In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hope Draped in Black: Decolonizing Utopian StudiesCaroline Edwards (bio)What does utopian studies have to learn from critical race theory, Black studies, and ideas of Black futurity? While utopian scholars have begun unpicking the colonial entanglements of utopianism’s origins (particularly as a literary genre grounded in pelagic crossings to the New World that have advocated slavery, extractivism, and eugenics to name a few notable examples across the utopian canon), (...) few, if any, have incorporated the perspectives, aesthetics, and theoretical work of Black scholars themselves.1 The following are a few brief remarks organized around keywords (in a nod to Raymond Williams, a fierce advocate of utopian thinking) that attempt to sketch an answer to these questions, with a focus on my own area of utopian study: utopian literary and cultural production in the contemporary period.ProgressWe might start by considering the literary utopia’s most prolific period, from roughly 1880 to 1915. In a deluge of utopian narratives, many of them penned by amateur writers, we find the emergence of a genre that is thoroughly [End Page 498] rooted in industrialized progress. Whatever their perspective on capitalism and waged labor, these works privilege advanced industrialization as the primary means to eliminate poverty and disease, thereby liberating workers into automated futures of post-scarcity abundance. Examples include Edward Bellamy’s highly rationalized system of pneumatic delivery (Looking Backward: 2000–1887 [1888]), Mary E. Bradley Lane’s chemical production of food from waste products (Mizora: A World of Women [1890] 1999), H. G. Wells’s titanic hydro-powered engineering (Men Like Gods [1923]), Edward Bulwer Lytton’s lithic limitless energy, Vril (The Coming Race [1871]), or the ubiquitous electricity that powers Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s clean city (New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future [1899] 2011), Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Marchant’s advanced Martian society (Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance [1893]), and Alexander Bogdanov’s advanced scientific culture on the red planet (Красная звезда [Red Star (1908) 1984]). Indeed, many notable dystopian novels begin with the same premise of highly automated societies that focus, rather, on the awfulness of life without purpose (Anna Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future; Or, Socialism a Reality [1887], E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” [1909], Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano [1952]). While they are far from uncritical of the telos of historical progress (most of the works highlight the class and gender inequalities of their own time), utopian novels in this period tend to view the utopian process as one of harnessing historical progress in a more equitable direction; they rarely question the Hegelian premise that history moves through contradictory forces in a dialectical series of stages.In his 2016 book Hope Draped in Black, Joseph R. Winters explores the lasting damage that ideas of historical progress have wrought on Black writers, artists, and thinkers. While notions of racial uplift are loaded with a linear narrative of Black progress such conceptions, he writes, “are mediated by melancholy, loss, and a recalcitrant sense of tragedy” (6–7). Building on Adorno and Horkheimer’s landmark critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as well as the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Winters notes thatmodern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed and problematic because they rely on and are intertwined with practices and conditions—capitalism, colonial expansion, racial hierarchies, endeavors, and incentives to usurp and possess that earth—that are harmful to non-Europeans, working-class bodies, women, and other groups.(2016, 8) [End Page 499]Examining the relationship between melancholy and hope in Black literary and aesthetic traditions, Winters explores how writers such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison incorporate jazz into their works, using its discordant, improvisational structures to imagine time out of joint (the Derridean deferral of justice announced by the arrival of the specter of old King Hamlet, who returns) (Derrida 1994). Here, Winters writes, “the past can always haunt and disturb the present [so that] the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility” (2016, 25). If we are to contemplate the almost overwhelming task of decolonizing utopian studies, then... (shrink)

This historical compendium investigates scientific methods conceived between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. Beginning with attacks on Scholasticism and the rist of the New Science, the authors explain the roles of both major andminor figures in describing scientific methods. Although the chapters are interrelated and contain explicit comparisons, each chapter is a complete study in itself. The authors' emphasis on writing for the non-specialist and their liberal use of primary sources make this an outstanding textbook.

On its release, the Instruction on Respect for Human Life was accused of obstructing the technological enhancement of human life by using slippery slope arguments to impose the Magisterium’s opinion that accepting certain new technologies, like homologous artificial fertilization, would weaken resistance to practices the Church traditionally has opposed. To the contrary, the instruction calls attention to the fact that by using these technologies, we have in principle accepted all sorts of thigs, with or without technology, which are destructive of (...) human life. (shrink)

Comparative risk assessment is playing an ever-increasing role in environmental policy priority setting, as manifested in national and numerous subnational comparative risk projects. It is widely accepted that public values, interests, and concerns should play an important role in CRA. However, the philosophical basis for public involvement in CRA has not been adequately explored, nor have comparative risk projects always made explicit their rationales for public involvement. The author examines the political, normative, and epistemic rationales for public involvement and explores (...) the case for public involvement in the making of ethical, valuation, and evidentiary judgments. The author considers key issues each rationale raises, problems eachfaces, and some of the implications of each for specific aspects of CRA. (shrink)

Euboulos' 'αγκελων is represented by only four fragments , all culled from Athenaeus, which tell us nothing about the plot of the play or about the identity of its titular character. R. L. Hunter, in his recent commentary on Euboulos, discusses at length the name 'αγκελων and concludes that it could belong to either a humble and poor man; ‘a character from folklore notorious for sexual relations with his mother’ ; or ’ a wily slave such as those foreshadowed in (...) Aristophanes and familiar from New Comedy'. In view of our ignorance of the play's plot, each of these possibilities has an equal claim to our consideration. I believe, however, that the context in which the fragments are embedded in Athenaeus allows us to refine our understanding of the name even further. (shrink)

Among the many textual difficulties that beset Ovid's Ibis are two passages that allude, in an oblique fashion typical of the whole poem, to the iambographer Hipponax: et quae Pytheides fecit de fratre Medusae, eveniant capiti vota sinistra tuo, utque parum stabili qui carmine laesit Athenin, invisus pereas deficiente cibo.

Brings together articles that influenced the scholarly work of Ralph McInerny.

The ISI Guides to the Major Disciplines are reader-friendly introductions to the most important fields of knowledge in the liberal arts. Written by leading scholars for both students and the general public, they will be appreciated by anyone desiring a reliable and informative tour of important subject matter. Each title offers an historical overview of a particular discipline, explains the central ideas of each subject, and evaluates the works of thinkers whose ideas have shaped our world. They will aid students (...) seeking to make better decisions about their course of study as well as general readers who wish to supplement their education. All who treasure the world of ideas and liberal learning will be motivated by these original and stimulating. (shrink)