Conceiving political agency in terms of an interaction between the categories that Simone de Beauvoir called 'immanence' and 'transcendence' illuminates the role that attachments and desires play in supporting commitments to abstract principles of political right, and so clarifies the structure and sources of political agency. Communitarians and feminist theorists have shown in recent years that attachments to particular others can support a strong sense of individual efficacy. This analysis goes beyond those prior studies by showing the importance for political (...) agency of partial attachments not to particular others but to abstract principles such as justice, liberty and equality. Motivating principled political action is a fundamental concern for constitutional liberal democracies such as the USA, in which citizens are to rule themselves on the basis of a constitutionally established set of abstract principles, rather than simply on the basis of attachments to particular persons or communities. Key Words: citizenship • gender • justice • political agency • Simone de Beauvoir. (shrink)

The integral role of royal women in political systems structured by diplomatic marriage is revealed in a series of legal verdicts from a case that involved the rulers of Late Bronze Age Ugarit, Amurru, and Ḫatti. These verdicts adjudicate the divorce, loss of political status, and execution of a royal woman who was the wife of the king of Ugarit, the daughter and sister of two successive kings of Amurru, and the granddaughter and niece of two successive Hittite Great Kings. (...) The undoing of her multivalent political status destabilized the regional and imperial system in which she was enmeshed. Protracted negotiations were required to restore equilibrium to the system. Examination of the rhetorical and legal strategies through which these negotiations took place reveals the extent to which the relative power of royal men depended on their relationships to royal women. (shrink)

In this article, I report on a Bulgarian female migrant caregiver's “life-story,” especially focusing on her relationship with an old Italian woman, on the care practices performed in her favor in Italy, and on her daughter and parents still living in Bulgaria. I chose to do it by means of an anthropological approach based on experience as field of mediation between personal dimensions and historical and social processes and therefore centered on the body conceived as historical product, the influence of (...) political and social forces on shaping human lives, and finally interest in the specific link between bodies and work. From this analysis, based on language and narratives, I think useful cultural aspects may emerge about “gender” and care practices, regarding the two women linked by an assistance relationship, and the activities/strategies used by the Bulgarian caregiver to fulfill her family obligations. (shrink)

Badiou has said that his entire philosophical project stems from the need to “update” the traditional philosophical categories of Truth, Being, the Infinite and the Universal in the wake of the 19th Century German mathematician Georg Cantor’s explication of transfinite set theory. In his essay, “What is Love?”, he provides an account of one of the ways in which a post-Cantorian reconfiguration of the ontological status of the category of Woman might operate. This is given in the form of a (...) postscript subtitled “The Feminine Position and Humanity” wherein he gives Lacan’s conception of supplementary feminine jouissance “an extra turn of the screw”. This essay draws on Badiou’s reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman to examine the implications of another postscript, that which abruptly concludes the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. It reads Coetzee’s invention of the “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos” with recourse to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and on through the ontological reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman demonstrated by Badiou. It argues that Coetzee assembles, through the intervention of the postscript, a situation that “makes it possible to argue”, along with Badiou, that, for the woman position, love knots together the four types of truths – Politics, Art, Science, and Love (2008, 196). (shrink)

Three leading scholars examine one of the oldest professorships, the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity at Cambridge, plotting its development in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history. The current Lady Margaret's Professor Graham Stanton sets the scene with an introduction briefly considering theology at Cambridge before 1502 and after 1649. In the two main chapters Richard Rex - an authority on John Fisher, first holder of the Chair - deploys new evidence to propose changes in the list (...) of early professors and shows how their appointment and dismissal reflected the vagaries of the Reformation; and Patrick Collinson investigates how the Elizabethan and early Stuart professors continued to be caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the times. There is a complete list of holders from 1502 to the present. (shrink)

Conceiving political agency in terms of an interaction between the categories that Simone de Beauvoir called ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ illuminates the role that attachments and desires play in supporting commitments to abstract principles of political right, and so clarifies the structure and sources of political agency. Communitarians and feminist theorists have shown in recent years that attachments to particular others can support a strong sense of individual efficacy. This analysis goes beyond those prior studies by showing the importance for political (...) agency of partial attachments not to particular others but to abstract principles such as justice, liberty and equality. Motivating principled political action is a fundamental concern for constitutional liberal democracies such as the USA, in which citizens are to rule themselves on the basis of a constitutionally established set of abstract principles, rather than simply on the basis of attachments to particular persons or communities. (shrink)

In this contribution to an exchange of views about “lyric philosophy,” the author argues that the philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky, beginning as early as her dissertation at the University of Toronto, has championed the nonlogical, including the ineffable, the oracular, and the mystical, and that more recently those concerns have merged in a more focused way in her attention to ecological issues. The impulse to fix philosophy and the environment depends in her work mainly on further linguistic statements and declarations, and (...) on occasional overt rejections of traditional political remedies. Thus, the audience for her campaign against analytic philosophy, for example, does not seem to reach beyond the walls of higher education in North America. Zwicky has aligned herself with an esoteric philosophical tradition that has sought to achieve its aims covertly — meaning, for one thing, that it becomes difficult to measure the success of those aims, since they are deliberately meant to be unavailable to public scrutiny. Those aims are not dependent on the general populace's involvement or engagement. Indeed, the author concludes, the general populace has been viewed consistently in the esoteric philosophical tradition as weak and resistant, if not hostile, to philosophical thought. (shrink)

Stephen White and Gianni Vattimo have argued in favor of weak ontological thought. Particularly for White, weak ontology's contestable fundamentals are a superior response to strong ontologies, including the violence linked to them. I make a historically comparative evaluation of their arguments. The evaluation draws on William Davenant's Restoration revision of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Davenant's play defends Charles II's sovereignty against the strong ontological claims of orthodox Anglicans. Lady Macduff's much expanded role and the death she suffers, in contrast to (...) her counterpart in Shakespeare's Folio, are key vehicles for this defense. Davenant's revisions are linked in this interpretation to Charles II's Happy Act of Indemnity and Oblivion of 1660. Also explored are new connections between Macduff and the witches. I argue Davenant exemplifies a contingency unanticipated by weak ontology advocates: he is both antifoundational and in favor of violence. Antifoundational arguments aid more political persuasions than often imagined. (shrink)

"This edition can therefore be regarded as the most important republication of a Mandeville text in the last few decades, and should be required reading for anyone seriously concerned to understand the growth of his challenging ideas. " —Professor Irwin Primer in History of Political Thought Volume XXI Issue 4 "Mandeville's contributions to The Female Tatler are almost unknown but they are of fundamental importance for understanding The Fable of the Bees and a social theory that was to be of (...) central importance to the Enlightenment's conception of modernity. The letters belong to the polemical world of early eighteenth-century journalism and have the energy, intelligence and gaiety characteristic of Grub Street at its best. They deal with many of the subjects which Mandeville was to make his own. Unexpectedly and excitedly, they also show how closely his thinking about society was bound up with his interest in the position in contemporary society. Vintage Mandeville, in fact." —Professor Nicholas Phillipson This book collects for the first time since their original publication the 32 papers which Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), author of The Fable of the Bees (1st ed., 1714), contributed to The Female Tatler (1709-10), one of the many imitators of Richard Steele's Tatler. In these papers, Mandeville's protagonists, the sisters Lucinda and Artesia, discuss and debate the origin and basis of human society and its progress, honour and courage, the value of a life devoted to making money, and most importantly, the position and the virtues of women. The essays are fully annotated, providing significant information about Mandeville's sources and identifying historical and literary references. The volume also includes a substantive introduction by Maurice Goldsmith, a leading expert on Mandeville, explaining the relation of the papers to the social thought of the period and the development of Mandeville's views. The Female Tatler essays systematically address themes further developed in The Fable of the Bees, a work very widely read in the eighteenth century and which was a stimulus to the theories of (among others) David Hume and Adam Smith. The collection will be of interest to scholars of eighteenth-century English literature, history, political and economic thought, women's studies and philosophy. —first publication of these essays since the eighteenth century and the only available edition —extended debate on female virtue is an important element in the development of feminism —Mandeville's defence of luxury and consumption is significant in the history of the discussion of commercial society and capitalism. (shrink)

The question, "Why has Harriet Taylor Mill appeared in the history of philosophy as she has?" has several answers. The answers intertwine the personality and politics of Harriet, the sexism of those who wrote of her (which was a reflection of the overall status of women during the period the commentator wrote), misunderstandings of the means and meaning of her collaboration with John Stuart Mill, and the disturbing challenge of her questioning.

During a smallpox epidemic in April 1721, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu asked Dr. Charles Maitland to "engraft" her daughter, thus instigating the first documented inoculation for smallpox (_Variola_ virus) in England. Engrafting, or variolation, was a means of conferring immunity to smallpox by placing pus taken from a smallpox pustule under the skin of an uninfected person to create a local infection. The introduction of infectious viral matter, however, could trigger fullblown smallpox, and the practice was controversial for both (...) this reason and the pervasive conviction that it was immoral to intentionally infect a human body. Eventually, engrafting was phased out altogether in favor of vaccination, a much safer procedure established by Edward Jenner in the late eighteenth century. Montagu's decision was influenced by her experiences in Constantinople, where she had spent a year, and where engrafting was commonplace. As a smallpox survivor herself, Montagu had taken an interest in Turkish inoculation practices, and had had her son Edward engrafted while in Turkey. She was not the first person to import the idea of smallpox inoculation to England, nor the first English person to have their child inoculated (other English children had been inoculated while visiting Turkey), yet she quickly became known for importing and popularizing smallpox inoculation. At the request of her acquaintances, she took her inoculated daughter with her on a round of visits into elite households to demonstrate the safety of the procedure. The reputation she gained was both positive and negative: monuments were erected in her honor, encomiastic poems were published, and Voltaire declared her "a woman of as fine a genius, and endued with as great a strength of mind as any of her sex in the British Kingdoms"; however, anti-inoculationists ridiculed her, some society figures regarded her warily, and Alexander Pope satirized her in his poetry.

Montagu’s pioneering role in the smallpox debate is undoubtedly significant: she instigated the first smallpox inoculation on English soil, and she was largely responsible for making the practice acceptable in elite circles. My interest in this essay is in the nature and significance of Montagu’s reputation as an inoculation pioneer. I will argue that her reputation was based on the particular combination of her social position as a Whig and an aristocratic woman; her interest in progressive and enlightened forms of social, political, and scientific thought; her standing in influential literary circles; and, not least, the force of her own personality. In broad terms, I offer Montagu’s involvement in the smallpox debate as a case study in a new kind of public role becoming available to elite women in the early eighteenth century — a role that caused considerable discomfort among her peers and in the medical community, and one that stimulated a widespread controversy in print publications of the day. (shrink)

The Lourdes Hospital Inquiry: An inquiry into peripartum hysterectomy at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, Ireland, of 2006 recounts in detail the circumstances within which 188 peripartum hysterectomies were carried out at the hospital between 1974 and 1998. The findings of the inquiry have serious ramifications for Irish healthcare delivery and have implications for many professional groups, including midwives. The findings prompt clear questions about the relative position or power of midwives within maternity care. These questions are examined (...) in this article, through the analysis and application of various theoretical perspectives on power. Critical views of power focus on the socio‐political nature of oppressive structures within society and seek mechanisms to address these. Stemming from structure versus agency debates, Giddens's structuration theory examines the agency‐structure interaction and stresses the centrality of agents’ roles in the social reproduction of structures. Postmodernism, particularly drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, focuses on a fluid conception of power while also describing the nature of disciplinary power. It offers midwives a way of viewing power as productive and dispersed. Drawing on different aspects of these perspectives on power, helps us to understand midwives’ relative positions and power relations and how to enhance these to prevent future tragic outcomes such as those reported in the inquiry report. (shrink)

Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies is one of the most important and neglected works advocating the establishment of women's academies. Its reception was so controversial that Astell responded with a lengthy sequel, also in this volume. The cause of great notoriety, Astell's Proposal was imitated by Defoe in his "An Academy for Women," parodied in the Tatler, satirized on the stage, plagiarized by Bishop Berkeley, and later mocked by Gilbert and Sullivan in Princess Ida.

Ḥājj, the ancient religious symbol in the Sami’s, is not only a religious duty for the Muslim individual, but also an important worship that creates a social awareness of the ummah and at the same time creates a serious population mobility in the Islamic geography. With the message of the Prophet, the pilgrimage was restored to its original form, and in the next process, those who were in charge of this region made an effort to enable all Muslims of the (...) world to carry out their duties comfortably and to carry their religious, scientific and social experiences to their own regions. The Maghreb (today’s Morocco) and Andalusia bonded and strengthened with the eastern Islamic world through pilgrimage, science and trade journeys. The Marīnid State started the pilgrimage journeys again with official convoys, which were partially interrupted due to the conquest of Andalusia. They gave great importance to these journeys in order to express their longing for the Prophet and to show their political and social power. In this study, the arduous pilgrimages Marīnid Sultan Abū’l-Ḥasan’s (d. 752/1351) mother Maryam and his sister Maryam bint Saʿīd- lasting at least one year in the 14th century are discussed in the context of diplomatic, social and cultural dimensions the pilgrimage. As a matter of fact, Muslims living in the distant lands of Morocco and Andalusia, where Islam was lived, made their material and spiritual ties with the lands where Islam was born and developed by means of pilgrimage, knowledge and trade. The pilgrimages of these two Maghribi noble women, who succeeded in the Maghrib-Hijaz pilgrimage, have become epic as even the noble men of the Maghrib and Mashriqi noble women rarely dare it. These pilgrimages, which took place during the reign of sultan of Abū l-Ḥasan should be evaluated in terms of the political developments and socio-cultural characteristics of the period. The Sultan has progressed considerably in his aim of becoming the sultan of the western Islamic world with the conquest of the places outside the Maghrib Aqṣā and the jihad he participated in Andalusia. It was during this period that he established multifaceted relations with the holy lands and their sultans. In these relations, the women of the Marīnid sultans, the pilgrimages made almost competing with the lady sultans of the Mamlūks, diplomatic correspondence and Exchange of gifts between the sultans, gifts and al-Masjid an-Nabawi letter expressing longing of those who could not go on the pilgrimage are included. With this subject, the effect of the fact that the pilgrimage is an exciting journey even in the most distant lands, the sultans of the period supported these journeys, as well as the help of the Ṣūfī connoisseurs to the state with their ribāṭ (hospice) for road safety. In the study, first of all, the women's pilgrimage stories were given, and then the pilgrimages of the dynastic women of the Marīnid period were discussed. The gifts sent to the Mamlūk sultans, who were the sultans of the holy lands, and the Qurʾān sent to Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, which are considered sacred by Muslims, have become important symbols of these pilgrimage journeys. It is remarkable how pilgrimage journeys united all Muslims materially and spiritually during the periods when Muslim state administrators were powerful. Especially the fact that these two Maghribi ladies were carried out easily should be expressed as another important aspect of the issue. (shrink)

Richard III’s courtship of Lady Anne in William Shakespeare’s King Richard III is a blend of courtly speech and sexual extravaganza. His sexual energy and power of seduction were invented by Shakespeare to enhance the theatrical effect of this figure and, at the same time, to present Richard as a tragic character. Richard’s eroticism in Act 1 Scene 2 makes him a complicated individual. Playing a seducer is one of the guises he uses to achieve his political aims on (...) the one hand, and, on the other, the pose of a sexually attractive lover enables him to put his masculinity to the test. Throughout the scene Richard is haunted by his deformity that, together with his villainy, makes him a stranger to the world and an enemy to his family and the court. In order to overcome his self-image of a disproportional cripple he manifests his sexuality towards Anne to boost his self-esteem and to confirm that the lady will accept him despite his obvious physical shortcomings. This article uses Georges Bataille’s theory of eroticism and erotic desire to characterize Richard as a tragic individual and to explain the reasons behind his unexpected sexual behaviour in the seduction scene. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature, Politics, and CharacterOliver Conolly and Bashshar HaydarWhat is the relationship between literature and politics? We might interpret this question in terms of causality. For example, we might ask whether literature has any effects in the world of politics and if so how. Auden famously proclaimed that poetry makes nothing happen, while it was central to Brecht's dramaturgy that theatre has certain political effects on its audience. Conversely, we (...) might see literature as an effect of political causes and claim that certain political environments give rise to certain types of literature, and that those political backgrounds thereby explain certain aspects of literary phenomena. Both kinds of causal relationship are at the heart of Marxist literary criticism, and of the many schools of academic criticism which share the Marxist assumption that individual consciousness, and its literary manifestations, are subordinate to political environment.These causal questions are important and interesting, particularly if approached with requisite critical tact. However, in this paper we would like to focus on the epistemological and normative questions of whether literature is suited to communicate political knowledge or insights, and whether we value, or rather ought to value, literature for such communication. These two questions are in our view intimately related. While there is no doubt that literary works can be made to communicate virtually all kinds of knowledge, from knowledge about the Big Bang to knowledge how to smuggle illegal immigrants into First World countries, these kinds of knowledge are not what we go to literature for. We go to literature and value it for giving us knowledge which it is peculiarly suited to communicate. It is natural to praise a novel for its insight into, say, character but odd to praise a novel for its [End Page 87] insight into, say, meteorology. This is because literature is suited at communicating insights into character, and is not suited at communicating insights into meteorology.The suitability of literature to explore the inner life derives from the expressive and imaginative possibilities inherent in the very medium of literature. For example, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady reveals the inner logic (or psychologic) that underlies the self-destructive behavior of its heroine, Isabel Archer, her disastrous choice of husband being dictated by a desire to prove a point to herself—that she is indifferent to his poverty relative to that of the other suitors—rather than an informed sense of her true interests.1 This is not to say that literature is the only medium in which insight into character can be communicated, but that this is one of the kinds of insight which literature is suited at communicating.The question of whether literature is suited to impart political insights is thus determinative of the question of whether its doing so counts towards its value as literature.2 This is the question to which we now turn.IThe question of whether literature is suited to impart political insights presupposes an understanding of the scope of the political, and the kinds of phenomena that can properly be called political. The scope of the political can be conceived more or less broadly. The narrow view is that politics is concerned with the nature and legitimacy of the state, government, legal and other coercive institutions. The broad view is that politics is concerned with power relations between social groups that are mediated not through institutions but through attitudes.The distinction can be illustrated with reference to two kinds of feminist argument. Feminist arguments for laws on sex discrimination and equal pay, and their proper implementation, are political in the narrow sense. However, feminists may also argue, irrespective of such institutional changes, that social attitudes towards women—the attitudes of a given society, including those of women—should be changed in certain ways. For example, a generally held view that emphasizes the importance of women's appearance, their role as adjuncts to their husbands—the kinds of views that were prevalent in the 1950's, say—is open to challenge by feminists outside a narrow institutional framework. The reason this [End Page 88] stance is political is that it concerns systemic attitudes which underpin power relations between one group... (shrink)

This book argues that a radical political gesture can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. The chapters navigate an interdisciplinary landscape by placing Kierkegaard’s passionate thought in conversation with the writings of Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the heart of the book’s argument is the concept of “indirect politics,” which names a negative space between methods, concepts, and intellectual acts in the work of Kierkegaard, as well as marking the dynamic relations between Kierkegaard and the (...) aforementioned thinkers. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is a set of masks that displaces identities from one field to the next: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary approaches to truth. As reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book examines how Kierkegaard’s indirect politics sets into relief three significant motifs: intellectual non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities, and negative dialectics. Bartholomew Ryan is currently a postdoctoral fellow (2011- ) at the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova, New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds degrees from Aarhus University, Denmark (PhD), University College, Dublin (MA), and Trinity College, Dublin (1999). He was visiting lecturer at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin (2007-2011) and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford (2010), and was a guest scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen (2007 and 2005) and Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Minnesota (2005). He has written extensively on Kierkegaard, and also published articles on Nietzsche, Pessoa, Joyce, Shakespeare and Schmitt. (shrink)

The equal opportunities issue constitutes one of the biggest ethical and practical challenges ever faced by business, because it strikes at fundamental cultural assumptions about the purpose and responsibilities of business and the rights of individuals which are ingrained from childhood. The author is chairman of Business in the Community's‘Opportunity 2000′.

Diplomacy is the corpus of procedures and institutions used in foreign relations by an independent state. It is the method by which a state seeks to attain its objectives in foreign policy, namely to secure for its citizens prosperity and justice through negotiations with other states.

Diplomacy is the corpus of procedures and institutions used in foreign relations by an independent state. It is the method by which a state seeks to attain its objectives in foreign policy, namely to secure for its citizens prosperity and justice through negotiations with other states.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s recently published novel titled, Glory, fictionalises the tragic fall of Robert Mugabe from the helm of power. The removal of Mugabe from power through the 2017 “military coup” engendered a problematic narrative that depicted the former first lady, Grace Mugabe as the biblical Eve’s doppelganger. The purported resemblance of Eve, a character from sacrosanct text, and Grace of contemporary Zimbabwe is often based on mythical and misogynist (mis)interpretations of the former as an epitome of sin and the (...) latter as instrumental to Mugabe’s demise. Arguably, the construct of Eve in Zimbabwe and the personified allegory in the fictive society of Bulawayo is profoundly laden with semantics and tropes of power together interwoven with innuendoes that denigrate women. This article reflected upon the ‘blame Eve myth’ with interlocking discourses of toxic politics and religion that reinforce phallocentric attitudes and practices that denigrate the female gender in Zimbabwe. Ecofeminism enriches the discussions of the novel Glory as a satire that provides imperative fictional sites to chart these intricate discourses. Ecofeminist framework offers insights that enrich the discussions of Eve’s myth and other representations which disparage women in the novel, Glory. The study concludes that blaming Grace Mugabe in her fictional doppelganger Marvelous, symbolically illuminates how women and the feminised nature are both insulted and held accountable for woes that befall humanity in both the fictive nation of Jidada and its referent Zimbabwe. Contribution: Ecofeminist conceptual framework has rarely been used to examine the complex connection between gender, politics, religion and nature in Zimbabwean fictional writing. Thus, this study offered fresh insights that are significant in understanding these subjects from a multidisciplinary perspective because the analyses and readings of the novel were based on literary criticism, political discourse and theology. (shrink)

This children's history of England by Maria Callcott was written as though she were telling a series of stories to a young boy known as 'Little Arthur'. Having travelled widely during her first marriage, publishing accounts under the name Maria Graham, she had become an invalid by 1831 owing to a burst blood vessel. Nevertheless, she continued her literary activity and became best known for this highly popular work. The first edition, published by John Murray in two volumes in 1835, (...) is reissued here in a single volume. In the course of the century after its appearance, the book went through seventy editions and sold some 80,000 copies. Its success stemmed partly from its romantic and patriotic depiction of the protagonists of English history. Also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection are Callcott's travel journals describing her time in India, Brazil and Chile. (shrink)

Not In Sisterhood investigates an important transitional moment in the history of U.S. women's writing : the uneasy shift from the 19th-century model of the "lady author" to some new but undefined alternative. The careers of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, together with that of their friend and peer Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reveal several different strategies for negotiating this unknown terrain. While Gale made her feminist politics an integral part of (...) her successful novels and plays, Wharton and Cather publicly denied any interest in gender issues or social reforms. Not in Sisterhood shows how the complex intersections of literary and social politics that shaped the world of Wharton, Cather, and Gale are still at work in today's feminist reconstructions of literary history. (shrink)

The personal, political, and aesthetic ideals that Irish modernists found embodied in the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell—independence, self-mastery, and a capacity for radical self-fashioning—have been well attested in Irish literary historiography. What has been less often noted is the centrality of sexual health to the conception, articulation, and emulation of those virtues, particularly when attempting to translate Parnell’s public persona to the stage. This essay addresses this lacuna by tracing how a medicalized and politicized conception of sex informed Irish (...) modernist efforts to dramatize the Parnell myth at the Abbey Theatre. It begins by establishing the hitherto underexamined ways in which the Parnell myth informed the infamously divisive sexual politics of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), in which the fallen leader and his career provide a template for Christy Mahon and the virile autonomy he is held to embody. Building on this analysis, the essay proceeds to explore the ways in which Synge’s restaging of the Parnell myth, and the medicalized and politicized model of sex which underpinned it, informed Lady Augusta Gregory’s efforts to resuscitate (and sanitize) Parnell for Abbey audiences in 1911’s The Deliverer. Finally, through a close reading of Lennox Robinson’s largely overlooked 1918 play, The Lost Leader, the essay charts how the organicist and hereditarian model of sexual health upon which earlier iterations of the Parnell myth had rested began to give place to a more psychoanalytic model. It then identifies the implications of this shift for Robinson’s reading of Irish politics in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising. In doing so, the essay highlights the ways in which sexual health emerged as an extra-moral normative framework in Irish political discourse, and it demonstrates how a Medical Humanities approach and a sensitivity to the social history of medicine in Ireland can enrich critical understandings of the Parnell myth and its modernist afterlives. (shrink)

In ‘Listening to Music Together’, Nick Zangwill offers three arguments which aim to establish that listening to music can never be a joint activity. If any of these arguments were sound, then our experiences of music, qua object of aesthetic attention, would be essentially private. In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s arguments are unsound and I develop an account of shared musical experience that defends three main conclusions. First, joint listening is not merely possible but a common feature of (...) our socially situated experiences of music. Second, when listening with others our experience of the music and our sense of community with our fellow listeners often reciprocally enhance one another. Third, how deeply and intimately we share a musical experience with others depends upon such factors as our respective backgrounds, interests, and levels of expertise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2501\REVIEWS.251 : 2005-09-14 19:58 Reviews  THE STANLEYS UP TO DATE S T Russell Archives & Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, , Canada   @. Thomas, Lord Stanley of Alderley. The Stanleys of Alderley, –: a Politically Incorrect Story. Rev. ed. Altimcham, ..: , . Pp. . £.. lthough the book is called The Stanleys of Alderley, the Stanleys have not Alived (...) at Alderley, the family home for  years, since  when it was sold. Not long after, Penrhos, the family’s property in Wales, left the family as well, sold in . Naturally the author, who would have inherited these properties, laments not only these losses but the fire-sale prices—Alderley sold for£, and is now estimated to be worth £ million; Penrhos was sold for a mere £, but then its owner, the author’s cousin, was a homosexual and upon leaving the Navy decided it would be unwise to live at Penrhos because homosexuality was then a crime in Britain (p. ). The author provides an appendix on the Alderley Settled Estate and his trials with the Royal Bank of _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2501\REVIEWS.251 : 2005-09-14 19:58  Reviews Canada when he inherited what was left (pp. –). Lord Stanley’s path to inheriting his title was much more tortuous and full of tragedy than Bertrand Russell’s inheritance of his earldom. Thomas’s two older brothers, John and Martin, died at the same time in Penrhos just before it was sold when the cliff collapsed, weakened by old tunnels that they had dug chasing rabbits in their childhood. After that, two cousins, Edward and Lyulph, had to die without heirs before the title became Thomas’s in . The author blames them for losing, and losing easily, in the span of  years wealth that had taken nine centuries to accumulate. Lord Stanley also had some difficulty in taking his seat in the House of Lords (as did Bertrand), since proof was needed that no offspring with a better claim might appear (p. ). The author exhibits some of the same wit that makes Russell’s writing sparkle. Lord Stanley sat in the House of Lords, although on different sides (Conservative vs. Liberal Democrat), with his cousin Conrad, Russell’s youngest son. The two of them had rather different professions, Thomas a farmer and Conrad a university professor. He notes: “When on one occasion I said that he looked tired, he, as any academic would, said that he found getting his mind down to the level of his undergraduates very exhausting. I replied that trying to understand the minds of my sheep surely must be more exhausting” (p. ). Another example of wit (which is frequent, particularly in the first part of the book) concerns his strict upbringing and the learning of rules. The rules were discarded until he joined the House of Lords when he found them “useful, if only to remember to put the milk in the cup first if sitting next to a life peer and last if next to an hereditary one” (pp. –). Milk first or last has always been a mystery to me, and I’m afraid this remark does not help much! Born in , the author was brought up to believe “that it was a privilege to be a Stanley” although any arrogance because of superior lineage was not allowed by his father (p. ). The author’s mother was Lady Kathleen Thynne, the daughter of the th Marquess of Bath. The passages concerning Christmas visits to the family’s very grand estate, Longleat, make fascinating reading (pp. –). The book contains chapters on Lord Stanley’s childhood (he was raised at Llanfawr near Penrhos), his career in the military followed by farming, his family, his hobbies and the House of Lords. It includes a family tree, a chronology from  to , and family photographs (the author bears more than a passing resemblance to his cousin Conrad). This book provides much information on Russell’s maternal family, moving the story forward from the period covered in The Amberley Papers, The Ladies of Alderley, and The Stanleys of Alderley. Russell favoured the Russell side of the family in his youth, but as he grew older... (shrink)

In this paper, I present the beginnings of a resemblance theory of representation. I start by surveying the contemporary philosophical debate surrounding musical representation and reveal that its main interlocutors share a conception of artistic representation as a mode of meaningful communication. I then show how conceiving of artistic representation in this way severely limits music’s possibilities as a medium for representation. Next, I propose an alternative conception of representation that, despite its widespread acceptance outside of the philosophy of art, (...) has been largely denigrated within it: namely, that representation fundamentally depends on structural resemblance. Finally, I demonstrate how conceiving of artistic representation as grounded upon structural resemblances, rather than as a mode of meaningful communication, provides us with a more accurate picture of both (a) how music represents and (b) how we perceive and appreciate musical representations. (shrink)

Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the (...) sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device. This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private. While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience, I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life. (shrink)

Anyone interested in the philosophy of music, especially popular music, should be familiar with Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir’s contempora.