of labor.

In _My Job My Self,_ Gini plumbs a wide range of statistics, interviews with workers, surveys from employers and employees, and his own experiences and memories, to explore why we work, how our work affects us, and what we will become as a nation of workers. _My Job, My Self_ speaks to every employed person who has yet to understand the costs and challenges of a lifetime of labor.

In My Job My Self, Gini plumbs a wide range of statistics, interviews with workers, surveys from employers and employees, and his own experiences and memories, to explore why we work, how our work affects us, and what we will become as a nation of workers. My Job, My Self speaks to every employed person who has yet to understand the costs and challenges of a lifetime of labor.

Despite best efforts, every aspect of life is in a state of flux. To adapt is to survive. That is why we must learn to embrace the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence. The essence of impermanence is that reality is never stagnant but is dynamic throughout. The one‐by‐four blue brick with bow that was once associated with the roof of the LEGO Cinderella's Dream Carriage may now be unidentifiable. Skills evolve, experience accumulates, and every LEGO project raises the bar for the (...) next endeavor. When we dismantle it brick by brick, systematically examining each piece, we find that the self, like the Death Star, lacks any substantial permanent essence, that it is bereft of the sum of self. LEGO enthusiasts recognize the MOC (My Own Creation) as a LEGO creation that monks designed and built. Destruction of a mandala, like dismantling LEGO creations, demonstrates that beauty is only meant for this world for a short time. (shrink)

The work aims to demonstrate that at the heart of Eriugena’s approach to Christian theology there lies a profoundly philosophical interest in the necessity of a cardinal shift in the paradigms of thinking – namely, that from the metaphysical to the dialectical one, which wins him a reputation of the ‘Hegel of the ninth century,’ as scholars in Post-Hegelian Germany called him. The prime concern of Eriugena’s discourse is to prove that the actual adoption of the salvific truth of Christ’s (...) revelation about all humans’ Sonship to God directly depends on the way the truth of God’s Oneness is consistently thought of. It is exactly the dialectic of the universal and particular which allows Eriugena both to tackle the dichotomy between being and non-being and to proceed towards raising a question how the totality of God’s being can be approached so as to let him radically reconsider a predominantly metaphysical view of creation the theological reflection traditionally relies on. According to the dialectical understanding of unity that Eriugena does adhere to, the reality of creation cannot be thought of, and therefore known, otherwise than in the way of being inseparable from the universal Principle of all. This is the Principle abandoned by nothing, unless the mind corrupted by the senses thinks otherwise and, following the metaphysical pattern of dichotomy, improperly sets the creation and its Principle apart. Restoration of the mind to the proper rational motion of recta ratio freed, as Eriugena argues, from the dictates of senses therefore becomes the way of both the epistemological breakthrough to the infinite whole and practical return from the world of finite things to living in the divine reality of creation. The work’s argument is based on the assumption of close affinity between Eriugena’s discourse and that of his Islamic contemporaries, who developed their dialectical ideas within the Mu’tazilah tradition of a philosophically disciplined approach to the truth of God’s Oneness. In particular, al-Nazzam’s engagement with Parmenides’ Periphyseon and his resistance to the danger of a dualistic interpretation of its ontology seem to provoke Eriugena’s innovative approach to Christian theology with a view to suggesting a mode of overcoming dualism as the main obstacle on the way to the Truth revealed. This vision of the meaning of Eriugena’s undertaking allows us not only to better understand the novelty of his approach to Christian theology, but also reconsider some of the key points of his discourse that seem to have become a sort of commonplace in Eriugenian studies: 1. Unlike the prevalent opinion, not the forms of the division of Nature but the modes of interpreting being and non-being are to be understood to constitute the genuine subject-matter of each book of the Periphyseon and, hence, of the five parts of his system. 2. The fourfold division of Nature is to be interpreted not as a basic structure of the system offered by Eriugena, but as a means of introducing dialectic to the body of theology by refuting Augustine’s metaphysical vision of a hierarchical model of the universe and indicating the way of resolution of the cardinally theological contradiction – God does and does not create at the same time. 3. All this gives reason to disagree with a general tendency of associating Eriugena’s work with exploration of the division of God’s Nature and to reinterpret it as an immense anti-division project to be understood as an important turn in the history of Christian thought entirely focused on the truth of God’s Oneness and human life in conformity to it. *** I affirm that this thesis is entirely my own work and has not been submitted for examination in any form elsewhere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002) 39-59 [Access article in PDF] Response to My Critics Karen J. Warren Introduction In the Preface to my book, Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters, 1 I describe as both "exciting and taxing" the process of writing the book over more than one decade (Warren, x). It was exciting because I was contributing to the still (...) nascent field of ecofeminist philosophy; it was taxing because I often found it difficult to know what I wanted to say about ecofeminism as a philosophical position. The book that emerged is my attempt to say, in my own voice and in a language and style amenable to a reflective lay audience, what I understand ecofeminist philosophy to be and why I think it matters.Ecofeminist Philosophy is premised on the conviction that ecofeminist philosophy has liberating potential to generate insights and recommendations for any theory, practice, or policy that is feminist, ecofeminist, or environmental. The version of ecofeminist philosophy I defend focuses on a variety of contingent interconnections—historical, empirical, socioeconomic, conceptual, linguistic, symbolic and literary, spiritual and religious, epistemological, metaphysical, political, ethical, and theoretical—among the dominations of women, other subordinated humans, nonhuman animals, and nature. It locates the commonalities of mutually reinforcing "isms of domination" (e.g., sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, colonialism, [End Page 39] ethnocentrism, speciesism and "naturism," or the unjustified domination of nonhuman nature) in oppressive conceptual frameworks, institutions, and practices mediated and justified by a "logic of domination." Connecting these isms of domination to pressing contemporary feminist and environmental issues, I argue for a version of ecofeminist philosophy that provides both critical analyses of and creative solutions to the intersecting practices, policies, and structures of unjustified ("isms" of) domination.From my perspective, the book is bold and daring. It advocates positions (e.g., regarding spirituality) typically eschewed by feminist and ecofeminist philosophers. It takes positions (e.g., on moral vegetarianism) that are at odds with much mainstream ecofeminist literature on nonhuman animals (particularly ecofeminist animal rights literature). It defends unfamiliar or unpopular philosophical positions (e.g., on the moral considerability of nonhuman animals and nature, on the nature of social justice, on ethics as "care-sensitive," and on theory as theory-in-process). It provides an account of ecofeminist philosophy that is grounded in good science, though not in canonical ideals of objectivity and rationality. It uses cross-cultural empirical, historical, social, and cultural data to motivate and test the theoretical claims of ecofeminist philosophy. And it supports the need for and role of emotional intelligence (including the ability to care) in ethics, ethical-decision making, and the creation of life-affirming, nonviolent communities and social systems.Given the nature of the issues I address and the positions I advocate in Ecofeminist Philosophy, it is to be expected that critics will raise questions, offer criticisms, and encourage further reflection on my part about my conception and defense of ecofeminist philosophy. That is precisely what the three critics who have written commentaries on my book for this special Symposium of Ethics & the Environment—philosophers Chris Cuomo, Trish Glazebrook, and Jim Sterba—have done. It is a humbling and gratifying experience to have one's scholarship the focus of a special issue of a journal; it is even more so when the critics offer comments that are helpful and constructive. I am grateful for the time and philosophical energy all three critics have invested in writing their commentaries.In what follows, I comment on each essay separately. My hope is to provide each essay with the thoughtful attention it deserves, while offering clarifying remarks on what I attempted to do, and the version of ecofeminist philosophy I defend, in Ecofeminist Philosophy. [End Page 40] Trish Glazebrook's Essay It was a pleasure to read Professor Trish Glazebrook's essay. Glazebrook understands what I attempted to do in this book, while also providing useful, illuminating questions and suggestions for future work. I am grateful for her supportive sensitivity and scholarly attention to what I argued in Ecofeminist Philosophy and to ways I might improve my... (shrink)

An account of creation revealed to the author through automatic writing. "It came through a thought process that was not my own...."--C. L.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Arthur Efland's and Richard Siegesmund's Reviews of The Arts and the Creation of MindElliot W. Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of ArtWhen I was invited by the Editor of The Journal of Aesthetic Education to respond to two unidentified reviews of my latest book, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, I thought that I would encounter a bevy of negatively critical (...) comments, which would give me the opportunity to respond equally as critically to theirs. Fortunately — perhaps unfortunately — the reviews prepared by Arthur Efland and Richard Siegesmund are not in the least bit negative. This, of course, is a boon to the book's author, but a bane to the creation of lively debate. I am happy to say that though their purposes differ, both Efland and Siegesmund got it essentially right. Efland's comments put my work in a historical context, particularly the emergence of interest in cognition and, in general, in the higher mental processes as they were called during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It is true that interest in cognition was in the air at that time, in the field of philosophy, and in the fields of linguistics and psychology as well. My own work is a part of that particular zeitgeist in the twentieth century.I was not aware at the time that I was being influenced by such a broad movement, but, alas or alack, I was. In some ways, the writing that John Dewey did during the early and mid 1930s, particularly his work on art as rendered in Art as Experience, presaged the interest linguists, psychologists, and philosophers developed in the conditions of communication and its relationship to symbolic systems and thought.1 Dewey has been a major influence on my thinking as have Susanne Langer and later Nelson Goodman.2 [End Page 96] The historical perspective that Efland provides is a useful accounting of where ideas about cognition were and where they are now. I do not know whether I have extended the thinking that is being done on cognition, but I certainly have tried to provide a fulsome account of the connections between cognition and the educational mission of the arts, especially the visual arts. Efland's historical portrayal is a useful picture of the period and, I would say, the significance of this way of thinking for education.Siegesmund pushes farther than Efland, in my view, into the sources of human understanding, particularly the function of somatic knowledge in grasping, or better yet, framing meaning. His notion of what might perhaps best be called visual reasoning marries two concepts that are seldom related; the visual and the reasonable. Reason is often associated with matters of logic, and matters of logic pertain to connections between language in its formal sense and with the relationships among numbers within numerical systems. Qualitative relationships are not typically regarded as manifestations, even at their best, of rational forms of thinking. Emotional, yes. Rational, no. As readers of my works know, I reject that conception of the limits of human rationality and Siegesmund does as well. His focus on embodied knowledge, or what is sometimes called somatic knowledge, is a promising conception of the sources of choice and judgment. There is, after all, more known than what can be told, to paraphrase Michael Polayni.3What pleases me most about Siegesmund's account of my work is its receptivity to the students he teaches. The ultimate educational test of any piece of writing is the extent to which people see meaning in it and apparently, at least for the students that Siegesmund teaches, meaning for most is there. I am pleased. What I have always tried to do in my work is to avoid prescribing recipes or formulaic procedures because I do not believe either works very well when one is working with human beings, but rather to provide concepts through which the educational world can be viewed, practice reflected upon, options identified, and action taken. Apparently these aims are being met in some university classrooms in which The Arts and the Creation of Mind is being used. One caveat.Although it is true, as... (shrink)

*As mentioned in Peter Coy's NYT essay "When Being Good Is Just a Matter of Being Lucky" (2023) -/- ----- -/- How is the problem of free will related to the problem of moral luck? In this essay, I answer that question and outline a new solution to the paradox of moral luck, the source-paradox solution. This solution both explains why the paradox arises and why moral luck does not exist. To make my case, I highlight a few key connections (...) between the paradox of moral luck and two related problems, namely the problem of free will and determinism and the paradox of self-creation. Piecing together intuitions, arguments, and insights from recent work on each of these three problems, I argue that the type of control necessary for moral responsibility can only be had by someone who is a genuine source of his own actions, but the relevant notion of sourcehood admits no coherent characterization. If our commonsense view of moral responsibility is incoherent, it is unsurprising that our commitment to the existence of morally responsible agents commits us to some paradoxical things—e.g. to both the existence and impossibility of moral luck. For more information about this article, please write to gmail account: kristin.mickelson.42. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 90-92 [Access article in PDF] Christian Views on Ritual Practice The Ongoing Creation of Loving Community: Christian Ritual and Ethics Jay T. RockNational Council of Churches of ChristAt the center of Christian practice is an ethical imperative: "This is my commandment," Jesus says; "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). This principle of active love lies at the heart of Christian (...) living.The argument about who is to be included in the circle of those to be loved, much alive in Jesus' own day, continues unabated. Christians do not agree whether the "sisters and brothers" whom one is instructed to love in various passages of the Christian canon refers only to the family of those in the Church, or to the family of all humankind. But there is certainly agreement that simply professing love is not enough: the love God has given is fully embraced only in being done.Given such a central emphasis on reconciling, active love, it is not surprising to find Christian ritual almost always directly connected to, and fully completed in, ethical behavior in the world. Even in the important ways in which Christian rites serve to open the individual and community to receive God, to become aware of the presence of the Ultimate Reality in their lives, one finds implicit links to acting in love. Christian ritual is itself incarnational: it continuously creates and recreates a community into which it incorporates individuals, and it reactualizes moments of sacred history in a way that opens them to the active participation and concrete action of the people.Some comments on the nature and significance of commemoration in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, may illustrate what I mean. These are the central liturgical celebrations of Christianity, one recalling the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan River, the other, more complex, connected to the events of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem. They are commemorations of past historical events, the memory of which is preserved in the theology and practice of the community. But their celebration by the community makes these events existentially present, and their meanings real and accessible, in several ways.Through Baptism, individuals enter into the Jesus community, and participate in the life of Christ. The rite is understood to effect a permanent bond between the one baptized, and Jesus, in whose name she is baptized. The one being baptized is taken down into water, and there is understood to die and rise with Christ: the ritual "makes present again what God has done through Jesus" and brings the Christian into direct, existential relation to the "actual happening of salvation in Christ." 1 Through this connection, the person undergoes a transition from the ways of "death" and "darkness" into the way of "light."The Eucharistic celebration, similarly, provides believers a way of entering into the events of Jesus' death and resurrection. In it, Christians both take part in these [End Page 90] acts of redemption--his death and rising again--and also take into themselves the body and blood of Jesus. The sacrament is a central way in which Christians partake of/take part in the Body of Christ. The rite commemorates a past event, but more importantly, it brings to present life the person of Christ, and allows active participation in the ongoing, communal expression of God's self-giving in Christ.In these rituals, a particular kind of historical memory is at work: that of anamnesis, which the Lutheran liturgist Frank Senn suggests might be best approximated in English as "reactualization." 2 This kind of remembering involves not simply a return to past events, but the placing of the past into the present situation. Ethicist John Pawlikowski reminds us that this concept has roots in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the biblical sense of zakar: just as it is only in being remembered by God that we continue in existence, remembering in this sense "brings the past as close as possible so that it becomes... (shrink)

If I had read Ted Nannicelli’s (2020) thoughtful and wide-ranging book before writing my own, I would not have written the same book that I did, and my book almost certainly would have been better for it. Ted Nannicelli’s 2020 book has many keen insights, and I learnt much from reading it.There is a great deal of overlap in our philosophical interests as well as in our views. Our books were written at the same time—at least, our writing times overlapped (...) significantly—and by the time Nannicelli's was published, mine was already finalized, and it was too late for me to incorporate his insights into my own book. So I welcome the opportunity, however belated, to think carefully about Nannicelli’s ideas in conversation with my own.The first and most important thing to emphasize is my agreement with Nannicelli on many significant matters. Both Nannicelli and I are critical of the overwhelming focus in the ethical criticism of art on what Nannicelli calls ‘perspectivism’, the view that works of art should be judged morally on the basis of the perspective they take up (or attitude they prescribe, or similar). We are also both sceptical about the strength of the arguments concerning the moral-cognitive benefits of art. Both of us think that we need a more expansive toolkit for thinking about art and morality, including attention to the circumstances under which an artwork is produced. (The latter is something that I discuss only briefly, but Nannicelli is right that it is deserving of more careful attention.) Both of us are neutral about specific normative ethical theories. Nannicelli and I are both worried about the problem of relativism and how that affects how we think about moral judgements of artworks. And I think Nannicelli shares my scepticism about the search for easy answers to hard moral questions about the value of art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Louis Agassiz and the Platonist Story of Creation at Harvard, 1795-1846David K. NartonisIn 1846, naturalist Louis Agassiz took Harvard College by storm with his idealist approach to nature. In his initial lectures, repeated in New York the following year, Agassiz announced, "We have that within ourselves which assures us of participation in the Divine Nature and it is a particular characteristic of man to be able to rise (...) in that way above material Nature, and to understand intellectual existences." He then made it clear that by intellectual existences he meant a divine plan of creation. "What naturalists intend when they speak of what they call 'types'... may be easily understood by comparison. We all know that architects construct our dwellings according to plans conceived by them before the erection of the edifice."1 There is no doubt that Agassiz valued the careful collection of observational data. "It has only been step by step that man has acquired an insight into this plan."2 But his empiricism, if that is the right term, was entirely subordinate to apprehension of divine ideas, which alone deserved to be called science. In one recent account, The Metaphysical Club, which contains an excellent discussion of Agassiz's American career, author Louis Menand accurately describes this dual emphasis on observation and intuition. But Menand leaves unstated the problem of [End Page 437] Agassiz's welcome at Harvard, attributing his instant popularity to force of character.3A fuller explanation of Agassiz's welcome is to be found in the Scottish textbooks that dominated the Harvard philosophy curriculum prior to his arrival.4 Like Agassiz, textbook authors Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Brown recognized observation and intuition as twin sources of human knowledge. According to them, we observe our own moral tendencies and interpret them in the light of intuited ethical principles that even God must obey. Similarly, we observe nature and interpret its workings with the aid of intuited principles of common sense.5 There is no doubt that this dual emphasis on observation and intuition was entirely consistent with Agassiz's idealist biology. But his definition of species and genera as intellectual existences in the divine mind was not to be found in the official Scottish texts. In fact, Dugald Stewart, who governed the philosophy curriculum after 1820, insisted that there are "no existences in nature corresponding to general terms, and the objects of our attention in all our general speculations are not ideas but words."6 This was "long misunderstood by philosophers, who imagined that a generic word expresses an actual existence distinct from the individuals of which the genus is composed."7 Similarly, Thomas Brown lamented, "One fundamental error... as long as it retained its hold of the understanding, must have rendered all its energies ineffectual, by wasting them in search of objects, which had no real existence... I allude to... the various orders of universals."8 In this one respect, Stewart and Brown were in agreement with Alexander Pope when he counseled his many American readers "presume not God to scan" and ridiculed those who would "soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere."9But Harvard students and faculty were also reading books that promoted the intellectual existences that Agassiz saw behind nature and the Scots did [End Page 438] not. Chief among these books were Plato's Works (ca. 360 BCE), Philo's De Opificio Mundi (20 BCE to 50 CE), Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the World (1678), and John Norris's An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intellectual World (1701–04). These combined with such widely popular literature as John Milton's Paradise Lost (1668) and the prose works of Samuel Coleridge to form a kind of unofficial curriculum that ultimately made Agassiz's idealist view of nature especially welcome at Harvard.10 Modest at first, Harvard interest in intellectual existences bloomed with the appearance of books by Romantic writers on campus. In order to illustrate this long development, I will bolster my explanation with data from Harvard College library borrowing records—handwritten lists of the books borrowed by each library user during a one- or two-year period... (shrink)

Ongoing research on making “human-animal chimeras” or “animals containing human material” to solve the shortage of organs available for transplantation has raised many ethical issues regarding the creation and utilization of such constructs, including cultural views regarding the status of those creations. A pilot study was conducted to explore Japanese public attitudes toward human-animal chimeras or ACHM. The February 2012 study consisted of focus group interviews with citizens from the Greater Tokyo Area, aged between 20 and 54. The 24 (...) participants were divided into four groups. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed and participants’ attitudes categorized. Five categories of participant attitudes were identified: resistance to the unnatural, concerns about animal welfare, concerns about controlling human-animal chimeras, concerns about the possible birth of intermediate entities, and resistance to creating and utilizing animals containing my material or my child’s material. Our FGI results showed a broader and greater variety of public concerns than those reported in previous studies. While researchers have tried to establish new methods to avoid creating intermediate entities, our participants expressed concerns about not only intermediate entities but also animals containing their own material or their child’s material. Based upon their responses in the interviews, we are introducing a new ethical concern: “animals containing my material/my child’s material.”. (shrink)

The companion volume to Arnold Come's Kierkegaard as Humanist, Kierkegaard as Theologian is an exploration of Søren Kierkegaard's deliberately Christian writings, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1846) to For Self-Examination (1851). In his later writings Kierkegaard sought to "get further forward in the direction of discovering the Christianity of the New Testament" to resolve his own spiritual crisis. His struggle to understand how authentic theologizing relates to the spiritual struggles of personal faith led him to a discussion of the (...) three basic foci of his theologizing: the self as gift, that is, a creation "out of nothing" from God; the self as failure, which brings on a state of despair; and the self redeemed by God's love and healing compassion. Come probes some of the problematic aspects of Kierkegaard's theology. He addresses the question of whether God's high intentions and demands for human achievement of selfhood and spirituality justify the unspeakable sufferings entailed in human failures to fulfil those demands. He also explores the puzzling relation between Kierkegaard's seeming assignment of exclusivity to the Christian understanding and experiences of both sin and salvation as well as his assumption of the capacity of humans to recognize the need to turn to the eternal that is immanent in every human consciousness - so-called Religiousness A. (shrink)

Existing scientific concepts of group or shared or collective emotion fail to appreciate several elements of collectivity in such emotions. Moreover, the idea of shared emotions is threatened by the individualism of emotions that comes in three forms: ontological, epistemological, and physical. The problem is whether or not we can provide a plausible account of ?straightforwardly shared? emotions without compromising our intuitions about the individualism of emotions. I discuss two philosophical accounts of shared emotions that explain the collectivity of emotions (...) in terms of their intentional structure: Margaret Gilbert's plural subject account, and Hans Bernhard Schmid's phenomenological account. I argue that Gilbert's view fails because it relegates affective experience into a contingent role in emotions and because a joint commitment to feel amounts to the creation of a feeling rule rather than to an emotion. The problems with Schmid's view are twofold: first, a phenomenological fusion of feelings is not necessary for shared emotions and second, Schmid is not sensitive enough to different forms of shared concerns. I then outline my own typology that distinguishes between weakly, moderately, and strongly shared emotions on the basis of the participants? shared concerns of different degree of collectivity, on the one hand, and the synchronization of their emotional responses, on the other hand. All kind of shared emotions in my typology are consistent with the individualism of emotions, while the question about ?straightforward sharing? is argued to be of secondary importance. (shrink)

In this essay I refer to eros as the force that plays on our bodies and connects us to the larger community of life, an embodied form of love that charges the will towards well-being. Analyzing the ways that eros can be engaged and expressed in the "commons" as a life sustaining force, I look to current, on-the-ground work being done in Detroit, MI where a grassroots network of artists, community-builders, educators and neighborhood folk are revitalizing their city. Linking this (...) work and the love I experienced with them to childhood experiences in my own homeplace in northern New York State, I argue for the development of eco-ethical consciousness within an erotic "poetics of place" where the natural world speaks to us within our interpretive, expressive efforts. Finally, in an explication of education as those generative relations that are specifically oriented towards well-being, I look to the relation among eros, language and the creation of the commons as a critical educational endeavor. If we are to stem the tide of ecological destruction now upon us, we will need educators in public schools who recognize and are able to create classroom practices that encourage an "eco-erosic love" and thus inspire students who can protect the fragile relationship of their human communities to the ecosystems upon which we depend. (shrink)

In this article, I use the example of the novel Micro, authored by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, to tease out the relationships between an author and his work and with other authors of that work. The case presents a complication for a number of contemporary views on authorship and co-authorship, which suggest that Crichton is either not an author of the novel or an author but not a co-author—both, I suggest, are counterintuitive views. After working through the leading views (...) on the topic, I present my own view of authorship, co-authorship, and multiple authorship, centrally resting on issues of power, responsibility, and creation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward Mindful Music Education:A Response To Bennett ReimerSandra L. StaufferIn her book Composing a Life, Mary Catherine Bateson reminds us to acknowledge our antecedents—those who have gone before in whatever way or whatever path.1 I believe we should also acknowledge our co-conspirators—those who have listened to us and wrestled with our ideas. Following Bateson, I wish to recognize the contributions of my teachers and my colleagues, particularly the members (...) of the doctoral seminar at Arizona State University. I am grateful for your contributions to the life of my mind and the words of this morning. For the record, I also want to say that Bennett Reimer is both antecedent and co-conspirator for everyone in this room, and we are indebted to him."The first task of philosophy involves learning to ask a good question," says Walter Feinberg in his essay on the philosophical scholar.2 Reimer asks us, "Who is philosophy of music education for?"—a provocative question indeed. He also gives us an answer: K-12 students.I agree, but not really. How can that be? Imagine this. A music teacher I know, Stephanie, was engaged with some first-grade children in singing songs and moving and reading rhythms. She turned to write on the white board. When she turned back to the children, one boy, Alex, was standing, perfectly still, on his head. What happened next? I will tell you in few minutes. Reimer says, "Philosophical issues are not disconnected to or incidental to musical experience. [End Page 135] They are foundational for musical experience, because one's values, beliefs, desires, preferences, and so forth, directly affect how one engages with music and what one gets from doing it." Abridging those two sentences at my own peril, Reimer appears to be saying that philosophical issues are foundational to musical experience.That idea works for me only if I am standing, figuratively and metaphorically, not literally, on my head. It seems to me that experience is the foundation of philosophy or, put another way, that one's philosophy derives from one's experiences; the richer the experiences, the richer the philosophy. A philosophy based on limited or weak experience is a limited or weak philosophy. This, however, is only surface-level logic for a deeper epistemological question—where does one's philosophy come from? If I take the Deweyan perspective that philosophy derives from experience, then surely I am obligated, in this forum, to define my terms—particularly "experience." It would be easy to say that experience means making music and listening to music, and surely it does. By experience, however, I mean not only these actions—the doing of music—but also thinking, or what Ellen Langer calls mindfulness.3 Langer describes mindful learning as having three characteristics: "the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective."4 I like how Robert Duke articulates the same idea: "Teach things that are intellectually interesting and functionally valuable."5 Engage students not just in doing, but also in thinking—in mindful learning. Rich experience makes for rich philosophy. If we are talking about music education at all levels that is not only participatory, but also mindful, then I am all for it.Reimer asks a second question: how are we to accomplish the teaching of philosophy to K-12 students? I want to know what we are trying to accomplish. Are we trying to teach the content of philosophy or are we trying to help students develop their own abilities to think about their experiences as musicians, whether as listeners or as music makers, in whatever contexts they find themselves? The former seems to be a reification of philosophy in which I am not eager to engage most K-12 students. I hope we are aiming for the latter. If so, then our task is to provide rich and mindful experiences in every music setting. Our task is to model the disposition of a philosopher—one who asks questions, is curious, and is engaged in the life of the mind.This seems so obvious. Why aren't we doing it already? There... (shrink)

The dissertation is composed of five papers, each of which either deals with a topic in contemporary metaphysics or uses concepts central to contemporary metaphysics as part of the machinery of its argument. Three papers deal with the problem of personal identity. In Hume on Identity: A Defense I argue that Hume, in maintaining that we are always mistaken in ascribing identity to persons, is presenting a fundamental metaphysical problem about identity through change, not trying to analyze the way we (...) talk about change as his contemporary critics charge. I explicate Hume's argument for this alarming conclusion and show it is far more powerful than has been realized. In Parfit on Identity, I criticize recent attempts to reduce persons to series of psychophysical states or stages. I outline a Realist account of persons and argue that identity is what matters in survival. In Memories, Brains, and Identity, I attack John Locke's contention that present identity is a function of present experience. I use counter-instances derived from the literature on split-brains to show that my present experience could have belonged to someone else. A consequence is that the memory criterion of personal identity is essentially incomplete. ;Examples from the literature on personal identity involving fissioning are central to Abortion and The Control of Human Bodies in which I argue that an organism with a strong right to life has a right to the continued use of the biological equipment, the use of which it acquires through the species-typical process of its own creation. A consequence is that if a fetus is a person, he has the right to the continued use of the mother's womb whether she has given it to him or not. ;The papers on Locke and Parfit rely upon the apparatus of possible worlds, which is central to Dreaming and Certainty. If I believe that I am in a world in which I have conclusive evidence that I am awake, and there is a possible world in which I have the same belief and it is false, can I know which is actual on the basis of the evidence I believe is conclusive? I argue that being wide-awake is a self-recognizing state: when I'm not in it I can mistakenly believe that I am in it, but when my belief is true, I know it. I argue that this enables me to recognize that I am not dreaming. (shrink)

Precollege philosophy programs provide young people with alternative spaces to ask questions and develop critical perspectives on their experiences, but neoliberal school management practices make the creation of these spaces increasingly difficult. Relying on my own experience as an instructor of a community-engaged course that focuses on precollege philosophy, I investigate how college and university professors and students can create philosophical learning opportunities for high school students without participating in the culture of volunteerism demanded by neoliberal logic. I argue (...) that the work my university students perform in the community-engaged course is a win-win that undermines neoliberalism’s assault on education by providing high school students with a valuable opportunity while helping my students achieve important skills. (shrink)

Terra incognita: the space is vibrant with reality and yet, as to its essentials, it eludes, like a hypothesis, all the modes of knowledge that I have at my disposal, and it appears that it ought to remain unaffected by every research procedure, whether intuitive or discursive, indirect or direct, whatever its process of creation, through experience, conscience or reasoning. Moreover, I have to speak without the protection of any critical distance, since the question that has been put to (...) me concerns the status of the unknowable in my own work. This means that we are talking about a testimony that already implies the transgression of several taboos. During a radio interview, Matisse once explained: “I said to my young students: Would you like to paint? First of all, you will have to cut off your tongue, because this decision deprives you of the right to express yourselves in any other way than with brushes.” If what the painter wants to say could be expressed in words, he would be a novelist, a poet, or a philosopher rather than a painter. Further, I believe that there is an antinomy today—and perhaps even a kind of open conflict, a permanent tension—between painting and writing. It is partly this conflict on which my research is based. Everything that follows should therefore be taken with caution. These are sketches and random ideas; extracts from reflections haphazardly jotted down during my work, arranged in some order only for the purposes of this article. (shrink)

This paper explores a paradox constitutive of transformation discourse in South Africa: the transformation of a fragmented society presupposes the existence of a collective Will ; but the creation of a collective will can only result from a process of transformation. While politicians and higher education administrators debate how best to conceive and implement transformation, committed lecturers have to find ways of teaching the reality of that ideal full knowing that it is in part through teaching that this ideal (...) is achieved. The 2010 HE Summit (HES) called on all universities to ‘purposefully address the issue of social cohesion as part of their transformation agenda’ (2010:20). In this paper the learning encounter is posited as the paradoxical site es reproductive of that subjectivity. This suggests a degree of ‘bootstrapping’ in the sense that the learning encounter necessarily posits a historical Subject that is paradoxically both cause and effect of transformation. This is an interpretative paper that reflects on what it means to practise philosophy in such a context. Taking Readings’s The University in Ruins (1996) as point of departure it starts with a general, historical reflection on the telos of higher education which is then contextualised with reference to the post-colonial university. Towards the end I briefly consider aspects of my own philosophy teaching praxis in light of that theoretical frame. I engage the ‘bootstrapping’ paradox by suggesting that teaching (as) transformation comprises four moments: making students aware of 1) the fact that they belong to specific socio-epistemic communities; 2) that this sense of community is an historical construct which 3) implies limitations on the possibility of knowing and being that can 4) only be questioned through an encounter with what is other to that socio-epistemic community. In short, it is argued that in a university context the possibility of ‘social cohesion’ is first and foremost a confrontation with the conditions for the possibility of inter-subjective learning. (shrink)

In a final, short summary of his life and works, David Hume wrote My Own Life as he suffered from gastrointestinal issues that ultimately killed him. Despite his bleak prognosis, Hume remains lighthearted and inspirational throughout. He discusses his life growing up, his family relationships, and his desire to constantly improve his works and his reputation as an author. He confesses, "I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have... never suffered a moment's abatement (...) of my spirits; insomuch that were I to name the period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period." This short biography ends with a series of letters from Hume's close friend and fellow author Adam Smith to their publisher William Strahan, recounting Hume's death and giving a stirring eulogy in honor of their friend. (shrink)

I want in these brief Notes to offer some critical observations on a text I admire very much. It appeared only after I had finally finished writing a work of my own, entitled Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. This work focuses on Hegel’s assessments, interpretations, and transformations in Phenomenology of Spirit and writings that preceded it, of the basic religious narrative, from creation to last judgment, that Christian writers have avowed but variously interpreted since New (...) Testament times. So I will be discussing Hegel’s Ladder from a point of view formed in my long labors on that work, and with its focus in mind. I will be brief and as clear as I am able to be, painting with a broad brush without documentation, because my views have been documented in some detail in my book. Judging, in fact, from the fair-minded review of the book by Daniel Shannon that appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of the Owl, I may have been so detailed as to have lost the forest in the trees: all the more reason to keep things uncluttered here, so as to join a few issues. Not included in issues I consider worth discussing, however, are such questions as whether Hegel was a Christian, or a Christian apologist, or an atheist, or whether any sort of Christian might be eligible for Professor Harris’s Republic of the Learned. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hebdomads: Boethius Meets the Neopythagoreans1Sarah Pessin1the thesis of this article is three-fold. First, I suggest, uncontroversially, that Boethius was in many ways influenced by Neopythagorean ideas. Second, I recommend that in light of our appreciation of his Neopythagorean inclinations in at least some of his writings, we understand his esoteric reference to the “hebdomads”—at the outset of his treatise often called by that name—as a reference to something Neopythagorean. (...) This I suggest in light of the fact that, as I will discuss, the “hebdomad” plays an important role within the Neopythagorean literature of Nicomachus of Gerasa, an author with whose writings Boethius was intimately familiar. Lastly, I suggest—following Dillon’s analysis of the Triad and the Hebdomad within Nicomachus’ works—an interpretation of the ‘hebdomad’ within the Neopythagorean corpus which, if correct, would make appropriate Boethius’ reference to it at the outset of a treatise on the nature of God and creation.2In his introductory remarks to the Quomodo Substantiae,2 a short but difficult theological treatise on the nature of goodness and its relation to being (esse), Boethius gives his reader fair warning:... tu ne sis obscuritatibus brevitatis adversus, quae cum sint arcani fida custodia turn id habent commodi, quod cum his solis qui digni sunt conloquuntur. [End Page 29]... do not you take objection to obscurities consequent on brevity, which are the sure treasure-house of secret doctrine and have the advantage that they speak only with those who are worthy.3While itself somewhat obscure, this statement seems to suggest that a clear explication of the treatise would involve the clarification of certain notions which Boethius chooses not to clarify, and hence, the uninitiated reader will be met with obscurity.4 Consider this suggested reading especially in light of what immediately follows: After listing nine brief axioms, we are told that: “These preliminaries are enough then for our purpose. The intelligent interpreter of the discussion will supply the arguments appropriate to each point.”5 What is most important to note in support of the claim that Boethius is intentionally obscuring the content of the work which follows, is that he never refers to these obscure axioms again—not in way of explaining them, or even in way of helping the reader use them to elucidate the subject matter which follows, (which is apparently what they are capable of doing). Furthermore, this lack of explanation and expansion on his part appears—as evidenced in the above quote—to be in line with his intended purposes in this treatise. It seems that the “intelligent interpreter” to whom he refers is the reader who is knowledge-able of certain ideas which Boethius prefers not to elaborate upon in this treatise, and who should at least in theory therefore be able to arrive at a full understanding of the arguments which follow.6The veil of obscurity which we seem to meet in the terse nature of the content of the treatise itself, then, also seems apparent in Boethius’ esoteric reference to the “hebdomads” at the outset of the treatise:You ask me to state and explain somewhat more clearly that obscure question in my Hebdomads concerning the manner in which substances are good in virtue of existence without being substantial goods. You urge that this demonstration is necessary because the method of this kind of treatise is not clear to all... But I think over my Hebdomads with myself, and I keep my speculations in my own memory rather than share them with any of those pert and frivolous persons who will not tolerate an argument unless it [End Page 30] is made amusing.7 Wherefore do not you take objection to obscurities stemming from brevity... 8Boethius’ reference to his “hebdomads” here is perplexing.Looking to the Greek word for ‘seven,’ (‘hepta’), it has been suggested that these ‘hebdomads,’ (lit., ‘groups of seven,’ or simply ‘sevens’), might simply refer to a weekly meeting group (i.e., a ‘seminar’), which Boethius attended, and which provided him the impetus to compose the treatise in question. Others suggest that this ‘group of sevens’ refers to the list of axioms which follows (which some... (shrink)

“Why did God create the World?” is one of the traditional questions of theology. In the twentieth century this question was rephrased in a secularized manner as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” While creation - at least in its traditional, temporal, sense - has little place in Spinoza’s system, a variant of the same questions puts Spinoza’s system under significant pressure. According to Spinoza, God, or the substance, has infinitely many modes. This infinity of modes follow from (...) the essence of God. If we ask: “Why must God have modes?,” we seem to be trapped in a real catch. On the one hand, Spinoza’s commitment to thoroughgoing rationalism demands that there must be a reason for the existence of the radical plurality of modes. On the other hand, the asymmetric dependence of modes on the substance seems to imply that the substance does not need the modes, and that it can exist without the modes. But if the substance does not need the modes, then why are there modes at all? Furthermore, Spinoza cannot explain the existence of modes as an arbitrary act of grace on God’s side since Spinoza’s God does not act arbitrarily. Surprisingly, this problem has hardly been addressed in the existing literature on Spinoza’s metaphysics, and it is my primary aim here to draw attention to this problem. In the first part of the paper I will present and explain the problem of justifying the existence of infinite plurality modes in Spinoza’s system. In the second part of the paper I consider the radical solution to the problem according to which modes do not really exist, and show that this solution must be rejected upon consideration. In the third and final part of the paper I will suggest my own solution according to which the essence of God is active and it is this feature of God’s essence which requires the flow of modes from God’s essence. I also suggest that Spinoza considered radical infinity and radical unity to be roughly the same, and that the absolute infinity of what follow from God’s essence is grounded in the absolute infinity of God’s essence itself. (shrink)

An excerpt from CHAPTER I. THE FORCES OF NATURE. You have asked me to give you an account of the opinions really held by some of those authors whose views you have seen caricatured in Punch and censured in religious periodicals. The subjects on which you specially questioned me were the speculations of Mr. Darwin, and the real or pretended discoveries of mesmerists, spiritualists, homoeopathists, and phrenologists. But a little reflection will, I think, convince you, that if I pretended to (...) give you, in a few conversations, the result of the lifelong labours of a succession of earnest and clever men, I could in reality only succeed in puzzling you, and in proving my own unfitness to act as the interpreter of any serious thinker whatever. It will be, I think, more to the purpose if I endeavour to put into your hands an end of the golden thread which, as it seems to me, binds all science together, giving us a clue through its intricate mazes, bridging over its awful chasms, and enabling us to walk fearlessly, even where we can see no light. If you like it, I will afterwards try to tell you what I believe to be the true meaning of some of the real or supposed revelations of modern investigation : but my main object will be to show you how you may, throughout your studies, make facts speak for themselves, and get help from books instead of being confused by them. In the first chapter of the Bible we read that the earth was originally without form and void. Next it is said that the "Spirit of God" moved upon the face of the waters. And throughout the Old Testament it is easy to see that the writers attributed the settling down of things in general, the ordering of the heavens, the coming up of dry land from under the sea, the clearing away of mists and vapours, and the production of life upon the earth, to the action of this Spirit (or Word) of God upon the chaos of matter. And not only so, but they evidently believed this living Word or Spirit to be continually present throughout creation, at every rising of sun or moon or star, in all cosmical changes, at every birth of man or beast, at every recovery of man or beast from sickness, in all growth, in all life, in all enjoyment; and to be at each moment the indispensable preserver of every living thing from decay.... (shrink)

I want in these brief Notes to offer some critical observations on a text I admire very much. It appeared only after I had finally finished writing a work of my own, entitled Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. This work focuses on Hegel’s assessments, interpretations, and transformations in Phenomenology of Spirit and writings that preceded it, of the basic religious narrative, from creation to last judgment, that Christian writers have avowed but variously interpreted since New (...) Testament times. So I will be discussing Hegel’s Ladder from a point of view formed in my long labors on that work, and with its focus in mind. I will be brief and as clear as I am able to be, painting with a broad brush without documentation, because my views have been documented in some detail in my book. Judging, in fact, from the fair-minded review of the book by Daniel Shannon that appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of the Owl, I may have been so detailed as to have lost the forest in the trees: all the more reason to keep things uncluttered here, so as to join a few issues. Not included in issues I consider worth discussing, however, are such questions as whether Hegel was a Christian, or a Christian apologist, or an atheist, or whether any sort of Christian might be eligible for Professor Harris’s Republic of the Learned. (shrink)

The siren call of easy solutions to socio-agricultural problems is often studied as a reflection of anthropocentric ideologies espousing faith in human ingenuity to overcome, often with technological innovations, any hurdles thrown at us. This theme has been reflected especially strongly in my own research on pesticide resistance, with farmers continually referring to the necessity of an ‘easy button’ or ‘silver bullet’ (usually in the form of a new chemical herbicide) that will solve the extremely complex and multi-dimensional problem of (...) resistance. Drawing on my own research experiences, I examine parallels between this trend and Dr. David Connor’s 2022 Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society presidential address, in which he emphasized the need to move from mono-disciplinary research with the target of explicit knowledge to transdisciplinary research engaged in co-creation of knowledge. Just as farmers have sought the ease and rewards of an easy button, so academics have often focused on simplistic, explicit knowledge generation to the exclusion of messy, complex approaches to real world problems. However, just as with farmers, academics as individuals are not necessarily to blame; there are structures and contextual factors constraining available choices, as well as a growing reflexive consideration of what our priorities should be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 21-32 [Access article in PDF] Re-Creating Christian Community:A Response to Rita M. Gross Donald W. Mitchell Purdue University In Rita M. Gross's well-written, insightful, and provocative paper entitled "Some Reflections about Community and Survival," Rita says: "I am challenging my Christian colleagues to consider what role Western religious concepts about the individual may have played in getting us into the current hyper-individualism. I also am (...) asking whether the Buddhist concept of interdependence might be very useful in providing tools with which to think about why this hyper-individualism cannot survive."In terms of Rita's challenge, one could make the generalization that the notion of the individual soul being saved or on a journey to union with God has certainly played an important role in Christianity. At the extreme in this regard, Thomas à Kempis even advised solitude and the actual avoidance of other people, seen by him to be distractions to the spiritual life. However, most Christians would see this advice as an unhealthy extreme, agreeing with Rita that solitude has a "valued role...in the context of social life, not a substitute for it" (11). It is much more common for Christians to see themselves as parts of the mystical body of Christ, and to believe that their authentic selfhood and discipleship are found in the context of fellowship and community life in the church.In what follows here, I will try to show how the notions of selfhood and discipleship are being defined in a particular re-creation of Christian community, which includes persons of other faiths. I have been asked to make my response from the perspective of my own Christian community, the Focolare, which focuses on the kinds of social, economic, and environmental issues that we have been discussing for the past three years. In so doing, I will also try to show how the Focolare's trinitarian vision of God, community, and the cosmos is a possible answer to the above-quoted question Rita asks about how interdependence might be an antidote to hyper-individualism. Along the way, I will raise issues that relate to other points Rita makes in her paper, and then address her conclusions at the end of my paper. Seeds of a New Christian Community The Focolare began duringWorld War II with a small group of young women, whose ages ranged from fifteen to twenty-five, living in the city of Trent, Italy. 1 At the center [End Page 21] of the group was Chiara Lubich, who was only twenty-three at the time. In May of 1944 Lubich's home was destroyed by bombs, and her family decided to leave the city. Lubich made the difficult decision to remain with her companions in Trent, where they would meet in the bomb shelters as often as eleven times each day. They would take with them to the shelters only the Bible, which they searched for guidance in that difficult situation. What they came to understand in those hours together and then put into practice became the basis for re-creating a Christian community, one that is sensitive to the social, political, and economic conditions that had produced the war in which they were caught.A foundational discovery for these young women was a collective and yet very personal experience, in the midst of the death and destruction of the war, that "God is Love" (I John 4:8). Their contemplation of the First Letter of John, as well as other parts of the Scripture, strengthened not only their belief in the existence of God, when many were doubting God's existence, but also their faith in the love of God for each one of them.Wanting to respond to this experience of God's love, they again found in Scripture that God does not seek just a response of individual prayerful sentiment or personal piety, but a response that includes doing God's will: "It is not those who say to me, 'Lord, Lord,' who will enter the kingdom of heaven... (shrink)

The purpose of this short article is to argue that it is both possible and theologically wise to construct Christian social ethics within the framework of belief in the eschatological continuity between present and future creation. This is a response to Stephen Williams' article, but is also a development of my own line of thought.1 Williams calls into question the general position that a this-wordly eschatology is the best or even an adequate framework for thinking about Christian social responsibility. (...) I will respond in five short steps. First, I will say why one should construct Christian social ethics within an eschatological framework. Second, I will argue in favour of eschatological transformation instead of annihilation of the creation. Third, I shall draw some implications for social ethics from the belief in eschatological transformation. Fourth, I will discuss the plausibility of believing in the integration of the results of human work into God's new creation. Finally, I will reflect on the bearing of the fact and form of eschatological transformation on Christian cultural, social and ecological involvement. (shrink)

Among the many scholarly surveys of historical and contemporary approaches to Christian eschatology, few treat the relation between eschatology and scientific cosmology. It is the purpose of this essay to do so. I begin with a brief summary of the importance of eschatology to contemporary Christian theology. Next, an overview is given of scientific cosmology, its earlier scenarios for the cosmic far future of “freeze or fry,” and, more recently the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These (...) predictions severely challenge those versions of Christian eschatology that are based on the bodily resurrection of Jesus and, by analogy, the transformation of the universe into the new creation. Several recent approaches to this challenge are outlined, including those of Denis Edwards, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Ted Peters, John Polkinghorne, and my own. I conclude with some suggestions for future research in both theology and science. (shrink)

The essay aims to show how business ethics—understood as a three-level approach—can strengthen the social cohesion of a society, which is jeopardized today in many ways. In the first part, the purpose of business and the economy is explained as the creation of wealth defined as a combination of private and public wealth that includes natural, economic, human, and social capital. Special emphasis is placed on the implications of the creation of public wealth which requires institutions other than (...) the market and motivations other than self-regarding ones. In the second part, the question of what holds a society together is discussed through different approaches: enlightened self-interest, a new game-theoretical approach, and the concept of the common good advanced by Catholic Social Teaching, followed by my own proposal. The third part presents several perspectives for business ethics to strengthen social cohesion of a society by focusing on the purpose of business and the economy to create natural, economic, human, and social capital; by advancing public goods that stand the test of ethical scrutiny; and by securing human rights conceptualized as public goods. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LettersMaxwell J. Mehlman, Susan R. Massey, Ronald M. Green, and Fred RosnerPhysicians and the Allocation of Scarce ResourcesMadam: We read with interest Dr. Pellegrino's commentary on our article in the December 1994 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, and commend him for pointing out so well the different ways that law and ethics approach the issue of physician allocation of scarce resources.We wish to make one clarification. (...) Dr. Pellegrino states that we propose that fiduciary duties be abolished. Quite the contrary, our position is that fiduciary obligations are essential to the maintenance of trust—which we believe to be an efficient as well as an ethical element of the patient-provider relationship. If fiduciary duties are undercut, as we pointed out they are by the Oregon Medicaid legislation, then some other method of promoting trust must be established, and, as we point out in the article, it is difficult to identify what that method could be.Maxwell J. MehlmanandSusan R. MasseyThe Law Medicine CenterArter & HaddenCase Western Reserve UniversityCleveland, OHSchool of LawCleveland, OHReport of the Human Embryo Research PanelMadam: In the December 1994 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I reported on the controversy surrounding the work of the NIH Human Embryo Research Panel and the conclusions reached in its report, which was formally presented to NIH Director Harold Varmus on September 27, 1994. At that time, the report was to be reviewed by the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) until its next meeting in early December. I am writing to update your readers on the fate of the Panel's report.On the morning of December 2, 1994, following a previous afternoon of animated discussion, the ACD unanimously accepted the Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel. Panel members and members of the NIH staff who were present and had worked for nearly a year on the Report were gratified by this vote of confidence and by the strong support of NIH Director Harold Varmus.We had little time to enjoy this success. Within a matter of hours, the White House issued a press release in which President Clinton thanked the committee for its work and then, in a remark overruling one of the key recommendations in our report, stated: "I do not believe that federal funds should be used to support the creation of human embryos for research purposes, and I have directed that NIH not allocate any resources for such research." [End Page 83]As a Panel member and active participant in that day's events, my initial response was one of shock. I was particularly distressed that the President and his advisors chose a moment so late in the process to make their views known. Why had we worked for months, I asked, without a word of concern from the White House? Although Panel members were guided primarily by our perceptions of the ethical and scientific issues involved, some were close to the political realities of Washington and would have introduced these concerns into the Panel's deliberations.Within a matter of days, my own sense of outrage had diminished. First of all, it was clear that whatever the personal sources of the President's objections to the Panel's recommendations, this high level political intervention was inevitable. Less than a month before, on November 8, with the election of a majority House and Senate, the political environment for embryo research had changed dramatically. The previous June, 32 congressmen, most of them members of a minority Republican party, had signed a letter protesting the Panel's work. Now, one of the signers of that letter, Newt Gingrich, was destined to be Speaker of the House.Second, it became clear that the damage was not total. The President has forbidden NIH to support work involving the deliberate creation of embryos for research. Without exception, members of the Panel had come to the conclusion that some development of "research embryos" must be permitted to reduce the risks of new assisted reproductive technologies, to enhance scientific knowledge, and to develop new therapies for a range of serious diseases. All these... (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to show that several missteps made by others in in their thinking about law as an artefact are due to misconceptions about the role of intentions in understanding law as an artefact. I first briefly recap my own contention that law is a genre of institutionalized abstract artefacts (put forth in The Functions of Law (OUP 2016) and subsequent papers), mostly following Searle’s understanding of institutions and Thomasson’s understanding of public artefacts. I highlight (...) the central place that this theory affords law’s functions, without requiring the theorist to say that possession or performance of the function is either necessary or sufficient for inclusion in the class of law. Some of the most common misunderstandings are exemplified in Brian Leiter’s paper ‘Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law’. He thinks that holding an intentionalist view of artefacts commits the theorist to privileging drafters’ intentions when interpreting law. (It doesn’t.) He also has confusions about the differences between artefact tokens and artefact types leading him to a problematically broad understanding of artefacts. Another problem can be seen in thinking that functional understandings of artefacts are vulnerable to the same problems that arise in functional explanations for biological systems. I go on to consider the work of Luka Burazin and Corrado Roversi, addressing worries that making intentionality central to artefacts implies too much conscious thought is required to make one, noting that several theories of intentionality do not require conscious thought in the execution of intentional action. While those who think a central place for intentionality threatens to leave us unable to explain customary law, this can be dealt with by noting the important distinction between customary rules and customary laws (where the latter requires a decision to enlist public aid in redressing violations). I claim that authors’ intentions are communicated requests for the artefacts’ audiences to see the artefacts as members of their putative kinds. Finally, I address the question of whether or not legal systems are themselves artefacts and institutions, given that they may or may not have been intentionally created. An early lawgiver might have created a legal system by accident in the process of handing down the first laws. I raise the possibility that we might want to impute intentionality to necessary by-products of artefact creation, seeing those by-products as artefacts as well. (shrink)

How do participating in a work of fiction and imagining a fictional world intertwine with the reader’s life? I develop an account that explores the relation between fiction reading and the reader’s narrative identity. Starting with an investigation of Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity and of Kendall Walton’s account of the nature of representations, I develop my own model of fiction reading. My account is based on two starting assumptions: first, that human beings are entangled in stories, and second, (...) that emotions are complex and have a narrative structure. I argue that during the reading process, the fiction reader creates her own narratives which contain not only the story provided by the work of fiction, but also event sequences from their own experiential memories. I investigate the creation and the influence of self-conscious emotions which are generated during the reading process, especially when a reader identifies with a fictional character from within. I consider how and why these fiction-induced emotions can continue after the reading is finished, and how these emotions can motivate the reader to engage in self-reflection and to refigure her self-narrative. My account examines a new topic: the interactive influence of fiction reading and the fiction reader’s narrative identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I would like to begin by thanking Gregory LaNave for his analysis of Bonaventure's Itinerarium. His interpretation has helped me clarify my own understanding of that rich text. I would also like to thank the editors of Franciscan Studies who invited this response. It focuses on LaNave's misreading of "symbolic theology," his own "scientific" interpretation of the Itinerarium, and the relationship between scientific and symbolic theology as explained by (...) Bonaventure. Accordingly, I divide my response into three parts: Clarifying the Meaning of Symbolic Theology, Critique of Dr. LaNave's Analysis, and Scientific and Symbolic Theology.Clarifying the Meaning of Symbolic TheologyIn Divine and Created Order in Bonaventure's Theology, I employ the term "symbolic theology" to help the modern reader approach and appreciate Bonaventure's profuse use of symbols in the Itinerarium. Dr. LaNave acknowledges that such an accommodation is valuable: "The symbolic reading of Bonaventure has undoubted merits, not least of which is its attempts to do justice to his deft use of an array of symbols in his theology."In my "attempts to do justice" to the ubiquitous symbols throughout the Itinerarium, I describe "symbolic theology" in two ways. First, I claim that Bonaventure:does not employ symbols to prove anything, rather, he resorts to the effusive nature of symbols to demonstrate ineffable mysteries that elude easy description … symbolic thinking, in its most authentic form, is not a second-best mode of grasping reality but a penetration of its most profound metaphysical structure and dynamics.LaNave seems to have two concerns. On the one hand, since symbols do not "prove anything" he deems them as rather inadequate in describing metaphysical realities. For LaNave, symbols can not be "merely symbolic" if "they are in fact ways to penetrate the real metaphysical structure of the realities in question." The "merely" points to the need for something more, which LaNave identifies as the "objectivity of sensation" according to the "canons of a scientific theology ," In effect, he emphasizes by a threefold repetition that the "objectivity of sensation" can better examine "what is really there." It seems that symbols are less equipped for such a task.On the other hand, LaNave's contrast of "symbolic" with "scientific" seems to confuse what I identified as a general characteristic for the actual methodology I employed to analyze the Itinerarium: an analysis of the analogical triads produced by the threefold method of doubling. Like LaNave, I base my interpretation upon the dialectic of seeing God through and in a mirror . Hence, I disagree that I employ a "symbolic approach to theology." Rather, my approach primarily examines the text's analogical triads.Second, I also comment, "Bonaventure uses symbols to provide the imagination with powerful images with which one may ponder the deepest and highest levels of knowing." As an example, I provide the two symbols of the Seraph and Temple from Isaiah 6:1-2. However, LaNave does not comment on this second description of Bonaventure's "symbolic theology." Instead he states:the mystery revealed in any such symbol points to the whole of the mystery, never to any one part in isolation. For example, one may speak about creation and its relationship to the single creative activity of the Creator; but one must at the same time know that Creator to be the Trinity, and see the analogous presence of the Trinity in the creature. Analytical thinking might try to separate these elements; symbolic thinking always strives to see them implied in each other.To justify his claim, he cites pages 228-29 of Divine and Created Order.These pages do not treat or even mention "symbolic theology." Rather, they explain the terms principium, primum, and primitas, and their relation to the notion of ordo. These three terms concern foundational concepts that shape the ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology of Bonaventure's theology. In effect, LaNave correctly.. (shrink)

A central question that arises when interpreting the U.S. Constitution is which theory of interpretation is the best? In his recent book, “How to Interpret the Constitution,” Cass Sunstein reviews various theories of constitutional interpretation currently in vogue and then offers what he believes would be the best approach going forward. In this Article, I want to take up a more basic question presupposed by the very idea of a theory of interpretation. That is, whether it is even possible to (...) arrive at more than a provisional understanding of what would be the best interpretation in any given area of study, including constitutional law. That said, I do believe some of the interpretations suggested by Cass Sunstein and elsewhere by myself and others to be more persuasive than most others, even if only partially so. For, as Sunstein himself points out, no theory seems perfect to figure out the Constitution’s meaning in every possible world in which we could imagine it to exist. So, we best just focus on our own world or what we take to matter in our world. In keeping with this idea, I plan to begin by looking first at how we might interpret the world around us based on our past experiences by considering a somewhat imaginative recent experience of my own. Next, I consider some recent studies in the neurosciences and a previous but highly influential article by the philosopher Donald Davidson concerning conceptual schemes and whether we could ever hope to make any sense of a scheme radically different from our own. Here it should be pointed out that I will use the word “scheme” when referring to a very broad system of thought for which there may not be much outside, versus when I use the word “framework,” as referencing something far narrower than a whole system of thought, even if what is referenced might purport to be a significant part of a still larger system. My goal is to eventually adopt John Rawls’ public reason method to separate out non-workable systems of thought as might be part of a particular religious or philosophical tradition that cannot be easily tied to any other system of thought easily imagined within a pluralistic society. I plan to do this by relating how Rawls’ public reason might allow for the creation of a moral interpretation of the Constitution adopting the moral theory of Alan Gewirth. The latter I adopt because its grounding does not presuppose any prior moral or religious framework. I then apply that interpretative method to five cases Sunstein believes are fixed points in our current constitutional understanding. In short, I plan to isolate out an area of human rights where even very different understandings of the world might be able to meet, while acknowledging that there will still be other areas that simply evade any common connection. I hope what I offer here to be of help for a theory of constitutional interpretation that focuses on morality, without having to compete with various religious frameworks going forward. (shrink)

In this article, I advance what I think is a more theologically robust and informed free-will defense, which allows me to address the problem of evil in a more theologically robust and informed way. In doing so, however, I do not claim to offer a comprehensive response to the problem of evil, or full-blown "theodicy"; instead, I offer a partial response, which I place in the service of a full-blown theodicy. Moreover, my own approach is explicitly Thomistic, insofar as I (...) formulate much of it drawing on Thomas Aquinas's own formulations of the doctrines of original justice and original sin, or the human being as created and fallen. Structurally, the article consists of three main sections. In first section, I consider and critique a recent, expanded free-will defense offered by Peter van Inwagen, which also incorporates the doctrines of creation and the Fall. I then introduce key aspects of Aquinas's own thought in order to make the requisite improvements to this approach. In the second section of the article, I consider some main objections to my own Thomistic approach, as I will have formulated it so far: in particular, that the doctrines of original justice and original sin are unintelligible from the standpoints of moral psychology and evolutionary biology. I also begin to consider the objection that there is no intelligible way of explaining the transmission of original sin. In the third and final section of the article, I respond to these objections, offering a final defense of my central claim that the free-will defense is best served when it is wedded with a specifically Thomistic construal of the human being as originally created in a state of original justice, but now subject to defects (both bodily and spiritual) that are the inherited consequences of original sin. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are seven stages, or orientations, of thought about divine madness (initially understood by Plato as eros) with each stage offering claims, or critiques of claims, about its nature. Moreover, each orientation offers a claim, or a critique of a claim, about a relation to the Good that comes through divine madness. My account of the stages is greatly indebted to, but divergent from, the work of William Desmond. Hence, my thought is metaxological and (...) the discussion of the stages takes its bearings from the "between" of eros and agape. I make reference to Desmond's work in order to develop and contrast my own view of the Good as both agapeic and erotic. I argue that the agapeic activity of the Good has an erotic aspect. This aspect of the Good is not an incompleteness or need; rather, it is an absence that "contains" the Good's agapeic activity of creation. Further, this aspect serves not to realize the Good but to ground the becoming in creation (including the movement of our eros through the seven stages of divine madness). I develop how in the seventh stage our eros dynamically images the erotic aspect of the Good's activity by consciously intermediating its relations to the other. (shrink)

I have been working on meta-philosophy for quite some time and was pleasantly surprised to encounter, mid-May 2017, someone who shares this commitment (apart from his many other interests and specializations) for very similar reasons as my own. He is Dr Desh Ray Sirswal from India and one of his numerous websites, blogs, journals, etc is - http://drsirswal.webs.com/ I let him speak for himself. “My objective is to achieve an intellectual detachment from all philosophical systems, and not to solve specific (...) philosophical problems but to become sensitively aware of what it is when we philosophize.” Copyright© Desh Raj Sirswal . I commence by dealing with the teaching of philosophy, because the contents of what is being taught at under-graduate level is for most people who are slightly informed about the subject what philosophy is about. This usually consists of the history of Ideas of Western Philosophy. Although an increasing number of faculties now broaden the scope to the ‘philosophies’ of Asia, the Far East and the Middle East. This international broadening of what is being included in curricula of or as philosophy is another index that Western Philosophy is in need of subject-matter as its traditional subject-matter have all but died out. Apart from the History of Philosophical ideas, the subject often is presented in terms of so-called branches, for example metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic, and so on. A number of authors suggest that both ways of teaching the discipline is very selective because of the departments adherence to some form of either ‘analytical’ or ‘continental’ philosophy. Apart from the traditional lecture-style the teaching of philosophy is dealt with by means of some variation on the Oxbridge ‘tutorial’-style. Tutorials are often acclaimed as being an amazing, to be highly regarded innovation. Some studies and research of it however revealed that is not at all very comprehensive but is restricted to a number of items concerning reasoning, argumentation and critical re-viewing and thinking. This approach forms part of the attempt by contemporary research universities to teach aspects of ‘research’. This brings us to my next section on methods of doing philosophy. I suggest that the doing of philosophy resembles certain aspects and contexts of some of the steps and stages of doing theorizing. This is the rationale for including the next section on theorizing, its steps, stages and other aspects such as the use of metaphors, imaginary experiments, heuristic devices, etc. The next section deals with the changing nature of traditional philosophy as it lost most of its subject-matter to other disciplines that have been socio-culturally differentiated. And the search for new philosophical subject-matter such as Experimental Philosophy or XPhi, the involvement of philosophers in inter-disciplinary studies, especially the latest fad of cognitive studies or sciences and of course the fabrication of philosophies of all areas of human behaviour and kinds of socio-cultural activities for example sport, the arts, sciences, cognition, sex, violence, gender, race, religion, etc etc. I then turn to the question about how, where and why one could perhaps do philosophy against the background of the above. In this investigation I make explicit some of the self-imposed limits of the discourse. Some of these restrictions have been created because of the absolute institutionalization of the discipline as just another subject of universities. This institutionalization of course requires that those involved in the discipline of institutionalized philosophy must be professionals. This absolute requirement lays down the condition that to be a philosopher one must be a professional and an academic. The conditions of institutionalization and professionalization have far reaching consequences for the philosophical discourse, its subject-matter, methods, principles, values, aims, purposes and norms. One of these is the need to publish and to publish often especially in peer-reviewed journals and in their required, institutionalized format. Because of these institutionalized restrictions of what philosophy is, what it must be like, what it may be like and what it may not be like I explore the lack of self-cognition of academically institutionalized philosophy and the associated absence of critical, meta-cognition and self-awareness of professional philosophers. I question the values of doing that type of philosophy, philosophy-on-demand and because of demand and suggest that it is preferable to engage with the more original, creative-thinking philosophers’ work. All of the above are of course intersubjectively determined and this is why I finally explore the nature and operation of different forms of intersubjectivity, for example of common sense, everyday existence, that of the different sciences, the arts, etc and the roles or functions of these things in the creation or constitution of alternative discourses, their realities, life-worlds or perspectives on ‘the world, reality, and existence’. This is the phantom, the ghost of the deceased discourse of philosophy that I chased, encountered and describe. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularization of Political Thought, 1532–1689 by Simon P. KennedyFrancis J. BeckwithKENNEDY, Simon P. Reforming the Law of Nature: The Secularization of Political Thought, 1532–1689. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. ix + 125 pp. Cloth, $110.00In this monograph Simon P. Kennedy offers an account of the desacralization of politics in the West by critically examining the works of five central figures in the (...) Protestant Reformed tradition: John Calvin (1509–64), Richard Hooker (1554–1600), Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1705). He dedicates a chapter to each thinker. The core of Kennedy's thesis is that desacralization is the result of a shift in the way modern thinkers like Hobbes and Locke reimagined the nature of natural law. The medieval tradition, having found its fullest expression in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, saw natural law as one of four different types of law: eternal law (the eternal plan of creation in the mind of God), natural law (the rational creature's participation in the eternal law), human law (civil laws that are derived from the natural law), and divine law (the Old and New Testaments). According to Kennedy, the eventual desacralization of politics was set in motion with the development of arguments for natural rights that relied on a natural law that was in [End Page 553] practice severed from eternal law. But in that case, our political institutions—which are founded on the natural law—are purely human constructions and thus entirely secular.The usual story is that the Protestant Reformation constituted the decisive break with the medieval tradition and that it was the political theology of the reformers and their immediate successors that made the secularization of politics nearly inevitable. Kennedy wants to push back against that story. He argues, quite convincingly, that Calvin, Hooker, and Althusius, all Reformed Protestants, were in continuity with their medieval predecessors. Although Calvin is often depicted by his contemporary followers—especially among American Evangelicals—as hostile to the natural law tradition, Kennedy marshals an impressive case that shows that classical natural law seemed almost second nature to Calvin. My own sense is that the confusion over Calvin is the result of his contemporary readers expecting him to use the vocabulary of an Aquinas or a Duns Scotus. But not finding that vocabulary, they conclude that he rejected the natural law. Kennedy dispels that confusion by showing that Calvin in fact was fully committed to the four types of law absent the technical jargon of medieval scholasticism.Hooker and Althusius, writes Kennedy, continue in that tradition, though with a bit of a twist that some argue portends to Hobbes and Locke. Hooker and Althusius use the language of contract to account for the origin of certain aspects of political life. But Kennedy insists that it is a mistake to interpret them as proto-contractarians (as one finds in Hobbes and Locke), for they still held that the natural law participates in the eternal law, and that any agreements employed in the service of political life are under the authority of, and guided by, the natural law. One could argue, then, that these "contracts," like constitutions and treaties, are nonstatutory manifestations of the human law, which is perfectly consistent with classical natural law. So like Calvin before them, Hooker and Althusius were, as Kennedy puts it, theistic political naturalists.Hobbes and Locke are a different story. According to Kennedy, they both defended desacralized views of politics, with Hobbes being the more extreme of the two. Although I think he is correct in that assessment, I am not sure he locates the cause of the desacralization in the right place. For example, he says that because for Locke politics is artificial and not natural—that is, it is the result of a social contract to insulate members of society from the instability of a state of nature—politics is desacralized, even though God is the ultimate source of the natural law. But it is not clear how that in and of itself desacralizes politics. After all, Aquinas, the paradigm case of a classical natural lawyer, held... (shrink)

Sam Lebens’ The Principles of Judaism is an extraordinary book in its rigor and richness. It is a sophisticated examination of three central propositions, which Lebens maintains, are the fundamental doctrines that “can make sense of continued commitment to an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.” (Lebens, 273). He presents and discusses the following three propositions: 1) The universe is the creation of one God; 2) The Torah is a divine system of laws and wisdom, revealed by the creator of the universe; (...) and, 3) The creator exercises provi-dential care over his creation, manifest in the creator’s continued sustenance of the world, reward and punishment for human action, and in the promise of ultimate salvation. (Lebens, 3).Lebens presents the principles as they were variously explicated and de-fended in key Jewish texts written by the most influential Jewish thinkers; he then turns to search for “the most plausible rendering of this set of prin-ciples...” (Lebens, 274). After so doing, he specifies those doctrinal compo-nents among them, which he deems necessary “for making sense of commit-ment to Judaism” (Lebens, 275), identifying a “commitment to Judaism” with being “faithful to the tenets of Judaism” in the sense of having faith in them:To the extent that these principles are necessary for making sense of commitment to Judaism, I argue that you cannot be considered faithful to the tenets of Judaism without holding an attitude of faith toward some element of each of the three principles... (Lebens 275).The distance between Lebens’ philosophical and religious outlook and pre-suppositions, as they show themselves in his Principles of Judaism, and my own is great. I shall start with a critique of Lebens’ reduction of Judaism to so-called Orthodox Judaism, and argue that Lebens has no justification for characterizing the principles that he identifies, as the “principles of Judaism” without qualification. I shall then turn to argue that there are grounds for questioning whether the principles that Lebens identifies can be understood as the principles that so-called “Orthodox Jews”, too, have faith in. It is, how-ever, clear that the utterances that Lebens discusses do play a central role within the life of committed Jews. I shall end by proposing that we adopt the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical method for making perspicuous their meaning and their different roles. (shrink)

Writing, the exigency of writing: no longer the writing that has always (through a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to say, moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred, (...) and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language. – Maurice Blanchot ( The Infinite Conversation , xi) The Compendium * Beginning with the idea and practice of writing, and moving to the subject or self, then to truth and the One, and arriving at the Book and the Work, Blanchot’s words reflect the trajectory of the following work of writing. True to the embeddedness of the subject in the work of writing, the term “Compendium” has been a metonym for me over the past few years as I have thought about the concept of totality alongside its expression in figures such as the One, the Whole, or the All. In the following I aim to share some of the content of this metonym, and to enrich it by making some distinctions. 1 Here the term “Compendium” will refer to a concept of totality that is ontological (pertaining to being, and the copula) and also textual (pertaining to the symbolic, and the signifier-signified relationship). The Compendium is a figure for thinking the world as a Book, in the broadest sense—an approach to reality that is by no means new, but one that is due for renewal. 2 In partial answer to the question of the Compendium we will say that the word ‘Compendium’ stands in for expressions which seek to totalize, or concepts which seek to approach the concept of ‘everything,’ particularly when these expressions are bound up in the question of the Book (both the book as a physical object and the Book as a metaphysical figure: a way of thinking about the work in and of writing). The question of the Compendium is strongly associated with the physical and metaphysical form of the Book, like the mysterious and symbolic books which are opened in the Biblical book of Revelation, the book of life and the book of death, which together constitute an important couplet. 3 Parataxis & Hypotaxis There are two helpful distinctions that will bring us closer to an answer to the question “What is a Compendium?” The first distinction is between two figures in and for writing: parataxis and hypotaxis . Typically paired in contrast to one another as literary techniques, with parataxis indicating a side-by-side placement of textual elements and hypotaxis referring to subordinate arrangements of textual elements, the two figures can be understood as having a philosophical significance in addition to their practical function as devices for writers. For us these two terms will remain between philosophical theory and writing practice, and serve as a perspective for our writing and creation of texts. Here I take texts to refer to anything from the concrete written words in a book, to the ontological text of the world that we experience. Parataxis , as a figural way of thinking about the ontological structure of texts, refers to texts which are tightly woven and interdependent – texts within which each sentence bears the weight of the entire work. Parataxis often involves repetition, great density, and fragility. One of the best examples of this sort of text is Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus , Aesthetic Theory . In addition to the text itself, the translation history of the book may also help us to better understand parataxis and its relation to hypotaxis . The final published version of Aesthetic Theory , in German, was a text that Adorno intended to revise and rewrite, but this intention was never realized because of his untimely death. Where the German text of Aesthetic Theory certainly exemplifies the concept of parataxis , the first English edition took this densely woven text and carved Adorno’s lengthy paragraphs and lengthy sentences into manageable ‘bite-sized’ pieces of English text. The first translator took further liberty and inserted headings and new paragraph breaks where there were none in the original. Aesthetic Theory was eventually retranslated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and is now available in a form that is much more faithful to the original work. 4 The pertinent idea that this translation history points to is the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis . Where parataxis describes texts which are repetitive, densely woven, and often fragile, hypotaxis describes texts which are hierarchical and in which the primary relation is linear – the latter of which is very similar to the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory . On the other hand, the original German text that Adorno wrote was very dense, often repetitive, and contained long sections of text unbroken by paragraphs or headings. This example of parataxis was then turned towards hypotaxis through the initial translation which took a text that was, in many ways, nonhierarchical and nonlinear, and artificially subjected it to a hierarchy that was not its own (and here I take the word of Fredric Jameson who comments on the two translations in a note at the beginning of his book Late Marxism ). 5 The point here is not about translation, but rather the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis precisely as they are figures for discourse, written or otherwise. The concept of parataxis looks far more postmodern and rhizomic than the concept of hypotaxis which remains very modern and arborescent. This is a more figural way of talking about the distinction. However, if we wanted to take a more precise and analytical approach we could say that on the level of form parataxis involves a relationship between sentences and paragraphs in which each part bears an equally crushing responsibility to present the whole content of the text. As well, on the level of content, parataxis requires that each concept in a work take on the full conceptual weight of the total work. Continuing the analysis, we could say that parataxis describes texts in which there is no (or very little) linear or causal move from antecedent to consequent, whether in content or form. Instead, parataxis describes texts which weave together concepts via conjugations or associations. The concept of hypotaxis , on the other hand, requires that texts submit themselves to hierarchy, one example of which is logical argumentation. The contingency of the conclusion upon premises in hypotaxis is certainly distinct from the repetition, re-presentation, and conjugation of concepts in parataxis , and I think that this is evident in the difference between the writing styles prevalent in contemporary Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. It is not the case that the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis absolutely corresponds with the writing styles of Continental and Analytic philosophy (respectively). There are thinkers who take exception to this pattern, such as Badiou’s more formal approach in the discourse of Continental philosophy to give one example. However, when Analytic philosophy takes its writing lessons from the sciences, and seeks to do philosophy via the clean linear move from antecedent to consequent, then I think that Analytic philosophy writes with hypotaxis in mind. On the other hand, when Continental (particularly German and French) philosophy takes its writing lessons from narrative or poetry then Continental philosophy writes with parataxis in mind. It is not fair to say that all those writing Continental philosophy are looking to narrative and poetry for stylistic direction, just as it is not the case that all those writing Analytic philosophy have mathematics and science as their writing format, however there are some striking ways in which the differing epistemologies of Continental and Analytic philosophy encourage writing with parataxis and hypotaxis in mind (respectively). For some, writing with parataxis or hypotaxis in mind is a conscious decision and a product of stylistic self-consciousness, and for others it is an unconscious discursive and epistemic requirement that must be met in order to be involved in a particular discourse. Before moving on to our second distinction, and then an examination of the question of the Book, it is important to point out that both totality and figurations like the One, the Whole, and the All, come out of very human desires to totalize or to actualize our being-towards-totality. The relationship between identity and totality then can be construed, with Heidegger in mind, as striving toward wholeness, completion, or fulfillment, each of which is a quality of compendia. 6 Compilation & Selection The first distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis pertains to both form and content, and to both the mechanics of writing and the ideas to which writing refers. The second distinction pertains to both as well. In the process of writing and in the process of perception as well, there is a tension between compilation and selection . To begin with, in the work of theory-writing there is compilation, and this is because writing theory requires a broad perspective and certain measure of totalization. On the other hand, writing theory requires that the writer select an idea or a combination of ideas to individuate out of a radical and infinite multiplicity of identities and combinations. The concern here is not primarily for the writing of a theory about a specific idea, like a secondary work or a reference text. But rather the concern is with the writing of grand theories: Marx and Marxism, Derrida and Deconstruction, Husserl and Phenomenology, Sartre and Existentialism, Saussure and Structuralism —each of which strives along a trajectory towards being all-encompassing, whether it intends to or not. Today, we could even say that Speculative Realism has embarked on this journey, and perhaps now we could say that the discourse of Speculative Realism has reached the inevitable point after which a grand theory leaves the hands of its writer or writers and becomes a possession of the collective consciousness of the academy, or (perhaps now) the mass consciousness of the blogosphere—and this is a true pharmakon , a poison and a cure, a blessing and a curse. 7 When we write theory, whether the scope is that of a grand theory or a particular theory, we write in the tension between compilation (making good on the desire to be all encompassing) and selection (being required to decide and discern and to judge what is included in the work and what is deleted or appended or abridged or given over to ellipses). Generally speaking, the work of theory-writing often comes out of a desire to totalize, that is, to develop a theory of everything that is able to apprehend new experiences and ideas while still remaining whole. I grant that this is not a universal desire, and that not everyone who sits down to write a work (or book) of theory does so because of their will-to-totality, but it remains that this drive to totalize does condition a great many writers of theory (especially those who seek to develop grand theories like those mentioned previously). At the beginning of his book of interviews, Between Existentialism and Marxism , Sartre is quoted as saying, after completing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason : “I no longer feel the need to make long digressions in my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It will now be deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied and at peace—as I felt after Being and Nothingness . A feeling of emptiness: a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has nothing to say, one can say everything .” 8 This is where our two initial distinctions come to bear on the being-towards-totality as it is expressed in the concrete practice of writing: the first being between parataxis and hypotaxis , and the second being between compilation and selection. Where this second distinction is concerned there is a certain paradox at play given that selection is inescapable, and compilation is unachievable. Selection is inescapable (with the figure of the Compendium in mind) because, even when the imperative to compile is followed to excruciating lengths, selection still has the last word. This is why the Compendium is a figure rather than some material thing that can actually be accomplished or actualized. No matter how far one goes along with the will-to-archive and the will-to-compile, it is only ever a question of minimizing selection and never eliminating it. This leads to the second point, which is that total compilation is unachievable. The closest thing to total compilation that we have before us is the ontological and textual fabric of the world. Even in the case of the world, compilation cannot be enacted in a total fashion because of the need to include both the sphere of the actual and the sphere of the possible or potential. This as another way in which compilation is always-already selection, and further evidence that total compilation is practically impossible. Discursive Figuration and Total Writing Rather than figuration referring to a figure of speech or an image, here the term points to a way in which to think about the work of writing, both the work put into writing, and the work that is the result of writing: the finished yet incomplete final piece. As figures or figurations, the Book and the Compendium are ways of thinking about the work of writing and the human desire for the wholeness, completion, and fulfillment that are made manifest in the completed form of the book (whether a published or printed or saved document put to rest by the author). These two figures bear more strongly upon works that seek to be all-encompassing, and works that strive towards expressions of totality such as the One, the Whole, or the All. Moving on to the topic of the subtitle, and on a more prescriptive note, I would say that there is more hope for theory-writing to be found in parataxis than hypotaxis . Part of the reason for this claim is the poststructuralist critique of hierarchies, and yet another part is the compelling line of thinking called “weak thought” (in theology by John D. Caputo, and in philosophy by Gianni Vattimo, among others). 9 The consequences of these two convictions are such that if one is to strongly assert the truth of a grand theory without leaving the realm of hierarchy-critique and weak thought, then one must write paradoxically with parataxis in mind, and in so doing write weakly and non-hierarchically. This does not mean avoiding a sort of topography or topology when writing theory, rather it means avoiding both subjugation and oppression in thought by pursuing a nonviolent sort of ontology. In order to do this, theory writing does not present itself as an exercise in logical analysis where one mechanically moves from a set of premises (via contingency) to the inevitable conclusion (via necessity). Instead, theory approaches the idea of a Compendium. Given that the figural Compendium places parataxis and compilation above hypotaxis and selection, then the question becomes: is placing one part of a binary term before another not just another way of selecting, or another expression of hypotaxis ? Counter to the urge to resign oneself to the reign of selection, with some qualification one can nonetheless write without deciding whether selection and hypotaxis should be subservient to compilation and parataxis (which is to say that writing-without-decision is somewhere between and beyond possibility and impossibility). This dilemma can be disarmed by stating that theory writing is not about primacy, and not about having-decided-beforehand, both stylistically and also where content is concerned. This is the paradox of writing: always striving along a trajectory ( telos ) towards totality via parataxis and compilation, but always being drawn back to finitude and making selections, and placing one idea before another with hypotaxis in mind. In light of this paradox, the question of the Compendium as a figure for discourse and a figural Book has resonance with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Edmund Jabès’ Book of Questions , found in his Writing and Difference . The Question of the Book “Little by little the book will finish me.” 10 Derrida quotes Jabès, and proceeds to outline the reflexive relationship between the author of the book and the book itself, each of which are subjected to the other through a sort of chiasmus, both ontological and textual (not that the two are entirely separable). The Book, for Derrida like Blanchot in the introductory quotation, “infinitely reflects itself” and “develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility”, and in light of this we can draw an association with the painful tension between the practical reality of selection and the ideal trajectory of compilation. 11 This tension in writing, between the will to total compilation and the necessity of abridgment, is an ontological tension between part and whole just as it is a textual tension between signifier and signified. The ontological tension in writing that Derrida expresses in his essay on Jabès is between everything and nothing – a contradiction which Derrida finds in Jabès’ Book of Questions and also in the divine, in God. When one writes between compilation and selection one writes towards totality, and here we can follow Derrida who states that the lapse in signification, presumably in the signifier-signified discrepancy, is a “ rupture with totality itself” and furthermore that this lapse cannot be rectified through deductive reason or even philosophical discourse. 12 This rupture with totality, found in the troubled relation between signifier and signified, can also tell us a lot about the Book and about writing. Given an understanding of writing as an ontological act that strives towards (but never accomplishes) totality, we can see the written book as the manifested and given body of that striving. Perhaps in other disciplines or even other schools of philosophy there is a cultural climate within which the article is prized above the book, but I am fairly confident, especially when referring to the grand theories of Continental thought, that there is a respect for the book as a uniquely meaningful object capable of apprehending totality. Derrida writes, Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. 13 Here the vitality of the literal event is compromised by the deadening weight of the concept, and the figure of the Book assists in this lapse of meaning. The Book is a totalizing object, much like the figure of the Compendium, and yet this totalization lacks its final object of completed totality both because the figural Book is necessarily incomplete, and because the physical book is always-already a product of selection. Instead of achieving its end of being a place where everything takes place, it suffers from the lapse of writing, the discrepancy between event and concept. Derrida continues his exposition on Jabès by bringing to light yet another reflexive relation, a reversal of the relationship between the Book and the world. Derrida writes that, for Jabès, “the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.” 14 In addition to what was stated before, I take figuration to mean that the concepts employed, such as the Book or the Compendium, are not subject to the supposed rigor of analysis that is so prized by Enlightenment or Capitalist realisms. The figure of the Book and the figure of the Compendium cannot be held accountable to standards imported from scientific method, given an understanding that these standards require a concept to be replicable, consistent, falsifiable, measurable, and so on… This is an important point to make, especially in the present atmosphere within which theory must justify itself under conditions that are not its own. Instead of being held to these standards, figuration serves as a way in which to think about writing that leaves thought open to idealistic speculation, imperfect analogies, and most importantly the ever-present gain and loss that occur in the relationship between thought and being. By extension the figural way of addressing writing indulges in enough generalization to accommodate the excess/lack relationship between the ideal form of the Book or the Compendium, and the manifested and given body of a text (as it is practically completed and closed). Here we speak against the hostile atmosphere which would have theory submit itself to hierarchical rigor, rather than Blanchot’s “enigmatic rigor”, by being explicit about the discursive conditions and epistemic conditions under which theory operates. To write with parataxis in mind is, to a certain degree, to write with weakness as one’s methodology (with weak thought being in opposition to hypotaxis and hierarchy as much as weak thought can be in opposition to anything). Rather than asserting the strength of hierarchical theory, and rather than employing antagonistic argumentation with the goal of refutation different discursive and epistemic conditions for theory writing must be cultivated (and these are by no means new). First the critical and theoretical spirit reveals itself as being concerned with the task of complication—especially the complication and critique of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, polarities, paradoxes, parallaxes, hybridities, and especially antinomies. Second, theory positions itself as a sort of showing or revealing, rather than being ultimately focused on coming to full agreement or disagreement. This is where figuration can help theory-writing, both by placing emphasis on teleologies and trajectories (like parataxis and compilation), and by shifting focus away from pure primacy, power, or absolute origin. Figuration then, assists theory writing by placing the concern of theory outside of the concerns of the hard or soft sciences, and into the realm of thought or the idea. To speak of ‘the’ Compendium or ‘the’ Book, here, is to generalize not regarding the perfect form of the Compendium or Book, but to engage speculatively with an abstract idea which remains singular and yet complicated by multiplicity. The question of the Book that Derrida asks through Jabès is a question of everything and nothing, totality and nonbeing, and this question is a concern for writing and a concern for the figure of the Compendium so defined by the tension between compilation and selection, and parataxis and hypotaxis . On the note of nonbeing, we can look to the final page of Derrida’s first essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference and notice the introduction of his neologism, différance (with an ‘a’). Derrida writes: Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance . Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). 15 This introduction of différance into the equation of the Book, alongside ontological affirmation and negation, hearkens back to the discussion of the symbolic lapse earlier in his essay. Differing and deferring, the Book is always a Book of Life and a figure for the intersection of the vital (life) and the total in writing. In a way, the writer of the Book may be someone who lives life, and in another way the writer of the book-as-object may be someone who engages in the act of writing, both practically (by inscribing words on paper, or typing script on a computer) and ontologically or symbolically (by investing their existence and inexistence into a work worthy of the figural Book). In addition to the writer as writer, the writer also serves as an editor, and the editorial role alongside the idea of the Compendium shows the editor to be one who collects and compiles, while being restrained by eventual selection and decision. Beyond this the editor of works and texts, in both the Book and the world, is engaged in a process of inscribing notation—of annotating (on) the Compendium. Eternal commentary is a feature of the textual Compendium, just as open-ended totality describes the ontological Compendium. The writer as writer does not simply write texts, but rather engages in a profoundly ontological act of inscribing their existence into the world, and the writer as editor does not merely annotate or alter texts as they are, but rather comments upon the text of the world. In/Conclusion So as we create texts, and as we write and create theory, let us be and remain attentive to the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book. These two concurrent metonymies are essential for total writing (grand theories, etc.), and may be forgettable for those concerned with fragmentary or hierarchical writing (which are valid in their own right). From the ontological and symbolic text of the world and phenomenological experience, to concrete texts such as books or mixed media, the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book are important for the actualization of the human will to be all-encompassing. The figure of the Compendium teaches writers of theory that the repetition, density, and fragility of parataxis offers a strong sort of weakness which does not become yet another variety of oppressive and hegemonic thought. Rather than write with hypotaxis in mind, subjugating one thought to another via cause and effect or antecedent and consequent, I would hope that theory-writing could guiltlessly indulge in the dialectical and contradictory conjugation of ideas, and take this as a legitimate methodology. Rather than being ashamed of showing resonances or giving way to abridgment or ellipses, it is my own authorial (but not authoritative) conviction that one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the fact that complete totalization is impossible, and one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the worry of violence, for the Book and the Compendium lack their completed object and are ever incomplete trajectories. NOTES * UPDATED 7/19/13: we've updated the HTML version to reflect the (correct) PDF version. Our apologies to the author—eds. 1. I would like extend thanks to Dr. Peter Schwenger of the University of Western Ontario for his comments on this paper and his hospitality as it was presented as a Theory Session at the Centre for Theory and Criticism on October 26th 2012. I would also like to thank Andrew Weiss for conversation and critique. 2. I should clarify my use of the term ‘figure’ at the outset. Given the use of the term by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (and also Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon ), I should state clearly that my use of the term will not correspond to the term ‘figure’ understood as the representation of an object. Instead, my use of the term ‘figure’ and its variations (‘figural’, ‘figurative’, ‘figuration’) will refer to the illustrative or metaphorical use of the Compendium or the Book as models or ways of thinking about writing and discourse. 3. Cf. Revelations 20:12-15. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London & New York: Continuum Press, 1997). 5. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1990), ix-x. 6. I have written about this concept of being-towards-totality elsewhere in two pieces of writing: the first is called Notes on the Compendium (an unfinished draft) which addresses some very wide theoretical concerns, being structured as a sort of itinerary or archive, and the second is Dialectics Unbound (Punctum Books, 2013) which outlines a concept of totality without the violence of totalization. While these works are more concerned with ontological totality, here I would like to focus on the idea of the Compendium as a textual totality. 7. Cf. Louis Morelle, “Speculative Realism: After Finitude and Beyond, A vade mecum” in Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism . Issue 3 (Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 241-272. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism . Trans. John Matthews (London & New York: Verso, 1974), 9. 9. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65. 11. Ibid, 65. 12. Ibid, 71. 13. Ibid, 75. 14. Ibid, 76. 15. Ibid, 78. (shrink)

How can hope, love and faith stay alive when dementia enters a home? In this article I shall look especially at the spouse or partner who shares an abode with a person with dementia. Most of the authors in this field, also John Swinton who is perhaps the best known author whose books are written from a theological perspective, focus on care in institutions, that means care by professionals. A partner living with a dementia patient has two main roles: as (...) partner and caregiver. Night and day a partner is witness to the ongoing deterioration of her or his beloved partner, without being a professional. This article is founded not only on literature about dementia patients, but also on the experiences of several partners, as well as my own experiences as a partner. The question we all ask is: 'From where does our strength come?' I argue that what is said in the literature on the subject of dementia patients does not help the partners, because it lays a heavy burden on them, who are already suffering from feelings of grief and guilt. I do not agree with John Swinton's idea that God created dementia. Looking for different ways of thinking about God and faith to survive with hope and love, I turn to the exegesis of the creation stories by Ellen van Wolde. These give the opportunity to take the evil of the situation of the deterioration of the personality of a patient with dementia seriously, and at the same time grant the possibility to turn the grief and guilt feelings into strength to fight evil, together with a God whose empathy and love stays with a partner in her or his loneliness and grief. (shrink)

This paper is meant to engage with philosophy teachers who are interested in creating a more inclusive environment by using small group discussion exercises. I begin this paper by describing the connections between the inclusive classroom and the collaborative classroom. I then articulate two learning goals that group discussion exercises can help students accomplish and define these learning goals as philosophical discovery and philosophical creation. Finally, I discuss a number of activities that encourage students to accomplish these learning goals (...) in small groups and describe how the incorporation of these exercises has affected the inclusivity of my own classes. (shrink)

This piece was written for performance and might be best enjoyed read aloud. It was an imaginative exercise based on a kind of intertextuality— combining my own story with the story of the God of the Genesis creation stories. Thus God became a Mother who was experiencing some of the things that mothers of teenage children might experience. It is a sort of poem, following the style of the first creation story but also provides an explanation of why (...) things are as they are, like the second creation story. It was first read at a weekend conference on Ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somatic Knowledge and Qualitative Reasoning:From Theory to PracticeRichard Siegesmund"Elliot Eisner is a writer to be reckoned with" is how my undergraduate student, Cheyenne, opened her final essay on The Arts and the Creation of Mind. After a semester of using his text in my art education methods class, reckoned seemed an apt word. The dictionary gives the definitions of reckoned as to settle accounts, make calculation, judge, and (...) take into consideration.1 The ideas in The Arts and the Creation of Mind are challenging on multiple levels, and Eisner does not provide any easy answers. There are no pithy how-to-do-it bullet points in the text. The issues he addresses are complex: nonlinguistic meaning, somatic knowledge, qualitative reasoning, the arts as habits of mind that guide experience and inquiry into the world — just to name a few. Nevertheless, in this text he brings these ideas into a format that is accessible to undergraduates entering the profession of teaching and experienced professionals, who wish to reflect on their own practice.The lucidity of Eisner's text can belie the complexity of the issues he addresses. Regrettably, some students only saw the outer shell of the content: the discussion of conceptual approaches to arts education or the delineation of the developmental stages of children's drawing. Yet for these aspects alone, they considered the text to be valuable; however, I was disappointed that they did not go deeper. Some just could not synthesize the big point: that the arts are not simply about mastery of technical skills, but that technical skills are merely a gateway into non-linguistic thinking. Educational objectives that are limited to content and skills are mundane.However, for more thoughtful and reflective students like Cheyenne, who was in her last semester of course work before student teaching in Guadalajara, the book was an inspiration. It provided a more robust conception of arts education that spoke to her feelings that compelled her to be a teacher. She reflected on what she read in The Arts and the Creation of Mind, and saw how an arts educator was more than an activities manager. She discovered she was embarking on a calling that could change minds — and [End Page 80] by changing minds, transform lives. For a young idealist, Eisner articulated her passion to serve. He said what up until that moment she had only felt. She discovered what she had previously sensed — known in her bones — but had not articulated. Eisner was a voice she wanted to take for her own. He provided a vision of the teacher she hoped to be. Indeed, Elliot Eisner is a writer to be reckoned with.Two ideas that my art students want to discuss when they first encounter The Arts and the Creation of Mind are the concepts of somatic knowing and qualitative reasoning. Somatic knowledge is a felt reaction of rightness within an experience. Qualitative reasoning is the ordering of relationships of qualities. Qualitative reasoning produces somatic knowledge. Using my students' questions and classroom discussions as inspiration, I want to explore these ideas for I believe they represent the essence of what is distinctive about learning in the arts. Furthermore, I share Eisner's belief that they provide the foundation on which to make an enduring case for the importance of the arts in education. These ideas reside at the heart of the process of education, which is, as he states, "learning to create ourselves."2It is immensely satisfying as a teacher to see the ah-ha moments in class discussion when students begin to integrate Eisner's ideas into their own experience. It is an even greater satisfaction to work with teachers who find these ideas illuminating for their educational aims and objectives and to see them played out in real classrooms where students flourish. In this essay, I want to try to build on my own experience with these moments to more deeply explore the significance of Eisner's work.To begin, I will briefly revisit the work of John Dewey. I will then discuss how Eisner's previous thinking sets a foundation for The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Finally, on a... (shrink)

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a “psychoanalytic critic” because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, (...) I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows—or perhaps I should say playmates.The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom’s psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the “situational-thematic”: studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers’ responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers or the reader as psychological everyman . But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure—a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical. Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, which has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling. (shrink)

Astrochristology, as a subfield within the more comprehensive astrotheology, speculates on the implications of what astrobiology and related space sciences learn about our future space neighbors. Confirmation of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations living on exoplanets will force Christian theologians to decide on two issues. The first issue deals with the question: should Christians expect many incarnations, one for each inhabited exoplanet; or will the single incarnation in terrestrial history suffice? The second issue deals with the question: why is (...) there an incarnation in the first place? Does the divine presence in the historical Jesus mark a divine attempt to fix a broken creation or does it mark a divine self-communication that would occur with or without creation's fall into sin and death? Sorting these issues out is one task for astrochristology. My own position is to affirm both a single incarnation on Earth valid for cosmic redemption from the brokenness of creation in its present state. (shrink)